Not enough weekend beach sport? Jon Lewis needs to have a proper think about why England grassed seven chances in one day

3 minute read

Did England drop seven chances today because the British idea of beach sport is going down the arcades and spending half an hour on one of those penny pusher games? Probably not, but there must be some reason why they’ve arrived at the wheelless phase of an Ashes tour.

Lack of fitness has been the peg off which criticism has been hung during this series, but only really because people feel it’s symptomatic of – and therefore also emblematic of – a wider attitude and approach.

When head coach Jon Lewis said that fitness wasn’t the reason England weren’t winning in Australia, the generous interpretation is that he meant it wasn’t the sole reason.

“I think their discipline and their skill level has been higher,” is how he concluded that particular thought. Is fitness not in large part a product of discipline? Skill too for that matter? Is he saying the team hasn’t been striving for sufficiently high standards?

Without watching the England players go about their work day-to-day, this is the worry with this team: that their current notion of ‘doing enough’ is way less than Australia’s. That’s the real criticism. Fitness is just shorthand for that.

“Doing Surf Lifesaving, or playing touch rugby”

“You guys need to come watch them,” Lewis told Cricinfo last week. “I promise you. I cannot defend them more around how hard they work on their physicality. They are incredibly dedicated to what they do. I’ve never seen a cricket team work like this cricket team, and I’ve worked in professional cricket for 31 years.”

Confusingly, he also said in the same interview that Australia are, “a much more athletic team than us. They’re more agile, they look faster, at times they look more powerful.”

That’s a weird combination of facts, isn’t it? The hardest-working team he’s ever known are being outperformed.

So if England really are leaving no Atlas stone unturned, lifted and carried, how is it that Australia are physically superior?

You’ll no doubt have heard Lewis’s already infamous theory that it’s down to “a cultural difference” – that Australians are out playing touch rugby down at the beach while Britons huddle in front of fires in their wattle and daub pit dwellings. (This is not a direct quote, just the general gist.)

But if you’re effectively in charge of a team’s culture, maybe that’s exactly what needs to be addressed. If everyone really is “incredibly dedicated” to working on their physicality, maybe they’d also be willing to, say, sign up for open water swimming if it closed the gap on those Surf Lifesaving Aussies. (Lord knows, they’d surely gain an edge in terms of sheer grit if they did that, relative water temperatures and all.)

That specific suggestion’s flippant, but the point is that if England’s perception is that they’re operating at 10/10, maybe they should have a quick check whether they’re actually using Spinal Tap amps, because all the evidence suggests there’s scope to go “one louder”.

Progress

Speaking after the World T20 exit late last year, Lewis said: “There was some really honest discussions within the playing group about how we were on the field and off the field in and around the World Cup in terms of our preparation and how we did things and how we wanted to be on the field.

“There were some really important discussions around how we were on the field in particular. And then the response to those discussions were about how we wanted to go and play our game and make sure that we were as fearless as we have been in the past and where we slightly drifted away from that as a group and I felt like the team responded really well to that.”

That’s the talk, but you then need to act on the talk. Walk it, as they tend to say. Perhaps even run.

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The post Not enough weekend beach sport? Jon Lewis needs to have a proper think about why England grassed seven chances in one day first appeared on King Cricket.

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In praise of the matter-of-fact dynamism of Travis Head

7 minute read

Is there a less showy attacking batter than Australia’s Travis Head?

Australia picked a new opener not so long ago – a couple of them actually. The second one was Sam Konstas, who quickly concluded that the best way to counter the world’s best fast bowler was by repeatedly attempting reverse scoops until he hit one.

After eventually doing so, he hit a few more. He made a few runs. Words like “audacious” were bandied about.

Australians marvelled at Konstas’ fearlessness, lauded his aggression and waxed lyrical about his fearless aggression. Pencil was renounced for ink. The nation had its new long-term opener.

Turning Head

Except a good while before this, Australia had concocted a plan for how they’d approach Test matches played on turning pitches. On their last tour of India, Travis Head had replaced David Warner at the top of the order halfway through the series with a view to him whacking the new ball. The new ball was duly whacked and the team concluded, “Okay, this is what we do in these conditions now.”

