European Cricket League: Northern settle into new surroundings with two wins from two

Northern 138/3 (10) beat Austrian Cricket Tigers 123/7 (10) by 15 runs

Byron 88/8 (10) lost to Northern 89/2 (5) by eight wickets

Northern Cricket Club at the European Cricket League in Malaga, Spain

Europe, meet Northern. 

The Love Lane Liverpool Competition’s first ever national champions showed what they can do on their first day of European Cricket League action, recording two wins with two increasingly assured performances.

The day was all the more impressive given it was their first taste of T10 cricket, and for most of the players their first competitive action on an artificial wicket.

First they tamed the Austrian Cricket Tigers, holding their nerve to record a 15-run victory, then they were streets ahead of Byron, smothering the Greek side’s batters then romping home with eight wickets and five overs to spare.

Captain for the day Chris Laker, standing in because of James Cole’s injured finger, made 87 runs from 39 balls across the day and looked increasingly at home managing his outfielders on the small playing surface at Malaga’s Cartama Oval.

He said: “There was a lot of learning that took place in the first game. The cricket is a good standard, but it’s very different out here. 

“Game two was a much more polished performance, so we were quite pleased with that.

“We had a couple of new players coming in and there were a lot of different challenges – some we were prepared for, some we weren’t.

“But these players can adapt to any conditions.”

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Laker and Tyler McGladdery gave Northern the perfect start against the Austrians, putting on 96 in 35 balls to set up a total of 138/4.

The Tigers made a brisk start and kept up with the rate early on but lost key wickets.

One turning point was a stunning boundary relay catch by a tumbling Alex Vincent, who threw to Laker as he toppled over the rope. 

Another was the ninth over, in which the skipper took two wickets for eight runs to shift the equation from a plausible 30 from 12 balls to a fanciful 22 from six. 

Against Byron, Dan Wilson was the star with the ball, taking 3/6 from his 12 balls, backed up by Vincent’s 2/9. 

Spinners firing it in full and seamers hitting the pitch with variations was the order of the day – after an opening flurry, the batters had no answer.

Northern needed to knock off the runs within seven overs to claim an extra bonus point – thanks to Liam Grey, who clubbed eight sixes in his 15-ball 55, they did it with plenty of time to spare.

It means they will be first or second in Group B overnight, potentially significant with rain forecast for tomorrow. 

Finishing in the top two will give them two bites at the cherry when it comes to reaching the group final on Saturday’s finals day. 

Weather permitting, Northern will face Cyprus’s Al Fatah before the first of a potential three games in a row against defending champions Hornchurch – including their wildcard signing, Formby skipper Ian Cockbain.

“The forecast isn’t good but we’ve put ourselves in the best position we can,” Laker added.

“I enjoyed being out there and it was really good to contribute.”

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Joe Root has set a new benchmark for ‘faintest praise’ in his backing of Jos Buttler

< 1 minute read

Jos Buttler hasn’t always impressed us as England’s white ball captain. But man… this was below the belt.

We don’t habitually read “employee backs his boss” type articles because they don’t tend to be awash with intriguing thoughts that enrich our life. But in this case, the BBC headline sucked us in…

Buttler captaining better than I did at times – Root

We’re not sure whether anyone’s yet devised a metric for faintness of praise, but it would be interesting to see this one quantified. It’s pretty faint. Probably somewhere around ‘pencilled-in by a ghost who subsequently changed their mind and then tried to rub it out’.

Because ‘Buttler captaining better than I did’ isn’t a colossal compliment from someone who began his leadership career with the nickname ‘craptain’ and arguably went downhill from there. To then qualify this with ‘at times’ takes this to another level.

“Buttler captaining better than I did at times” isn’t a direct quote, obviously, and Root did admittedly call him “a brilliant leader” at one point.

Nevertheless, the headline appears to derive from this comment: “I certainly think that this team are doing more things right than maybe some of the teams I captained.”

That’s a great ‘maybe’, introducing an element of doubt about clearance of a bar that is essentially lying flat on the ground.

Are Jos Buttler’s England doing more things right than a Test team that rested its two all-time top wicket-takers from the first Test of an Ashes tour so that they could be preserved for deployment as two-fifths of an attack comprising nothing but right-arm fast-medium bowlers come the second?

