King Cricket

May 23, 2008 New Zealand

James Marshall gets asked a stupid question

< 1 minute read“So, are you any relation to Hamish Marshall?” Writing in his Cricinfo diary, Ross Taylor says someone asked James Marshall that. James and Hamish are identical twins, if you didn’t know. This was either the most admirably, pig-headedly stupid and obvious joke of all time or it was asked by

May 22, 2008 England / New Zealand

The Old Trafford pitch

< 1 minute readSportsfreak are running a cricket tipping competition about the England v New Zealand series. We are currently equal second out of 12. For the last Test we used reasoning for precisely one of the questions and got it right. Michael Vaughan has scored bucketloads of runs at Lord’s, so we

May 22, 2008 India / Pakistan

Latest news from the IPL

< 1 minute readIt’s been a while since anyone was interested, so what the fudge is going on over there? Well, everyone’s played either 11 or 12 matches out of 14. Rajasthan Royals are top for whom Mr Ego, Shane Warne, is both captain AND coach. Two points behind them are Kings XI

May 21, 2008 Match report

Surrey v Essex Friends Provident Trophy match report

2 minute readThe Atheist from Are You A Left-Arm Chinaman? writes: I was excited about going to see my first match of the season. This would be a perfect opportunity to wear my sun-hat without the usual sense of shame associated with over-keen headgear. Although its powers are potent, it didn’t prevent

May 20, 2008 Australia

Matthew Hayden has another go at talking

< 1 minute readIt never goes well. Matthew Hayden is very poor at executing his talking skills. Thanks to RC for pointing us towards Hayden’s latest attempt in an interview with Cricinfo. Here are some highlights: “I go to the middle, I mark the crease and I squat on the wicket. I feel

May 19, 2008 England / New Zealand

Jacob Oram and his face

< 1 minute readMost teams struggle for all-rounders. In New Zealand they’re ten a penny. If only they could find a couple more half-decent specialist batsmen, they’d be a force to be reckoned with. This new batting line-up’s missing a few of the bigger names, of course, but even those batting absentees dabbled

May 17, 2008 England / New Zealand

Bad light stopped play

< 1 minute readIt’s not often we agree with Mark Nicholas, if only because we don’t float through life spouting words like ‘divine’ and ‘exquisite’ every second sentence, but we think he had a point this one time he was commentating over Channel 5 highlights of cricketers walking on and off the field.

May 16, 2008 England / New Zealand

Brendon McCullum uses his feet

2 minute readBrendon McCullum recently found his feet. Now he’s putting them to good use. If you’ve read the page we just linked to, this might sound kind of familiar. This is the Test version of that post. Brendon McCullum’s had 52 Test innings. In his first 45, he managed two hundreds

May 15, 2008 England

England’s brilliant white kit

< 1 minute readA lot of people are asking whether England’s new Test kit is the whitest ever seen on a cricket field. It isn’t. That honour goes to the outfit worn by Algernon Denby-Farthing in a match for Yorkshire against Kent in 1885. Denby-Farthing was obsessive about the cleanliness of his whites,

May 15, 2008 England / New Zealand

Cricket lunch

< 1 minute readWe pretty much know the teams. We pretty much know the tactics. What we don’t know is what the two teams will be feasting on during the first lunch break and who will fare the better. It’s common cricketing courtesy to clap the players when they emerge for the afternoon