So it was that they arrived in Sri Lanka the other day armed with two conflicting plans. Dashing new opener who whacks, or subcontinental stand-in opener-whacker.

Given Konstas is flavour of the month, it feels quite brave that they ultimately went with Head. He hit 57 off 40 balls and as we type this sentence, Australia are exactly 600-5.

Is the pitch an ironed pancake thing on which they’d have made 600 regardless of who opened? Or did Head soften the ball at a time when the innings might have headed off down some other narrative path?

Who knows? Maybe Konstas’ previous struggles against Ravindra Jadeja would have come to be reclassified as overlooked warning sirens, or maybe he’d have made 200. Maybe, if he’s highly likely to play in the Ashes, a bit more Test experience would be beneficial. Or maybe some bad Test experiences would round off the very rough edges that could cut England to ribbons when the team returns to home conditions.

We don’t know about any of that. All we know is that you give Travis Head a job and he’ll just crack on with it in his own quietly dynamic way.

Turning heads

Some batters come across as attention-seeking. This might be down to words and deeds (Kevin Pietersen) or on-field behaviour and deeds (Virat Kohli), but it can also come about purely through deeds alone (Jos Buttler, say).

It’s hard to think of too many rapid scorers who aren’t magnets for public attention, even if they don’t otherwise exhibit too many look-at-me qualities. This makes us think that hitting boundaries and attempting to score quickly must unavoidably be a bit of a show-offy thing to do.

But then Travis Head clonks his way to another score and it feels like somehow this isn’t the case.

Because the clonking itself should really qualify as attention-seeking. Last year he hit the fourth-fastest hundred in the history of the IPL, off 39 balls, and finished the season as the fourth-highest scorer. He scored a century when Australia won the 2023 World Cup. A few months before that he’d scored 163 in the World Test Championship final.

Head sometimes looks shaky early on, but it never seems to bother him. Rather than overhauling his approach, he waits, and while he waits, he tries to hit some fours. For some reason this comes across less as ‘putting pressure back on the bowler’ and more as just passing the time. If he survives that period, he tends to progress to a phase where he’s no longer troubled. And then he just carries on playing much as he has been doing.

On the face of it, nothing’s changed. The bowlers are the same, Head is playing the same, but it just seems like that very old-fashioned thing of having his eye in.

This refusal to moderate his approach when he’s being challenged translates into habitually quick hundreds. His Test tons have mostly been scored at about five runs an over; his ODI hundreds at significantly more than a run a ball. His strike-rate in T20 internationals is 160.

Throw in his reliability and the fact his output spans the formats and on paper he’s one of the superstars of world cricket.

Superstardom hasn’t felt less superstarry since Superstars.

Pizzazzterzone

Trying to promote Travis Head as a superstar is like trying to bowl bouncers into plasticine. You’re simply not going to get a decent return on your efforts. There is an innate black hole quality to the man that sucks in all nearby pizzazz and simply does not let it out again.

It is, at least partly, down to the look.

The Travis Head look is complete

Mitchell Johnson first grew a moustache for Movember, but it worked so well for him that the second time he grew one, it was essentially an aggressive act.

“Look at my terrifying moustache!” he seemed to say and batters crumbled.

You’d have to ask Dennis Lillee how his came about, but it carried the same air. Then, in the late-80s, the top lips of Allan Border, David Boon and Merv Hughes seemed designed to send a strong message about the nature of the wearers and indeed about the nation of Australia in general.

Head’s moustache?

“I’m pretty lazy, so I don’t like looking after myself,” he told ABC in 2023.

It is almost as if there is a directly inverse relationship between how Head goes about his cricket and his personal vibe. For every barrage of fours and sixes in a match, he brings a corresponding and proportional deadbat energy to absolutely everything else.

Controversy!

You’d think it would be easy to pin a random concocted controversy on a World Cup winner. Comes with the territory, no? But attempting to do so with Head is a thankless task.

We saw a headline the other day, suggesting Head had ‘taken a a swipe at critics’ after the series victory over India.

The offending quote read: “The series could have gone in any direction for the last few Test matches and it’s been a crazy five. The media has hyped it up in different directions and different narratives. I don’t agree with some and I do agree with some others.”

Why didn’t they go with “EXCLUSIVE: Head reveals he agrees with some things, but not other things”?

