King Cricket

August 9, 2021 England / India

If England’s top three sets the tone, exactly what tone is it setting?

3 minute readStarts are important. Starts set everyone’s mood and so shape everything that’s to come. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Abattoir Blues album starts with two bars that sound like the climax of an encore. Nick then forcefully instructs us to, ‘get ready for love,’ and by 12 seconds, there’s

August 5, 2021 England / India

Jimmy Anderson wicket celebration analysis: Pujara 4 v Kohli 0

3 minute readJames Anderson took two wickets in his 11th over of the first Test: Cheteshwar Pujara for 4 and Virat Kohli for 0. Both are great and significant batsmen and if our maths is correct – and no guarantees on this one, people – there is only a four-run difference between

August 5, 2021 England / India

Pick of the ducks with Rory Burns, Dan Lawrence, Jos Buttler and Ollie Robinson

3 minute readWell India are great and England seem massively out of their depth. So what are we left with? Let’s compare ducks. Four ducks in an innings. That’s a thing now, apparently. Cricinfo’s George Dobell says it’s the third time it’s happened to England in their last five Tests. That’s… a

August 3, 2021 England / India

Why England v India is exactly what you need right now

3 minute readEngland are about to play Test matches against India. Maybe we’ll just concentrate on that for a bit. We don’t know about you, but these last few weeks have sapped our enthusiasm a bit. It’s not the Hundred itself, which is flawed and a bit silly, but still fundamentally cricket.

August 2, 2021 Features / India

R Ashwin went to Devon

5 minute readR Ashwin is a man who very much ploughs his own furrow. We like this. We like R Ashwin. Recently R Ashwin went to Devon. The world of cricket has changed a lot in quite a short period. It’s hard to put the change into words, but basically the top

July 30, 2021 Match report

Whalley Range U10s v Stretford U10s. Forget about The Hundred – how’s this for a format? (a match report)

2 minute readSend 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. Equally, if it’s an amateur match, please go into excruciating detail. King Cricket reader Stuart writes… If The

July 29, 2021 Australia / England / Extras

Ridiculous Michael Clarke

< 1 minute readWe’ve done a special Ridiculous Ashes podcast about Michael Clarke stemming from our coverage of the 2013/14 series. We got writer, broadcaster and podcaster Adam Collins on to help us because he knows more about Michael Clarke than we do. We never really ‘got’ Michael Clarke. The thing that baffled

July 27, 2021 Extras

We watched the first episode of This Could Go Anywhere and this is what we think

3 minute readWe said we’d report back on This Could Go Anywhere, the Netflix show where Phil Tufnell and Brendon McCullum travel New Zealand playing golf. We watched the first episode last night and we have… uncommonly few thoughts about it, actually. To recap, the somewhat head-scratching premise of This Could Go

July 26, 2021 Match report

Watching live cricket in the time of Covid: England v New Zealand at Lord’s (the Allen Stand)

July 22, 2021 County cricket / Features

Observations after half-watching the Hundred on TV with a couple of kids milling about the place

5 minute readWe don’t really want to be an ambassador for the Hundred and nor are we in the #opposethehundred camp. Our natural habitat is the muddy middle ground, taking ineffectual potshots at both sides. But let’s for now bypass the argument about whether the competition represents the future or death of