King Cricket

January 23, 2009 Bangladesh

Shakib al Hasan is the best all-rounder in one-day internationals

< 1 minute readShakib al Hasan is the best one-day international all-rounder in the world. It’s official. According to who, you ask? According to maths. You can’t argue with maths. Well, you can argue with maths, but it takes ages and you’ll get confused and bored, so why bother? Just take it on

January 23, 2009 England / India

IPL window for England players

2 minute readA group of guys who aren’t you have got an opportunity to earn a lot of money. The situation is that any England players who might actually be wanted by an IPL franchise will play Twenty20 in India for three weeks and then their next match after that will be

January 22, 2009 England

Tests at neutral venues

< 1 minute readZapp 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 readPakistan 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 readWe’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 readWe 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 readIn 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 readShaun 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 readMurali’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 readPrice 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