Then there was the ‘finger on ice’ celebration earlier in the series after he’d dismissed Rishabh Pant.

“Travis head’s obnoxious behaviour during the course of the Melbourne test doesn’t auger well for the gentleman’s game,” wrote former India opener, Navjot Singh Sidhu. “Sets the worst possible example when there are kids, women, young & old watching the game… this caustic conduct did not insult an individual but a nation of 1.5 billion Indians… stringent punishment that would serve a deterrent for the future generations needs to be slapped on him so that no one dares follow suit !!!”

That’s Navjot Singh Sidhu, the guy who was sentenced to “one year rigorous imprisonment” for a road rage incident that resulted in a man’s death. (We’d like to word our description of the incident less generously, but it’s hard to know where you stand on India’s shifting legal sands – Sidhu’s case has taken in various charges, acquittals, convictions and reversals over the years.)

Head later explained that he’d been, “mainly taking the piss out of Gaz [Nathan Lyon] really,” by suggesting that his own part-time bowling was so valuable that after delivering just a handful of overs his spinning finger should be put on ice until it was needed again.

Maybe the gentleman’s game’s not so gravely threatened by Head’s behaviour, Navjot. Your limited view might even suggest you aren’t on the highest moral ground.

Don’t let it go to your Head

We’ve established that Head isn’t attention-seeking, but at the same time he isn’t really attention-oblivious either. He doesn’t come across as a Jonathan Trott, lost in his bubble, inured from the wider world, subject only to the pressure that is applied from within.

We wouldn’t even say he’s attention-ambivalent because it suggests mixed feelings. He’s more attention-indifferent. Head plays how he plays, does what he does, without any obvious regard for how his actions might be received.

You could call it a philosophy – and we’re sure in some ways it is – but it mostly just looks like he hasn’t really thought about it much. That’s probably to some extent an illusion, but therein lies some of the brilliance of the man.

Keeping things simple is an art and Head’s particular artistry only becomes more challenging within the increasingly professional cricket world. If nothing else, you need to have a certain conviction about your approach to resist the alternatives.

At the IPL, for example, with every resource available to him, Head resists the temptation to “deep dive” about upcoming opponents. He told Cricinfo he’ll instead have a few words with team-mates to, “try and tap into conversational stuff. I don’t like to sit around and watch a heap of footage or anything.”

He says he strives for a “balance” where the emphasis is on freshness. “Just try and stay pretty relaxed about things.”

Back in the day, some of the UK cricket press had a habit of referring to Matthew Hoggard as a yeoman. It’s a funny word that hasn’t often been used about other cricketers. The implication was that he was an unspectacular cricketer – a bit of a toiler.

Despite his spectacular all-format performances, Travis Head has a little of that quality about him too. While the ‘super’ part of ‘superstar’ fits well enough, the ‘star’ part sits less comfortably.

As paradoxical as it sounds, perhaps he’s a superyeoman.

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Where does Jomel Warrican’s pioneering work as a number 11 all-rounder leave Pakistan’s Test cricket?

3 minute read

You’ve seen a rum old Test match when the team that was 38-7 before drinks on the first morning ends up winning easily. That’s what Jomel Warrican helped the West Indies achieve against Pakistan this week though.

To recap Warrican’s match, he walked in to bat at 95-9 and promptly contributed 36 not out to what ultimately proved to be the biggest partnership of the match (68). When his batting (and soon to be bowling) partner, Gudakesh Motie, was bowled for 55, they took lunch.

After six overs from Kemar Roach at the start of the afternoon session, Warrican came on to bowl. There would be no further seam bowling from the West Indies for the remainder of the match.

Warrican took 4-43 in Pakistan’s first innings to somehow secure a first innings lead. The Windies then delivered one of those mathematically-perplexing team efforts where the tally is somehow 244 even though all you can see is one 50 and a couple of 30s.

Pakistan needed 254 to win, but Warrican took 5-27, so they didn’t get anywhere close. He finished as his team’s top wicket-taker for the two-match series with 19 and also achieved their highest batting average (42.50).

The Pakistan perspective

This feels like a bit of a blow to what started out as Plan B for Pakistan, but which seems to have since earned promotion to Plan A status.