The answer to that is ‘maybe’.

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The post Joe Root has set a new benchmark for ‘faintest praise’ in his backing of Jos Buttler first appeared on King Cricket.

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Weekend weak ends at the Champions Trophy

2 minute read

The Champions Trophy doesn’t hang about. Hosts Pakistan are out already. So are Bangladesh. Things don’t look too spanking for England either.

We’ll start with the England game for (a) chronological reasons, (b) because we’re an England focused website, and (c) to get it out of the way.

They reached 200-2 after 30 overs, but then added only another 151 in the final 20. It sounds harsh to say 351 wasn’t good enough, but with England’s more-wicketkeepers-than-bowling-options formation, that’s what it proved to be.

We’re not sure whether Josh Inglis is as widely referred to as “Leeds-born Coventry fan Inglis” in Australia as he is in BBC headlines, but whatever they call him, his unbeaten 120 off 86 balls shone a blinding LED light on all the holes in England’s attack.

Right-arm seamer Brydon Carse has now gone home with a blister. We can’t help but note that in Rehan Ahmed, he’s being replaced by a leg-spinner.

Seven questions that tell us the (somewhat dodgy) state of England’s one-day cricket right now

The Big Match

The start of an India v Pakistan match (and it does seem fair to list India as the home team with Pakistan the ones obliged to travel) is always exciting. It still unavoidably carries that unmistakeable air of being A Big Thing happening live.

But then the match gets underway and are we misremembering or have they pretty much always gone the same way in recent years? Pakistan’s totals always seem too small and they no longer have a bowling attack that can dig them out of such a hole.

And then probably Virat Kohli makes all the runs for India because he’s a lot more desensitised to attention than anyone else.

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The post Weekend weak ends at the Champions Trophy first appeared on King Cricket.

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2. Champions Trophy: D’ya eye these ODIs or did ya already OD on those ODIs?
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European Cricket League: Northern rely on familiar faces for their journey into the unknown

Northern celebrate winning the National T20 Cup

Show me the way to Barcelona (well, Malaga) – the Northern boys are taking over, and the European Cricket League waits for them.

James Cole’s National T20 champions are off to sunny-ish Spain for the fifth ever meeting of some of Europe’s top clubs.

As the first Love Lane Liverpool Competition side ever to win a national title, they are also the first to compete in the relatively new competition.

All the games will be 10 overs a side on the artificial wicket of the Costa Del Sol Cricket Club’s Cartama Oval, with boundaries about 20% shorter than Northern’s Moor Park home. 

And while the format might take a bit of getting used to, Cole is confident that his players have the talent to fly the flag.

He said: “We’re there because we won the national T20 and we want to go and test ourselves against other leading clubs in various countries. 

“It’s a new format and I’d bet a lot of the clubs we’re playing against have played a lot of this format and a lot on astroturf, so they’re probably a bit more prepared than we are. 

“But we’ve got good cricketers and most of them can adapt quickly. 

“You’re not going to change that much with the bowling or fielding, but with the batting you’re going a lot harder at the ball. 

“With smaller boundaries, you’re probably looking at not far off a normal T20 score.”

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Northern’s Group B games take place on Thursday and Friday against Austrian Cricket Tigers, Greek side Byron, Al Fatah from Cyprus and Essex League side Hornchurch, who became England’s first ECL winners last year.

After that, there is a finals day for the top four out of five on Saturday, and the winners go on to the tournament’s championship week from March 17-21, along with the other six group winners.

“We’ll be pretty disappointed if we don’t make finals day, and obviously anything can happen there,” Cole added.

There may be a few familiar faces along the way – Hornchurch have former Ormskirk and Lancashire seamer Gavin Griffiths in their ranks, while Edinburgh’s Grange, in Group C, have ex-Wallasey man Jamie Crawley at the top of the order.

Some of the sides from mainland Europe are based in areas with big Subcontinental populations and boast ex-pros from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India.

Cole has a full-strength squad available, at least for the first stage – Aussie all-rounder Alex Vincent has returned to the club for 2025 and is with the squad heading to Spain.

Jac Kennedy and George Harris have left, but their slots in the top order will be filled by Stephen Lucas, who returns from Ainsdale for his second spell at the club, and Louis Bhabra, recently acquired from Nottinghamshire’s Papplewich and Linby.

