King Cricket

January 11, 2021 Australia / India

The autopilot: Why Cheteshwar Pujara is unconsciously exceptional

5 minute readPlease can we tell you why Cheteshwar Pujara is so special. It’s too do with how little he thinks. Most of us are waging a war against conscious thought at the moment. Holed up with the same people we’ve been cooped up with for most of the last year, good

January 8, 2021 New Zealand

For now, based on cricket that’s actually been played, New Zealand are the top-ranked Test side

4 minute readTest rankings are tricksy. Sometimes the top-ranked side isn’t much better than average. Sometimes it isn’t even the best at that specific moment. This doesn’t mean the rankings are wrong. It just means that people’s understanding of rankings is wrong. We play Test series between two sides so that we

January 7, 2021 Australia / England / Features

What Ben Stokes, Jack Leach and Headingley 2019 tell us about Test cricket

5 minute readEngland v Australia, third Test, day four It’s six or out… … It’s six! Jonathan Agnew, Test Match Special Have you seen No Country For Old Men? You should watch No Country For Old Men. No Country For Old Men is a striking and excellent film and while the ending

January 6, 2021 Regulars

The Ridiculous Ashes is now a podcast

< 1 minute readDo you remember the Ridiculous Ashes? It was a thing we did with Dan Liebke over at Cricket 365 for the 2019 series. It’s an alternative trophy that is awarded to the side that produces the most hilarious and absurd cricket across an Ashes series. Just to let you all

January 4, 2021 Match report

Cricket on a tea estate near Darjeeling – a match report

3 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

January 2, 2021 England / New Zealand

Lord Megachiefs on Hold

3 minute readAt this time of year, we normally bestow the greatest honour in cricket by naming Lord Megachief of Gold. It’s a title that is earned through freakish cricket performance across the previous calendar year, but after much rumination we have concluded that 2020 wasn’t actually a proper year. There were

December 29, 2020 Australia / India

Ajinkya Rahane and India’s net gains

2 minute readIndia got past Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood bowling with the new ball and lo, they won the Test match. That’s reductive – but then so’s concluding a team can’t bat when it gets bowled out for 36. Ajinkya Rahane made the most obviously telling contribution, run out for 112

December 23, 2020 Extras

The Festivus holding page: The Boxing Day Tests and some Ian Austin news

2 minute readWe can’t generally be arsed reporting on Boxing Day Tests in any way promptly, but it is nevertheless one of the most important times in the cricket year. This is a quandary, but a few years ago we came up with an approach that we’ve since tried to pass off

December 19, 2020 Australia / India

Why India’s 36 all out was a one-dimensional effort in the field of collapses

3 minute readIf you’ve ever seen The Perfect Storm, you’ll know that quite a lot of things go wrong in it. The Perfect Storm is a film about fishing, starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and quite a few other people you know. At one point Wahlberg is bitten by a shark. A

December 17, 2020 Extras

The Ultimate Kricket Challenge looks delightfully half-baked and bonkers and Kevin Pietersen seems to be at risk of being set on fire

3 minute readHere’s a thing. Six lads that you’ve heard of are going to play a one-on-one form of cricket called the Ultimate Kricket Challenge this Christmas and New Year. (Or at least that’s when it’s going to be broadcast on Star Sports and Disney Hotstar.) The lads in question are Rashid