Playing Test cricket at home hasn’t been going well. They lost 1-0 to Australia in 2022. They lost 3-0 to England later the same year. They lost 2-0 to Bangladesh in 2024.

After watching Harry Brook make 317 at the start of England’s next tour, they decided enough was enough and made some changes. They wheeled out the heaters and the fans and put together a strategy that revolved around two players who hadn’t even been in the team.

It seemed at the time like it might be a specific ploy for England, but just to underline the continued centrality of Noman Ali and Sajid Khan, no men’s Test in Pakistan has ever seen more wickets fall to spinners (35) than the second Test against the West Indies. This is a record that has stood since… the first Test, where 34 wickets fell to spinners.

Spin shoot-outs bring few guarantees, but what’s the alternative? Nothing else has worked. Pakistan are bottom of the Test Championship table.

Conclusion

“All right, Mrs Warrican – is your Jomel playing out today?”

Just an absolute classic West Indies cricketer name.

Granted, we’re catching him on a high here, but Warrican also strikes us a man whose cricket is positively soggy with joy.

As just one example, he gave Sajid Khan a mocking send-off when he dismissed him in the second innings by mimicking his celebration and somehow even that brand of niggle came across as borderline friendly.

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The post Where does Jomel Warrican’s pioneering work as a number 11 all-rounder leave Pakistan’s Test cricket? first appeared on King Cricket.

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‘Fitness? Actually we’re inferior in *loads* of areas’ says Jon Lewis after England lose the Ashes

3 minute read

We’re not sure this is the effective rebuttal he thinks it is. England have been criticised for their fitness both before and during this Ashes capitulation, but head coach Jon Lewis says they didn’t lose because of that – there are in fact loads of other reasons why they’ve lost every game, as well as the fitness thing.

To quickly bring you up to speed, in October England were knocked out of the T20 World Cup in the group stages. Their final match, against the West Indies, featured a lamentable fielding display in which opener Qiana Joseph was dropped five times. (On two of those occasions, she was effectively dropped for six.)

After that match, former England player, now BBC pundit, Alex Hartley, said that England needed to get fitter. “Australia have got 15 or 16 athletes; genuine athletes. You look at our team – I’m not going to name names, but if you look at them, you know.”

Hartley’s view was that 80% of the England team were fit and athletic enough and the remainder were letting the side down.

Lewis disagreed. He said the criticism was unfair and that in his view: “Fitness was absolutely nothing to do with us losing that game.”

Either way, Hartley’s assessment has hung in the air for this Ashes and as the series has progressed, it has become more and more of a ‘thing’. Australia have fielded like demons and so far won every game.

Hartley has since said she’s been given the cold shoulder by some players, highlighting as one example Sophie Ecclestone allegedly refusing to do an interview with her. Against all odds, revealing this development in a podcast has not defused the situation.

England are digging in. Lewis is in fact so keen to disabuse people of the idea that fitness is a problem that he’s gone out of his way to list all the other ways in which Australia are superior.

“I would say yeah they are, they’re a much more athletic team than us,” he told the BBC. “They’re more agile, they look faster, at times they look more powerful.

“Is that the reason that we’re not winning cricket matches here in this country? No. I think their discipline and their skill level has been higher.”

Lewis thinks his team have been more competitive than the scoreline suggests (they haven’t, not really), but concedes: “We definitely need to get faster and we can access more power for sure.”

That sounds a little like he’s come round to the idea that the T20 World Cup criticism had some merit, after all. Might that bring a ceasefire from those still taking potshots at the messenger?

Extras

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The 2025 King Cricket Essentials Calendar

2 minute read

We do this every year now as a means of navigating the heavingly confusing cricket schedule. We draw up a month-by-month guide to the series and tournaments we’ll (most likely) be focusing on in the coming year so that we don’t accidentally piss away some of our enthusiasm on whatever lesser event they’re trying to push on us in the here and now. You’ve got to pace yourselves, people.

To paraphrase Paul Collingwood, no-one in power’s bothered that a game might feature players who are mentally fatigued – they just wanted to get the ‘product’ out there. The end result is a high volume of matches.

That’s no good for players and really it’s no different for us as fans either. Enthusiasm is something that needs time to build. Try to follow everything and you’ll soon find yourself in a no-man’s land of knowing what’s going on without feeling particularly moved by any of it.

