King Cricket

November 20, 2008 India

Mahendra Singh Dhoni is skipping the match that you’ve waited all year to go and see

< 1 minute readThe kid who sits next to you at that match will have been waiting for a tenth of his life. He’ll find out that his hero isn’t playing and he’ll cry. “Players know their body best and in future more and more players would come out and say that they

November 19, 2008 Australia

Matthew Hayden opens his mouth

< 1 minute readAnd an arse falls out. Someone should tell Matthew Hayden to try and blend into the scenery if he ever sees a tape recorder or a microphone in the vicinity. “When you get to my age, you get to a point where the next 12 months is a long, long

November 19, 2008 County cricket

Ian Blackwell leaves Somerset for Durham

< 1 minute readLast time England toured India, Ian Blackwell was in the one-day side. He did all right as well. As a batsman he’s usually described as ‘rustic’ or somesuch. A variety of adjectives might get used, but they all mean that he’s a fat slogger. He’s a good fat slogger, don’t

November 18, 2008 Australia

Why Andrew Symonds fell out with Michael Clarke

< 1 minute readAndrew Symonds said: “I did something silly with him one night and I suppose I was a bit disrespectful to him.” What does that sound like to you? It sounds like it could only be one thing to us. What act is both silly and disrespectful? Ask yourself that. It

November 17, 2008 England / India

Yuvraj Singh ups his IPL price

< 1 minute readThis was England’s 500th one-day international. It was Yuvraj Singh’s 219th. Yuvraj is 26. Once again Yuvraj hit a hundred. This time, he also took four wickets. We’re not sure it would make a huge amount of difference, but we’re inclined to agree with everyone else in the entire world

November 17, 2008 England

England to show aggression in everything they do

< 1 minute read“We thought we were a bit tentative in the way we played and could have been more aggressive in everything we did.” So says Peter Moores. He’s right. England need to show more aggression in absolutely everything they do. Look at the first one-day international for example. England showed little

November 15, 2008 New Zealand

Jesse Ryder quarantined

< 1 minute readWe have never once seen someone quarantined without dire consequences for everyone on earth. It starts with vomiting. It ends with zombies or a flesh-eating virus. Maybe there’s an alien gestating inside Jesse Ryder as we speak – Lord knows, there’s room for one. It’s at times like this that

November 14, 2008 England / India

Yuvraj Singh hits a hundred despite a knacked back

2 minute readHas any batsman every played a more destructive innings while wearing a girdle? We’ve always liked Yuvraj Singh, but he’s lost a little bit of lustre lately. This is largely thanks to Sky Sports’ ‘look at all the cricket we’ve got’ advert which starts with a big orchestral crescendo, before

November 14, 2008 England

England will be mentally ready

< 1 minute readThere’s an awful lot of talk from Peter Moores and Kevin Pietersen about England ‘getting their heads turned on’ and being ‘mentally in the right place’ for this one-day series. We’re a bit worried that at some point they’ll go overboard with the mental side and will forget about being

November 13, 2008 Regulars

Tribble being conspicuously indifferent to cricket

< 1 minute readCully, from New Zealand, writes: Here is my cat, Tribble, being conspicuously indifferent to cricket. Could she be bothered to watch the second Test between India and Australia? Could she even be bothered to watch us scrape a painful win against Bangladesh? Could she heck. Once she’d emptied the fridge