The ECL permits clubs to use newly signed players to cover departures or absences. 

But rather than draft in players specially for the tournament, Cole is as far as possible keeping faith with the side who earned their spot in September’s national final against Oundle – and the bowlers who held their nerve in the bowl-out.

He added: “We want to reward the lads who’ve got us there, so if anyone wasn’t available then we’d look to 2nd XI lads. It just seems like the right thing to do. 

“But there will be loads of good cricketers there and we’ll have to play really well to get anything out of it.

“I don’t know what availability looks like if we win the first week, but it’s not too much of a commitment because we’re only going from Wednesday to Sunday, so a lot of the lads have managed to get time off work. 

“We’ll handle the second week if we get that far.”

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So this is Buttler and McCullum’s England first team – more wicketkeepers than bowling options

3 minute read

In these multi-format days of infernal rotation, you don’t often get a good, clear look at a country’s various first teams. But with just three group stage games in the Champions Trophy and an incentive to win at least a couple of them, England have given us a sighter of their first XI in one of Jos Buttler’s favourites formats by naming their team early. It features three wicketkeepers and not quite enough bowlers.

The headline news is that Jamie Smith is at number three. This gives a sense of just how often we see the first team, because Smith has never before batted in that position for England. (The fact he has only batted at three once in his entire 50-over career is however not so surprising given that the best county players don’t actually play the format any more.)

Smith will also relieve Phil Salt of the gloves, after Salt previously relieved Buttler of the gloves. What are these gloves? Why does their absence bring such relief?

That leaves us with this…

England XI v Australia

1. Phil Salt
2. Ben Duckett
3. Jamie Smith (wk)
4. Joe Root
5. Harry Brook
6. Jos Buttler (c)
7. Liam Livingstone
8. Brydon Carse
9. Jofra Archer
10. Adil Rashid
11. Mark Wood

We aren’t going to quibble with Smith’s inclusion. He is a bit of an unknown quantity in the format, having not yet made a fifty, but he is also a man with a track record of perfectly fulfilling his brief, so why not continue asking him to do new things?

We also quite like Buttler’s demotion to number six. We honestly believe the less time Buttler has to bat, the better he plays. He is the greatest late overs one-day batter England have ever had and we feel like in this instance willingness to take on ‘responsibility’ only really diminishes his genius.

We can’t help but notice they’re going with the two-parts Liam Livingstone to one part Joe Root chimera as a fifth bowler though. The problem here is that neither of those ingredients would pass as a frontline bowler and yet together they will be asked to fulfil that role.

Livingstone has 22 wickets in 36 one-day internationals (ODIs) at 40.13 and has conceded just over a run a ball. The low number of wickets is excused by the fact he has only bowled, on average, four overs per game. The economy rate could however presumably be even worse if captains hadn’t generally had the option of hauling him out of the attack.

In this team, when that happens, Root (28 wickets at 45.36 in 174 ODIs at just under a run a ball) will come on. And if he gets wellied, Buttler’s looking at, um, Harry Brook… (We dearly hope Brook gets to do some bowling.)

There is no-one else because everyone else is either a wicketkeeper or Ben Duckett. (Here is Ben Duckett’s first wicket as a professional cricketer. Here is his only other one. If there is one thing we want to see more than Harry Brook bowling in a one-day international, it is Ben Duckett bowling in a one-day international.)

Buttler’s main decision in the field therefore becomes how exactly he shares out the 10 overs between Livingstone and Root. If he’s looking for other ‘options’, we suppose he could always rotate his wicketkeepers.

Seven questions that tell us the (somewhat dodgy) state of England’s one-day cricket right now

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The post So this is Buttler and McCullum’s England first team – more wicketkeepers than bowling options first appeared on King Cricket.

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Cheers! Comp clubs pay a pre-season visit to brewery, bar and kitchen run by sponsor Love Lane

Club representatives on the tour

Members from Liverpool Competition clubs were invited on a pre-season tour of the brewery, bar and kitchen run by sponsor Love Lane.

Rod Grainger, operations director at Love Lane’s owner, TJ Morris Brewing, welcomed about 30 guests to the site in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle.

They heard about the brewery’s plans, including the return of Higsons Pale Ale and Higsons Bitter, and paid a visit to Turncoat Distillery, which makes gin at the site.

