King Cricket

January 14, 2008 England

England’s number six for New Zealand

2 minute readWe want Ian Bell back at number six in the batting order. He’s shown promise and he hasn’t disgraced himself at three, but he’s so good at six and that’s an important spot too. England forget this sometimes. An England batting line-up with Bell at six looks a lot more

January 11, 2008 Australia / Regulars

Ask Stuart MacGill if he’ll give us the ball back

< 1 minute readGo on, do it… No, you ask… We don’t think he’s going to let us have it back.

January 10, 2008 Regulars

England lose the ball

< 1 minute readIan! Look down! It’s right there in front of you! Here we see Paul Collingwood, Ian Bell and Matt Prior desperately searching for the ball while Mahela Jayawardene and Tillekeratne Dilshan complete an all-run hundred for Jayawardene. England weren’t to find the ball again for three straight days and all

January 9, 2008 Australia / Bangladesh / County cricket / England / India / New Zealand / Pakistan / South Africa / Sri Lanka / West Indies / Zimbabwe

Twenty20 wicketkeeping

2 minute readDo you want the better batsman or the better wicketkeeper behind the stumps for your team? That argument’s been represented by any number of individual duels over the years. Recently though, we think you’ll all agree that the better batsman’s been winning out, in general. Blame Adam Gilchrist. He’s a

January 8, 2008 Australia / Regulars

Ricky Ponting with a bat in his mouth

< 1 minute readPictures like this DESERVE captions: This is what we’ve come up with: (1) Ricky Ponting with a bat in his mouth. (2) Ricky Ponting eats a cricket bat. (3) Ricky Ponting and a cricket bat and the bat’s sort of in his mouth so it sort of looks like he

January 7, 2008 India / Regulars

Sachin Tendulkar’s helium-filled bat

< 1 minute readEveryone knows about Dennis Lillee’s aluminium bat, but Sachin Tendulkar’s experiment with a helium-filled bat is less well known. Sachin thought the lightness of the bat would allow him to bat freer and longer, but unfortunately, as this picture shows, the excess of helium rendered the bat unusable. During the

January 6, 2008 Australia / India

Michael Clarke does some sort of deal with the devil

< 1 minute readHe must have sold something to Satan to take three wickets in the penultimate over to win this Test for Australia. It can’t have been his soul though, because he must have already sold that to Ricky Ponting to bring him on to bowl in the first place. Maybe it

January 5, 2008 Australia / India

Matthew Hayden continues to personify all that’s wrong with modern cricket

< 1 minute readDo we hate Matthew Hayden because he personifies all that’s wrong with modern cricket or do we just ascribe those traits to him because we hate him? It doesn’t matter. The important part is that we hate him. The whys and wherefores all pale into insignificance next to the sheer

January 4, 2008 England

Matt Prior dropped like an edge from Ryan Sidebottom

< 1 minute readMatt Prior’s been discarded like a greasy pizza box. That’s fair considering his erratic wicketkeeping, but harsh for a man averaging 40 in Test cricket. Tim Ambrose of Warwickshire is his replacement and you’d imagine he’d be in the first XI ahead of Phil Mustard, who’s still providing back-up. It

January 4, 2008 Australia / India

An unbeaten Tendulkar hundred – everything is as it should be

< 1 minute readUp here in the northern hemisphere we need a bit of comfort at this time of year; something warm and familiar to let us know that all’s right in the world and the status quo persists. That’s ‘status quo’ and not ‘Status Quo’, you understand. Francis Rossi et al. have