Feeling moved by things is important.

Interest waxes and wanes. Interest needs to wax and wane. This calendar is our tool to engineer that for ourself. You may well have entirely different priorities. No problem, that’s fine – but this is what we’ll be aiming to cover here on King Cricket.

---

The 2024 King Cricket Essentials Calendar

January

• The Ashes, Australia v England (women) – three ODIs, three T20s, one Test

February to March

• The Champions Trophy (men)

April to May

• The County Championship (men) – the first seven rounds

May

• England v Zimbabwe (men) – one Test

June

• World Test Championship final (men) – Australia v South Africa

June to July

• England v India (men) – five Tests

August to September

• World Cup (women) – ODIs

September

• The County Championship (men) – depending when the World Cup final is (we can’t find a date yet)

October

• India v West Indies (men) – two Tests
• Pakistan v South Africa (men) – two Tests

November

• India v South Africa (men) – two Tests

November to December (and on into 2026)

• The Ashes, Australia v England (men) – five Tests

---

Observations

Everyone calls it a ‘big year’ for the England men’s team, but it’s also a weirdly narrow one. Five Tests against India and five against Australia with a (small) world tournament and a de facto warm-up Test against Zimbabwe the only rays of light from the wider world. (Bilateral white ball series come and go. No-one cares.)

Beyond that, August stands out. UK cricket fans who don’t like The Hundred habitually complain that there’s no other cricket that month these days. However, it strikes us that there’s a very appealing alternative in 2025 – not just some other tournament, but the very best cricketers in the world all together for a World Cup. Except will it be an alternative? The exact dates aren’t yet known. And wouldn’t a World Cup taking place elsewhere completely hollow-out the teams taking part in the women’s Hundred?

A final point: if it ain’t five, it’s two. Beyond the obvious, all the other Test series that have caught our eye for the year ahead are only two matches long. Two-Test series are unsatisfactory anyway, but as we pointed out last summer, that fact is then compounded by two simple rules…

• The shorter the series, the more important it is to start well
• The shorter the series, the less warm-up cricket there will be

Hey-ho.

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The post The 2025 King Cricket Essentials Calendar first appeared on King Cricket.

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Heather Knight’s slightly odd reaction to failing to reclaim the Ashes

3 minute read

England don’t change captains too often. The previous one, Charlotte Edwards, made her international debut in 1996 and served as captain from 2005 until 2016 when current captain, Heather Knight, took over. Knight has previously said she’s grown more relaxed as a leader over time because she believes that’s what later teams have needed. We’re not too sure what the current team needs, but given Australia have retained the Ashes at the very earliest opportunity, perhaps that belief should be revisited.

Writing after Australia had claimed the first six of the 16 points available in this Ashes, the Guardian’s Raf Nicholson suggested that of late England have handled significant defeats, “by either trying to pretend it does not really matter or by presenting handy excuses.”

There’s something to be said for talking things down as a means of taking the pressure off your team when a big series is still live, but the peculiar breeziness of some of Knight’s comments has come across more like a form of detachment.

> Ashes, second ODI: Really, if we’re honest, England just wanted the defeat more than Australia

For example, she apparently felt her team were “ahead for most of the chase” in the third ODI, which is only really true if you take wickets out of the equation. (For obvious reasons, international captains don’t habitually do that.)

Australia have since retained the Ashes with victory in the first T20, after which Knight concluded her post-match interview by saying, “Frustrating today, but on to the next one.”

On the one hand it’s unwise to read too much into off-the-cuff comments in a post-match interview. On the other, they can be an insight into the general vibe of a team.

Assessing the latest defeat, Knight blamed “a little bit of mis-execution,” adding that, “if we’d kept them to 20, 30 less, we would have been in the game for sure.”

We presume the ‘mis-execution’ was a reference to the batting in the way that any particular dismissal (paffing one to mid-off, say, or missing a straight delivery) can be presented as just a small, isolated error if you’ve sufficient motive to view it in such a way.

She might also have been referring to the fielding, which judging by the highlights was frequently mediocre and on a few occasions honestly a little bit shit.

