King Cricket

May 11, 2022 West Indies

The day Dad faced (and caught) Roy Gilchrist

2 minute readWe sent Special Correspondent Dad some footage of Roy Gilchrist this week because we knew he’d played against him once. If you don’t know Gilchrist, he was summed up in his Guardian obituary as a, “West Indian fast bowler whose temper was even quicker and more fiery than the speed

May 9, 2022 England

England batters: mystery of the odds

2 minute readWe have in recent years aimed for coherence, clarity and accessibility in our opening paragraphs. It’s tough to take that approach today though because we’ve accidentally written a headline that reads like the title of an obscure B-movie or computer game. It’s the tagline bit that does it. It’s got

May 6, 2022 County cricket

You see what happens? You see what happens? This is what happens when you give Ben Stokes the England Test captaincy and then invite him to return to action in the County Championship

2 minute readBen Stokes played his third Championship innings for Durham in four years today. He made 161 off 88 balls. It took him 64 balls to reach three figures. Stokes brought up his hundred with what was his fifth six in five balls. The sixth ball of the over went for

May 5, 2022 County cricket

No James Anderson and no Saqib Mahmood as Lancashire and the Birmingham U-Bears rehash the Bob Willis Trophy final

< 1 minute readLancashire’s best team in years didn’t last long, did it? They’re without both James Anderson and Saqib Mahmood for county champions Warwickshire’s visit to Old Trafford this week. Hassan Ali must be running on fumes by now as well. We have to say that the return of crack fielder and

May 2, 2022 County cricket

Pope, pitches, pacesetters: 3 county cricket talking points we don’t want to talk about

3 minute readThat’s the royal we. These aren’t things that we, the county cricket community, are for some reason collectively overlooking. These are just three things that we, King Cricket, don’t really want to talk about for one reason or another. That’s what we’ve chosen to talk about today: the things we

April 28, 2022 England

Ben Stokes to vie with Eoin Morgan for use of Ben Stokes

3 minute readWe very much hate announcements of announcements. You know – when they announce that an announcement is going to be made and also exactly what that announcement will be. Hopefully by the time you read this Ben Stokes will have officially been announced as England Test captain and we can

April 27, 2022 England / Features / New Zealand / Sri Lanka

Five Test wicketkeepers who quite often didn’t actually do any wicketkeeping

6 minute readIf you want to be highly regarded as a wicketkeeper-batter, one of the smartest things you can do is not actually keep wicket in a whole load of Test matches. At what point do you become a wicketkeeper? How frequently do you have to don pads and gloves and chunter

April 25, 2022 County cricket

Josh Bohannon, Matt Parkinson and the mayfly that is Lancashire’s best team in years

2 minute readLast week might have been the first time since the 1990s when we didn’t think Lancashire could have improved their XI by including Glen Chapple. Chapple is getting on a bit these days, but he was getting on a bit for quite a large proportion of his magnificent playing career

April 20, 2022 County cricket

So that idea to crown an overall three-format county champion then…

3 minute readIt’s time for the next exciting instalment of the saga we like to call, ‘you may add to the county cricket season, but you may never take away‘. There is no idea so clear and simple that county cricket can’t completely misunderstand and misapply it. The Mail has reported that

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