King Cricket

January 22, 2009 England

Tests at neutral venues

< 1 minute read Zapp Brannigan says: “What makes a good man go neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?” Neutrality sickens us, just as it sickens him. Picturing a neutral crowd at a neutral Test venue sends us into a blind fury at all

January 21, 2009 Pakistan

Shoaib Akhtar is a ‘what’

< 1 minute read Pakistan captain, Shoaib Malik, is fed up with waddly, disinterested purveyor of two-over spells, Shoaib Akhtar. “Everyone can see what is out there,” he said about everyone’s favourite one-time fast bowler. Rumour has it that Malik has asked the selectors to replace Akhtar with a patch of slightly longer grass

January 21, 2009 England

Andrew Strauss wants cricketers who use their brains for something other than preventing their skulls from caving in

2 minute read We’re not in the habit of paying much heed to public pronouncements from cricketers. You can say what you like. It’s not the same as actually doing something. We could say that we beat Thor at chess yesterday, but it’s transparently a lie. We would never play chess. However, we

January 20, 2009 Pakistan

Butt cracks balls and more

< 1 minute read We dread to think what search engine traffic we’re going to get from that title, but you can’t sashay through life being called ‘Butt’ without some sort of consequences. It’ll teach some visitors the importance of the humble comma at any rate. Prior to the first one-day international against Sri

January 20, 2009 Australia

Haydos: gone but not forgotten

< 1 minute read In many ways, Matthew ‘Haydos’ Hayden is irreplaceable. Not his batting, obviously, Aussie opening batsmen are ten-a-penny. We’re thinking more about his way with words and the way he never lets the faintest whiff of self awareness enter his consciousness. What was your career highlight, Haydos? “Singing the team song

January 18, 2009 Australia

Shaun Marsh wants to play straighter

< 1 minute read Shaun Marsh said he wanted to play straighter after making 79 in Australia’s win over South Africa. How much straighter does he want to play? Now granted, we slept through a good deal of his innings, but from what we did see Marsh’s batting was straighter than Chuck Norris doing

January 17, 2009 Sri Lanka

Murali’s batting

< 1 minute read Murali’s always had a certain approach to batting. Have a ruddy great swing at the ball Miss Have an even bigger swing at the next one Usually this method fails for reasons that are fairly clear even to Murali. Occasionally it doesn’t and he hits 33 off 16 balls to

January 16, 2009 Match report

England v South Africa fourth Test match report

2 minute read Price writes: I had taken the Monday off work to allow us to watch some Test Cricket at bargain bucket prices. My Cornish friend who lives in Wiltshire came up on the Sunday. We prayed for rain and the rain duly arrived. In celebration that we would get some play

January 15, 2009 England

Monty Panesar’s bowling speed

< 1 minute read People say that Monty Panesar bowls too fast and that he doesn’t adapt. People say that he’s a mindless idiot who hasn’t got the potential to develop his game. He’s not moved on as most England supporters would have liked, but people have been going a bit overboard. There’s nothing

January 14, 2009 Bangladesh

Shakib Al Hasan twangs another bow string

< 1 minute read How many strings does Shakib Al Hasan’s bow have? Predictably and disappointingly, he has two strings to his bow: batting and bowling. This is not an especially large number of strings, but it’s two more than we have. We haven’t even got a bow – or if we have, we