It has to be said that “20, 30 less” isn’t such a small thing in a T20 either. In this format, conceding an extra 20-30 runs is generally going to be match-losing. Audibly wishing you hadn’t done so therefore amounts to wishing you’d played well enough to win rather than so badly that you lost – a bit meaningless in other words.

As we’ve already said, such are post-match interviews, but this is in the context of England not really having gone anywhere in the Jon Lewis era.

What next? Sophia Dunkley says everyone’s 100 per cent behind Knight, which as much as anything sounds like no-one else really wants the job.

One small disclaimer to all of the above: Australia are an extremely good cricket team.

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A cat continuing to maintain almost ostentatiously conspicuous indifference to cricket

< 1 minute read

If you’ve got a picture of an animal being conspicuously indifferent to cricket, please send it to king@kingcricket.co.uk.

A P Webster writes…

I bring updates on previously-featured feline indifference to Boxing Day Tests and cricket in general.

As I was checking in on the South Africa v Pakistan Test over at my parents’ house, I was joined by Dusty, who has previously veered between indifference and outright hostility to televised cricket.

As you can see, he took up a prominent position to display his indifference, and then, just in case that wasn’t clear enough, walked across the screen to stare directly out of the window whilst partially obstructing my view, making it ostentatiously clear that the Markram v Abbas duel held no significance for him whatsoever.

By the time Abbas prevailed in taking Markram’s wicket, he felt his point had been made and climbed down to stare out of the window from closer proximity.

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Ashes, second ODI: Really, if we’re honest, England just wanted the defeat more than Australia

2 minute read

At the end of the day, England just wanted it more. Australia showed serious appetite for defeat when they shipped their last eight wickets for 49 runs, but England responded well and crucially held their nerve at the death.

Having already successfully lost the first Ashes match (an ODI) by four wickets, England showed up for the second, in Melbourne, confident of repeating the feat. Australia are not great at losing at the best of times and in this series they also have home disadvantage.

After losing the toss and being put into bat, the Aussies made their way to 131-2 before unexpectedly leaping into life. Sophie Ecclestone is an absolute liability for any team seeking to lose a cricket match and she duly finished with 4-35. Alice Capsey was also led astray and took 3-22.

England were left needing under 181 to lose – a daunting task – but Tammy Beaumont swiftly took action, ensuring she was right in line with the stumps when the last ball of the second over crashed into her pads.

Wicketkeeper Amy Jones was woefully in form though and dragged England to 120-5. Fortunately, the lower order performed badly and this soon became 146-9.

The Aussies had one last trick up their sleeves though. With not much more than two overs to go, Annabel Sutherland hit upon the idea of bowling a load of beamers. This was not just costly from a run perspective (the first one cost five runs), it also resulted in her being removed from the attack. A masterstroke!

Tahlia McGrath was entrusted with bowling the last ball of the over, which was also a free hit. Jones skied it towards deep square leg and with incredible big game lack-of-awareness neglected to run. This meant Lauren Bell was needlessly on strike for the first ball of the next over, which hit her stumps.

Now 4-0 up on points with 12 points still up for grabs, it’s already hard to see how Australia can come back from this.

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3. England are better than Australia

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23 of the best, worst and weirdest cricket moments of 2024

7 minute read

It was a hell of a year. Probably. Who can honestly remember 12 months’ worth of stuff, let alone assign it some sort of value by which the year as a whole can be compared to previous ones? Here’s a bunch of cricket things that happened in 2024 anyway – good, bad and peculiar. If you’re anything like us, you’ll have forgotten loads of them.

1. David Warner massively diminished Australia’s dislikeability

By retiring. With a final, postmodern feat of annoyance, Warner committed perhaps his greatest-ever sin by rendering the resultant Warner-free Australia Test team honestly quite likeable for the most part. Unforgiveable. This. Will not. STAAAAAAAND!

2. Steve Smith became an opening batter

And not too long after returned to the middle-order, as we outlined in our subsequent, balanced report, headlined, “Failing failure Steve Smith to hide down the order after abject failure as Test opener.”

3. Shamar Joseph gave us an almost-perfect cricket moment

Not every victory is equal. The final act of the West Indies victory over Australia brought a perfect dismissal, a perfect celebration, a perfect story and a perfect subtext. If we were ranking the moments in this article by impact and importance, this one would be number one.

