King Cricket

February 8, 2023 Australia / India

R Ashwin is vulnerable to actual chess

3 minute readMarnus Labuschagne recently described facing R Ashwin as being “like a chess game”. It was an interesting choice of words as actual chess could prove to be the off-spinner’s greatest weakness. Labuschagne was alluding to that to and fro of decision-making between himself and a thoughtful bowler like Ashwin who

February 7, 2023 Australia / India

Steve Smith’s mountain-toppling attempt and Rohit Sharma’s potential landslide | an India v Australia preview

2 minute readMountains crop up a lot in metaphors. They’re forever being scaled, climbed or conquered. Steve Smith has come up with his own way to reach the summit of the mountain that is a Test tour of India though. “If we are able to topple that mountain, that’d be huge,” he

February 6, 2023 West Indies

Chanderpaul not out – one way Tagenarine could prove more useful than Shivnarine

2 minute readIn 2012, we wrote a piece for Cricinfo about Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s patient wait for a West Indies Test team worthy of his contributions. Little did we know he wasn’t just waiting; he was taking active steps. ‘Taking active steps’ is an interesting euphemism because what we’re saying is that Shiv’s

February 2, 2023 England / South Africa

Lust and rust | a South Africa v England ODI recap

4 minute readSouth Africa wanted to win this one. England were happy to loosen a few limbs. That’s kind of how it went. In many ways this South Africa v England series was the definitive pointless bilateral: a little island of three one-day internationals dropped right in the middle of another tournament

February 1, 2023 Bangladesh / England

Why England’s March tour of Bangladesh doesn’t count… but also does

3 minute readWho’s up for the contest then? No? Got somewhere else to be, have you? We don’t know if you’ve ever seen the highly violent Indonesian martial arts ballet, The Raid, but there’s a character in that who’s really, really, very much up for a fight. He’s called Mad Dog, so

January 30, 2023 Extras

The 2023 King Cricket Essentials Calendar

2 minute readIf those who run cricket can’t make the cricket calendar comprehensible, we’ll just have to do it ourself. Below you’ll find a month-by-month guide to the series and tournaments we’ll most likely be focusing on throughout this year. Setting it out in writing is as much for us as it

January 27, 2023 England

The definition of “Bazball” is following a very familiar path

2 minute read“Bazball” is an ill-defined woolly-yet-squidgy concept that you can smush around to mean pretty much anything you want. We’ve been here before. Speaking ahead of South Africa’s home one-day series against England, captain Temba Bavuma spoke about his team’s way of going about things and how they might look to

January 25, 2023 Extras

But what has the Patreon crowdfunding campaign ever done for King Cricket?

6 minute readWe’re pretty happy with the last year’s Patreon-funded output. Hopefully our crowdfunding campaign doesn’t completely implode in 2023. A very quick recap. We run a Patreon campaign where readers can, if they want, pledge a monthly sum to help support the site. You can pretty much pledge whatever you want

January 23, 2023 Australia

Steve Smith’s number one priority on a Test tour

2 minute read“Cricket Australia basically said to us, ‘Okay, what can we kinda do to make your time in hotels for the next month better? So the boys just took it to the next level” – Pat Cummins The latest series of The Test outlines all the various toys and gizmos the

January 20, 2023 Australia / England / India

Steve Smith’s Sussex stint and podcast proxies – mop-up of the day

2 minute readMop-up of the day is a thing we do when we can’t really be bothered writing more than a sentence or two about a bunch of different things. Sometimes we end up writing extra sentences though because it looks weird if the opening sentence, in bold, is immediately followed by