King Cricket

March 25, 2008 England / New Zealand

Stephen Fleming finishes with a pair of fifties

< 1 minute readEverybody else is saying it, so why shouldn’t we? How apt that Stephen Fleming should retire with a fifty in each innings. In total he hit 46 in Test cricket, but only nine hundreds. Statistics might not tell the whole story, but there’s only the odd semi-colon missing in this

March 24, 2008 England / New Zealand

Andrew Strauss gets the job done with BIG RUNS

2 minute readThere are two sides to this, being as we’re English, we’re first going to concentrate on the negative, because that’s our knee-jerk response when our side have made a comprehensive fightback and put themselves in total control of a Test match. Andrew Strauss shouldn’t have been playing. He shouldn’t have

March 23, 2008 England / New Zealand

Ryan Sidebottom takes 7-47

< 1 minute readA week or so ago, we wondered whether Steve Harmison’s underlying lack of confidence was the result of not feeling like he’d earned his place in the England team. With six years and hundreds of first-class wickets between his first and second Test appearances, Ryan Sidebottom must feel the opposite.

March 21, 2008 England / New Zealand

England’s top six are going to make BIG RUNS

< 1 minute readWord is they’re all hitting it well in the nets. Confidence is rising. Big scores are due. With players of their class, hundreds are just around the corner. As soon as one batsman cashes in, the floodgates will open. Because that’s the way it works. All batsmen have got a

March 20, 2008 Australia

A Matthew Hayden quote shorn of context to make it sound weird

< 1 minute readWe’re not in the habit of being even-handed when it comes to Hayden. Why should we extend the courtesy of context to him when he never once apologises for being Matthew Hayden. “At the end of the day, two alpha dogs are never going to sit in a cage and

March 19, 2008 England

Less tweediness from Strauss’s team mates

< 1 minute readRemember how Andrew Strauss was going to GET THE JOB DONE? Ceci sent more pictures, saying: “Squire Hoggard and the chav Vaughan. KP however will always be an alien life form to me. I’d like to say the rough edges are there as an ironic statement, but of course I

March 18, 2008 Australia

Miracle Hair restoral

< 1 minute readMaybe it’s not a miracle, but you don’t spurn headlines like that, even if they are more obvious than the correlation between mobile phone advertising and incidences of depression. Darrell Hair has been restored to the Elite Panel of ICC Umpires. It sounds like he’s just going to see out

March 18, 2008 Extras

We’re in The Wisden Cricketer!

2 minute readThe Wisden Cricketer’s a proper, grown-up publication. Look, it’s actually tangible! Here’s the bit where it says that it’s “the world’s no.1 cricket magazine”. And here’s us! No, really. Look! And here’s Monty being conspicuously indifferent to it. Turning away OR closing your eyes would have been sufficient, young man.

March 17, 2008 County cricket

Chris Lewis signs for Surrey

< 1 minute readChris ‘shaved head, no hat’ Lewis has signed for Surrey for this season’s Twenty20 matches. He’s 40. Younger readers might like to think of Lewis as being a sort of role model for the current West Indian team. He was born in Guyana, but it’s not that. With the ball,

March 17, 2008 England / New Zealand

Ryan Sidebottom does the necessary

2 minute readWe said after the last Test that you need spectacular performances to win Tests and you also need them to give you some breathing room in case of a bad day. England got away with one day of buttery fingers thanks to Tim Ambrose’s hundred and James Anderson’s five wickets.