King Cricket

April 19, 2022 England

This is surely the very worst place to get an assessment of Rob Key’s suitability for his new England job – but here’s one anyway

5 minute readWhen we think about some of the decidedly non-newsworthy Rob Key related things we have reported on down the years, it is pretty clear to us that we will have to say something about him becoming the managing director of England men’s cricket too. To give a handful of largely-picked-at-random

April 15, 2022 England

Joe Root steps down to give England an exciting new problem

5 minute readThe England Test team is going to remain awash with problems for quite some time to come. The best you can hope for as a fan is that they at least keep those problems fresh and interesting. The Joe Root captaincy problem was getting a bit stale, so at least

April 13, 2022 Australia

The only story you need to know about Australia’s new coach Andrew McDonald

< 1 minute readEvery cricketer has been out for a duck, but Andrew McDonald might be the only player who’s ever been physically assaulted by one. It happened in 2010 when he was walking through Queen’s Gardens in Perth with then team-mate Aaron Finch. “We walked too close to the ducklings and the

April 11, 2022 County cricket

Is it fair that Hampshire have Mohammad Abbas in the County Championship?

2 minute readThere is much debate about fairness in county cricket at the minute. Is it fair that Nottinghamshire – who finished third in the Championship last year – have to play in division two based on how they performed in 2019? Is it fair that teams in the top flight won’t

April 6, 2022 County cricket / Features

This is the way the county cricket season begins, not with a bang – and we’re happy with that

4 minute readNot every tournament needs an opening ceremony. We’ll let you in on a secret. We are not a fast waker-upper. Our daughter sometimes wanders into our room at an unconscionable hour and announces, “it’s morning,” in an indignant tone. It is impossible for us to convey the full horror of

April 5, 2022 Australia / England / Features / India

Separate teams? What might a world of cricket format specialists actually look like?

9 minute readWay, way back in 2006, in our first year of writing this website, we described the international fixture list as being fatter than a TV-loving, chip-munching hippo with an abnormally slow metabolism. We probably should have left ourself with more room for manoeuvre because where does that leave us now?

April 4, 2022 Australia / England

Lesson from the World Cup final: the team that wins absolutely every single game is a good team

2 minute readWell that wasn’t precisely how we expected England to lose the World Cup final to Australia. Nat Sciver played one of the finest World Cup final innings you’re ever likely to see in England’s forlorn chase of 357, making 148 not out off 121 balls. The only issue was that

April 1, 2022 Extras

The Hundred v Test cricket reading experiment

2 minute readHere at King Cricket, we have a strong history of EXPERIMENTS. Here, a mere 15 years after the last one, is another EXPERIMENT. Regular King Cricket correspondent Ged writes… Abstract The null hypothesis was that reading at the Hundred would be hampered by distractions whereas reading at the Test Match

March 30, 2022 Australia / England / South Africa

Who will lose to Australia in the World Cup final?

2 minute readWhen we put together our Essentials Calendar last month, we figured we’d turn our attention to the World Cup at this point. We thought our gaze would shift from the West Indies v England Test series at the perfect time and we’d catch a big, exciting finish to the tournament.

March 28, 2022 England / West Indies

Pretty soon someone is going to prise the brush out of Joe Root’s automaton fingers

3 minute readIf you needed to sum up England’s latest series defeat in a single quote, you could do a lot worse than Joe Root’s pre-tour comment: “I don’t want this to sound like a development tour at all but…” A friend of ours tells a story about when he did a