2 minute read Send your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Please consider putting the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself. We like those ones. Inveterate King Cricket contributor Ged Ladd writes… One of the joys of revisiting the popular music of my youth online is the opportunity to see music videos of that era, which I didn’t see at the time, as well as to hear the familiar hits. I was visiting one such track from the early 1980s the other day, The Big Bean by Pigbag. Woe betide you if you suggest that Pigbag was a one hit ..read more

4 minute read Poor pathetic Durham could only muster 517 all out in their first innings against Warwickshire and were therefore invited to follow-on. Fortunately, they managed to escape with a draw after Matt Potts – yes, that Matt Potts – made 149 not out. It is safe to say that in its second week of matches, the Kookaburra ball lived up to its reputation. Warwickshire’s 698-3 was the silliest total (within which Ed Barnard’s 1 was unarguably the standout innings) but pretty much every team got in on the batting action. All nine first-class matches were draws. We’ve detected, in some quarter ..read more

2 minute read Six years ago we handed out a bunch of awards to various county cricket grounds, in recognition of the terrible names they’d been saddled with as a result of sponsorship. Most of these names have since changed, but some of the new names are quite funny or potentially funny, so we thought we’d better update you on that. The way we see it, there are three standouts that warrant comment. 1. The Cloud County Ground, Chelmsford, Essex We took issue with the naming of the Cloudfm County Ground last time around for reasons that are too obvious to state. We are therefore delighted to s ..read more

2 minute read Only one team successfully beat both the weather and the opposition this week and Sam Cook’s 10-73 was Essex’s most significant contribution. Those figures were also a pretty handy rebuttal to anyone who suggested Cook was a bowler guaranteed to suffer at the listless hands of the slumberous Kookaburra ball. First things first: Little Chef is an excellent nickname. Alastair Cook was of course Chef, so his junior team-mate acquired this even better nickname. In an ideal world, we’d like to see this nomenclature thread extended into outright nonsense. Perhaps opening partner Jamie ..read more

2 minute read Sam Northeast finished last season with 166 not out. He started this one with 335 not out. It wasn’t his highest score for Glamorgan. In 2022, he made 410 not out. These are hugely impressive feats; the kinds of feats that get you talked about as a possible England batter. However, if there’s one thing we know about Sam Northeast, it’s that his ‘thing’ is forever being mentioned as a possible England batter but never actually getting picked. This is, arguably, an even more impressive feat than making an unbeaten 166, 335 or 410. Because Northeast is 34. Just think of some of the ..read more

5 minute read James Anderson and Stuart Broad made their debuts in their early 20s and then just carried on playing until they were middle-aged. This means the players we might ordinarily think of as constituting ‘the next generation’ are mostly now on the cusp of retirement themselves. England have however given Test debuts to four men in their mid-20s in the last couple of years: Matt Fisher, Saqib Mahmood, Matt Potts and Josh Tongue. These guys will presumably be the ones queueing up to take Broad’s place. So what have they been up to this winter? James Anderson made his debut before Marti ..read more

4 minute read Just for a minute there, we thought the IPL’s Fair Play Award was the only one that wasn’t sponsored. We wondered what that might say, if it were the case. However, after about two minutes of looking into it, we realised that nothing could ever be so simple as one unsponsored award in the ever-shifting sands of IPL sponsorship. There is surely no clearer indication of the IPL’s awe-inspiring status as an unstoppable juggernaut of marketing than its ability to imagine-up new awards and persuade firms to sponsor them. Been contacted by a brand keen for some exposure? Simply manife ..read more

< 1 minute read Send your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. It is more than okay to put the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself if you want. In fact we urge you to do precisely that. Sam writes… A Tuesday evening, BBC Two, post-watershed. A moody black-and-white picture of a solemn-looking Johnson. Fear not, smutty-minded readers, I shall not continue any further down this road. I speak, of course, about Laura Kuenssberg’s comprehensive documentary on the slow motion car crash which is the UK’s modern political system. As ..read more

5 minute read Joe Root has been so reliably and frequently excellent that at times it hasn’t even felt that interesting. Today is a celebration of Root’s overlooked brilliance. “Just remember what ol’ Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big ol’ storm right square in the eye and he says, ‘Give me your best shot, pal. I can take it.’” Except he can’t. It’s widely acknowledged that while Jack Burton is the central character in Big Trouble in Little China, he isn’t the hero. While Jack ..read more

2 minute read Those of you who’ve been paying attention and reading to the ends of articles will know that we recently floated the possibility of switching off display advertising for a year. This was predicated on attracting a few new Patreon backers. We can’t remember the exact number. We think it was ‘some’ or ‘several’ or ‘a few’ and then eventually it was ‘one more’. We can now confirm that we have successfully hit this very specific threshold. Hurray! This means there will be no display advertising on this site until April 2025 at the earliest. No annoying pop-ups. No big squares promot ..read more