4. England picked Tom Hartley and it was absolutely disastrous but then somehow a colossal success

With 40 first-class wickets at 36.57 to his name, Hartley shaped up as the grizzled veteran when he was called into the England Test squad alongside ingenu, Shoaib Bashir. When he first came on to bowl, he was greeted in time-honoured ‘new spinner playing against India’ fashion. His first delivery was dispatched over the ropes, as was another a ball or two later. After three overs he’d conceded 34, but Ben Stokes kept him on, sending a message that the spinner’s inclusion wasn’t a mistake and he didn’t need to be hidden or protected. Figures of 2-130 off 25 overs in India’s first innings were then followed by a match-winning return of 7-62 in the second.

5. Jasprit Bumrah yorked Ollie Pope

Pope was fresh off the performance of a lifetime when Bumrah did this to him.

6. Rohit Sharma did a cartoonish angry hat throw

Rohit isn’t an especially demonstrative man. It took Sarfaraz Khan getting run out because Ravindra Jadeja was so keen to get off 99 to drive him to this.

7. Ben Stokes bowled a cricket ball

Newsworthy because he hadn’t done so for nine months. Doubly newsworthy because, despite his rustiness and the fact the score was 275-1, he knocked back Rohit Sharma’s off stump with it.

8. An international cricket stadium popped up

The Nassau County International Cricket Stadium in New York was hastily erected for the T20 World Cup. Alas, it turned out that shipping 30cm-deep trays of soil and grass halfway round the world wasn’t the best way to create a cricket pitch. Scores were low and after just a couple of months of life, it was deconstructed again.

9. Someone shot Afghanistan’s Gulbadin Naib

In the hamstring. At a crucial moment in a World Cup match when Bangladesh were behind the required run rate and rain was very much thinking about falling. He got over it though. Within half an hour, he was taking a wicket. Maybe he was just taking a rare opportunity for a lie-down because after just four hours sleep, Afghanistan had to catch a flight for the semi-final they would go on to lose.

10. Jasprit Bumrah wasn’t named player of the match in the World Cup final

Absolute A-grade nonsense. At least someone’s willing to give him an award.

11. James Anderson was forcefully invited to retire

Anderson’s final match doubled-up as Gus Atkinson’s debut. The new man took a wicket second ball, was at one point on a hat trick and finished with 7-45. In the second innings he took 5-61. Only his celebrations disappointed. In short, life moves on. By September Atkinson was bothamming his way to a hundred and a five-for in the same Test match against Sri Lanka and by December, he’d snaffled that Test hat trick.

12. Graham Thorpe took his own life

Apologies for the shift in tone, but ‘worst’ is in the headline. In August, having ceased responding to messages a few months earlier, Graham Thorpe killed himself. Thorpe was a big part of our formative cricket-watching years. This is how we’ll remember him.

ANDYSMANCLUB is a men’s suicide prevention charity, offering free-to-attend support groups. Alternatively, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or by email at jo@samaritans.org

13. South Africa picked some “strapping boys”

It was a dizzying year for South Africa, who went from renouncing/disrespecting/destroying Test cricket by sending a third-choice squad to New Zealand in February to qualifying for the World Test Championship final a few months later.

14. Brendon McCullum got a new hat

Although he’s not actually worn it yet.

15. England picked Josh Hull

It really was quite the year for England Test selection. As well as Hartley, there was Shoaib Bashir, who’d taken 10 first-class wickets at 67 runs apiece when he made his debut, and then Josh Hull, whose first-class average of 62.75 was actually heading in the wrong direction when he was picked thanks to a 2024 summer in which he’d been averaging 182.50 in the second division. Hull’s debut also brought Dan Lawrence’s final outing as a Test opener – a role that made about as much sense as picking Jacob Bethell as a number three. It was all very colourful, but Gus Atkinson, Jamie Smith and Brydon Carse also made their Test debuts in 2024, so there were definitely more hits than misses.