And of course, they got to sample a few of the products, as well as some of the food on offer.

TJ Morris – owned by Liverpool-based Home Bargains founder Thomas Morris – rescued Love Lane from administration in 2023 and announced last year it would continue to sponsor the Love Lane Liverpool Competition.

Mr Grainger said: “It is a good fit for a Liverpool-based brewery to support a sporting organisation with over 50 clubs and over 200 teams throughout the Merseyside area and beyond. 

“I look forward to the opportunity to connect with clubs previously trading with Love Lane as well as any new clubs wishing to do so.” 

Liverpool Competition chairman Eddie Shiff said: “I’m delighted with the turnout from our clubs and thank Love Lane for their hospitality and continued support.”

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Pakistan park pointlessly to pass passive powerplay

< 1 minute read

Pakistan have looked back on the 1999 World Cup, when hosts England were famously knocked out before the official tournament song was released, and thought to themselves, “Surely we can improve on that.”

Two balls into the first match of the Champions Trophy, Fakhar Zaman was injured. His subsequent time off the field meant he wasn’t allowed to open when Pakistan made a start on chasing New Zealand’s 320-5. We’re still not sure anyone opened in his place.

After 9.5 overs, Pakistan had trickled their way to 22-1.

Having made 3 off 13 balls, Mohammad Rizwan decided it was finally time to play a shot. For some reason he saw fit to play that shot near Glenn Phillips.

Not a great move. Glenn Phillips has got previous for this kind of thing.

That left the home team 22-2 after the supposed powerplay. Fakhar then came out and looked very injured. With only one more home game and an away trip to Dubai for the India game, their home tournament already looks kind of done.

It’s Pakistan though. There’s always that. Although are we wrong or does it not feel like their innate Pakistannery applies quite so often these days?

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The post Pakistan park pointlessly to pass passive powerplay first appeared on King Cricket.

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England v New Zealand at the Oval in 1999 – a match report

2 minute read

Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.)

Daisy writes…

I had never been to a professional cricket match before. Until then, my entire experience of watching cricket was limited to:

• My dad stopping the car and insisting on watching for a while if he spotted some random cricket on a village green or school playing field we happened to be passing
• More recently, Ged’s attempts to get some charity cricket going with his colleagues and friends

A few days before my first ever day at the Test, Ged moved into my flat for six weeks, while he was having his flat refurbished. Those six weeks became four months, but that’s a different story.

My diary is light on detail about this match. Just the one word, “Oval”, about the cricket match. Lots of notes about a cashmere sale at Fulham Town Hall that I had intended to visit that day.

I made the picnic. Probably, in those days, I cooked some sausages in the morning and wrapped them in foil so they would still be warm for lunch. Nibbles of carrot and baby tomatoes no doubt. Probably sandwiches and biscuits as well.

There was a party atmosphere at that match. We partied like it was 1999 – which, of course, it was.

A couple of events stick in my mind. A young woman, with a group of male friends, were all getting very drunk. Suddenly, the fulsome lass removed her top and ran around the stand topless, to the excitement of many in the crowd, until the stewards encouraged her to cover up and return to her seat.

Ged said: “That’s it, baby. When you’ve got it, flaunt it!” and then had to mollify me by explaining the source of his quote.

We went home by tube. Ged told me that we might well see Bob Willis at the Oval underground station. We did not.

Instead, we saw hundreds of fans who were alternately singing, “Nasser Hussain is having a party, bring some beer and a bottle of Bacardi,” and, “Nasser Hussain is having a party, bring some beers and a packet of charley”. This seemed amusing at first, became tedious after two minutes and went on for at least 20 minutes.

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The post England v New Zealand at the Oval in 1999 – a match report first appeared on King Cricket.

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Seven questions that tell us the (somewhat dodgy) state of England’s one-day cricket right now

5 minute read

Jos Buttler fell back on words like ‘learning’ and ‘unit’ in his latest post-match interview, which is never a good sign. These sorts of clichés are the sign of a man who knows a few things are wrong but doesn’t really want to talk about them right now, thank you very much.

To be fair to Buttler, he didn’t say ‘learning curve’ to mean ‘lesson’ so he’s left himself room for manoeuvre. Clearly he feels that things could get worse – which must be a good thing, right?

