King Cricket

Danish Kaneria or Dane Vilas – who is most Danish?

4 minute readDanish Kaneria is a Pakistani cricketer who has been banned from the sport for life for spot-fixing. Dane Vilas is a South African cricketer who currently plays for Lancashire. Despite what their names suggest, neither player is from Denmark. So who is most Danish? Let’s measure the two men against

March 29, 2021 England / India

Well Bhuvneshwar Kumar came out of that well | an India v England ODI series recap sorta thing

2 minute readRight-arm, average height, fast-medium: there is not, at the very surface level, a great deal to recommend Bhuvneshwar Kumar as a white ball bowler. He’ll just have to rely on his incredible ability and results if he wants to win people over. In the T20 series, England’s bowlers conceded between

March 26, 2021 England / India

Why your team’s late barrage of sixes is bad news for them

< 1 minute readA run doesn’t have a set value. That is a recurring theme of this website. The value of a run derives from the game in which it is scored and in all honesty can only accurately be gauged with hindsight. Up until the moment a match is finally decided, all

March 24, 2021 England / Features

England’s eight most surprising double hundreds since Graham Gooch’s 333

9 minute readGraham Gooch’s 333 against India at Lord’s in 1990 was the first eye-wateringly big innings we can remember. The idea that one guy could score that many runs on his own in a Test match recalibrated what we thought was possible. There have only really been a handful of oversized

March 22, 2021 England / India

Chris Jordan’s pitch and Virat Kohli’s hat – an India v England T20 series recap sorta thing

2 minute readEngland just played a handful of T20s in India ahead of the World T20 in India later this year. How did it go? Did anyone learn anything? The headline stat is that India won 3-2. The standfirst stat is that they managed that while testing out more players than England.

March 19, 2021 England / India

Dawid Malan, selfish gambles and why the T20 rankings don’t seem fit for purpose

3 minute readWhen it comes to T20 batting, the ICC’s rankings reward selfishness – but teams often benefit more from selflessness. The Dawid Malan debate is an interesting one. There’s a pretty strong case for saying T20 batting rankings aren’t worth the webspace that stores the algorithms that generate them. Because what

March 17, 2021 Match report

Players (of the left) v Gentlemen (of the right) – match report + wagon wheel

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. Herbert Ackgrass (the official cricket biographer of

March 15, 2021 England / India

Why Eoin Morgan got his first-choice team against India when Joe Root didn’t

5 minute readEngland are finally putting out their first team. And people aren’t happy. Speaking ahead of the T20 series against India, Eoin Morgan came as close as anyone has so far to articulating the principles underpinning England’s 2021 squad rotation policy. (We’re not going to call it a ‘controversial’ squad rotation

March 12, 2021 England

Who is whispering to Michael Vaughan about Jofra Archer?

4 minute readWe used to work with a girl who had access to a secret weather report. “It’s going to be 40 degrees on Thursday,” she would say. And she would state this as a fact. How often is it 40 degrees in the United Kingdom? The answer is never. Armed with

March 10, 2021 England / Features

Why it is only now dawning on England fans that their team plays way too many games

8 minute readTurns out people don’t like squad rotation. Not when you call it that anyway. Test Match Special can be a good place to gauge which way the wind’s blowing – and not just because it’s regularly interrupted by the shipping forecast. Earlier this week, Jonathan Agnew wrote a column in