16. India won a Test inside (the last) two days

Two day Tests are not unheard of, but it’s usually the first two. They make a start, both teams collapse, time is left unused. India’s victory over Bangladesh was noteworthy for the fact that only 35 overs were possible in the first three days and yet India recalibrated their approach and went for the victory anyway. As we said at the time, full credit to Ben Duckett for their efforts…

17. Harry Brook hit a triple hundred

You don’t get many of them. Our view is that we are most likely already witnessing peak Harry Brook. Enjoy it while you still can. His attitude to England being 50-4 against New Zealand later in the year was a particular highlight.

18. A butterfly tried to run out Zak Crawley

It failed.

19. Mohammed Siraj made his way onto India’s top scorers podium with a single shot

The number 11 was responsible for a quarter of India’s four boundaries in the team’s first innings of the series against New Zealand. It would be wrong to say things got worse from there for the home team, but they did find multiple different ways to lose Test matches and were ultimately defeated 3-0. Buoyed by his personal performance, Siraj made an appearance as a nightwatcher a month later, only to be given out LBW first ball.

20. Pakistan settled on a two-man bowling attack

After that whole Harry Brook thing, Pakistan decided the smart thing to do would be to drop all their best-known bowlers. They replaced them with Noman Ali and Sajid Khan and possibly some other guys as well. It didn’t really matter who else because Noman and Sajid did absolutely all of the bowling and wicket-taking from then on. Across two Tests and three innings, they bowled for 89.5 overs unchanged.

21. Marnus Labuschagne MADE VIRAT KOHLI PAY

Virat Kohli dropped Marnus Labuschagne second ball. An hour and a half later, Labuschagne was still at the crease, punishing India, with two runs to his name. He didn’t actually make any further runs, but he also didn’t get out to Jasprit Bumrah until the second innings, even though he’d pretty much constantly looked like doing so.

22. Tom Latham fled from the ball

Fresh from beating India in India, New Zealand set themselves the challenge of beating England without taking any catches. This wilful catch avoidance peaked with an effort by Tom Latham, who first parried the ball straight up before sprinting away from the exact spot where it was going to land. Series-wise, England beat New Zealand, who’d beaten India, who’d beaten Bangladesh, who’d beaten Pakistan, who’d beaten England, who’d beaten Sri Lanka, who’d beaten New Zealand.

23. Virat Kohli’s vision deteriorated

The concern is not that Virat Kohli has lost his edge, but that it is now the only part of the bat he ever uses. Perhaps his vision’s gone downhill. How else to explain the mid-pitch collision with Australia’s really-highly-noticeable David Warner replacement, Sam Konstas?

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The post 23 of the best, worst and weirdest cricket moments of 2024 first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. 17 of the best, worst and weirdest cricket moments of 2021
2. 21 of the best, worst and weirdest cricket moments of 2023
3. Five bonkers moments from the 2019 Cricket World Cup final – but which was the most uniquely cricket?

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Love Lane Liverpool Competition fixtures 2025

Champions Ormskirk – back, l-r Harvey Rankin, Toby Bulcock, Sam Marsh, Calum Turner, Sam Holden, John Armstrong, Kevin Wilson (scorer); front, l-r George Lavelle, Scott Lees, Jamie Barnes, Gary Knight (captain), George Politis

Ormskirk begin their quest for a third successive Love Lane Liverpool Competition title with a tricky clash against last season’s third-placed side, Rainford.

Both promoted sides begin their ECB Premier Division campaigns away from home on April 26, with Firwood Bootle at Birkenhead Park and Colwyn Bay travelling to Formby.

Wallasey are the first side to make the trip to North Wales on May 3, while top-flight cricket returns to Wadham Road with the visit of National T20 champions Northern, who host Rainhill on opening day.

In a change to the usual early-season schedule, the first Saturday of the season, April 19, is set aside for Ray Digman Trophy and Ray Tyler Cup games. 

Another new feature for 2025 is the absence of the traditional Bank Holiday Monday clashes between Wallasey and New Brighton, following the latter’s first ever relegation from the Premier Division. 

Their Division One campaign begins against Orrell Red Triangle at Rake Lane, while Southport & Birkdale travel to Highfield on day one.

Prescot & Odyssey begin life back in the Comp with a trip to Southport Trinity in Division Two.

Below you can see all 36 1st XI sides’ fixtures for the season – coloured yellow for early season, green for mid, red for late. Home teams down the left, away along the top.

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