King Cricket

Chris Silverwood respectfully disrespects New Zealand and India

2 minute read “With all due respect…” people say, or “No offence but…” What follows these phrases is somehow never respectful or inoffensive. England coach and selector Chris Silverwood (we warned you he’d try and become a ‘supremo’) didn’t actually plump for either of those options when speaking about the summer ahead earlier

May 17, 2021 Australia

Cricket Australia asks Cameron Bancroft if he’s going to remove more things from beneath the carpet

2 minute read So some of the bowlers did know? “Uh … yeah, look, I think, yeah, I think it’s pretty probably self-explanatory.” It’s hard to say whether Cameron Bancroft finally grew weary of pretending that it was only he, Steve Smith and David Warner who knew about the sandpapering or whether he

May 13, 2021 Australia

Why it would apparently be a “tragedy” if Steve Smith didn’t get to be Australia captain again

2 minute read International cricket’s longest-serving stand-in Test captain, Tim Paine (oh come on, he is), has been talking about whether Steve Smith could one day replace him. Paine told Cricinfo that when he first came into the Australia Test team, Smith was, “growing into that role and getting better and better. Then

May 12, 2021 Match report

Yard and beach cricket in April – a match report

2 minute read Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only interested in what it was like to be at the game, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. Conversely, if it’s an amateur match, please go into excruciating detail. King Cricket reader and regular contributor Sam

May 10, 2021 England / India

Rahul Dravid makes a pretty good point about India’s Test tour of England

2 minute read We tend to think of the ‘bio-bubble’ imposed on touring cricketers as an oppressive, negative thing. But there is an upside – at least from a purely cricket point of view. Thanks to the way the world has been this last year or so, it’s perhaps a little easier for

May 6, 2021 India

So who is ‘playing for humanity’ now then?

< 1 minute read The thing about talking grandiose self-serving bollocks is that not only does it expose your fundamental hollowness, but the fundamental meaninglessness of what you said may well also be exposed. Late last month, as the IPL scrabbled towards its inevitable postponement, the most eye-poppingly you-don’t-even-believe-this-yourself justification for continuing came from

May 4, 2021 County cricket

Making sense of the County Championship 40% of the way through the group stage

2 minute read It’s very early May and it basically feels like winter, but we’re already well on the way to establishing the three divisions that will comprise the second phase of this year’s County Championship. (Here’s an explanation of how the Championship and other competitions will work this year.) 18 teams is

May 1, 2021 England / Features / South Africa

Why ‘overnight’ is such an important part of a five-day Test match

2 minute read Whenever a Test is decided late on the fifth day, there’s much talk about how that kind of tension and excitement wouldn’t happen with four-day Tests. It’s half true. This is why. If you move a deadline, you don’t negate it. Even if a Test match has no fifth day,

April 30, 2021 India

Prithvi Shaw hit six fours in an over and part of us thinks that’s better than six sixes in an over

2 minute read Look, obviously six fours in an over is not better than six sixes in an over. But also it is. That’s what we’re going to argue here. Delhi Capitals were chasing 155 against Kolkata Knight Riders yesterday and it’s fair to say they got off to a pretty solid start.

April 29, 2021 Extras

King Cricket email news

< 1 minute read A sizeable proportion of you are signed up for our emails. We’ve good news and bad news about that. The bad news is that the email sending service we’ve always used – which has generally worked pretty well – ends in July, so we’re having to switch to another one.