The ‘unit’ was a pretty classic one though.

“The learning is the way that we want to play our cricket,” he began, meaninglessly. “The style of cricket we want to play is the right one but we haven’t been able to do it well enough. As players, individually, we need to see what we need to do better to play better as a unit.”

So where do England stand as they head into the Champions Trophy? Let’s paint a picture out of questions…

1. Can anyone play spin?

England were bowled out in all three matches of this one-day international series against India. Ravindra Jadeja took six wickets at 10.16 and conceded 3.21 an over. Axar Patel conceded 4.75 runs an over. Kuldeep Yadav went at 5.15 an over.

To contextualise that, Liam Livingstone was the only England spinner to concede less than a run a ball – and he only barely managed it while taking one wicket for 114 runs.

This comes hot on the heels of shipping 14 wickets to Varun Chakravarthy in 18 overs during the T20 series.

2. Can anyone hang around for, say, an hour?

Not wholly unrelated to the one above, this one. The top four scores of the series were all delivered by India batters. After a year off ODIs, England have brought Joe Root back to provide a bit of glue – but even he’s been more Pritt Stick than Loctite. He did at least manage one innings longer than 70 balls. No-one else did.

3. How many right-arm seam bowlers is the correct number of right-arm seam bowlers?

This will vary from pitch to pitch, but our suspicion is the answer is either (a) ‘one less than England have picked’, or (b) ‘the number that England have picked, but why have they only picked four bowlers’.

4. Should Jos Buttler bat at number five?

Statistically speaking, Buttler’s strongest batting position is number four, where he averages 68.10 from 14 innings and has scored 167.73 runs per hundred balls. Those stats do however mask the fact that much of that is down to 250 unbeaten runs in a couple of innings against the Netherlands in 2022.

As for the other big innings in that position – well, that’s where it gets interesting. These were days where England got off to a flyer and then figured they may as well cut straight to the Buttler sloggery at the fall of the second wicket. In 2015, against Pakistan, 194-2 in the 36th over became 355-5 after our man larruped 116* off 52 balls. His next knock in that spot, against South Africa a few months later, also resulted in a hundred. This one was rather different in that he arrived in the 18th over, but being as England already had 130 on the board by that point, the general feeling was that the pitch that day was looking like a bit of a flatty.

Buttler’s next-best slot, stats-wise, is actually number seven, where he averages 40.08 and scores 117.45 runs per 100 balls. This is because it is essentially the same job: punishing bowlers as much as possible. This is what England’s captain has always done best and, quite honestly, still does best.

Walking out at 77-3, as he did at the start of this series? That’s not his thing and – much as he’s 34 now and captain and wants to take responsibility and all that – it will never really be his thing. By batting at five – in this team of skippy shotmakers, in particular – he is missing the whole point of himself.

5. How many Jos Buttlers do you need in one middle-order?

If that sounds like Buttler should drop down to, say, number six, are we certain that he’d routinely arrive at the right time if that meant coming in after Liam Livingstone? The all-rounder’s only ODI hundred came at number five, so it’s not necessarily the worst option, but he doesn’t feel like what you’d call ‘a banker’.

But in much the same way, how much does Livingstone really benefit from coming in after Buttler. The one time this series he was dropped off at roughly the right place for ‘finishing’ (219-4 in the 39th over), he made 41 off 32 balls and was out in the final over. When he came in at 170-5 in the 33rd over and 154-5 in the 25th, he did nothing.

Buttler and Livingstone seem like two players suited to the same role. But of course that isn’t quite the full story because…

6. Who is England’s second spinner?

Feel free to get AI to mash together an unnerving digital composite face that’s two-parts Livingstone to one part Root. England have just toured India with one spin bowler they’d be willing to pick, plus Rehan Ahmed on work experience – and the latter isn’t in the Champions Trophy squad.

The problem with Livingstone is that he is most of a bowler without quite being a full one, and he’s not trusted to bat higher than number six when England already have one of those (which then pushes Buttler up a spot).

As a top five batter, Livingstone’s bowling would become a handy extra option. As a genuine fifth bowler, his batting would add depth to the order. But England don’t seem to trust him to do either of those things. They pick him for neither batting nor bowling yet ask him to do both. Depending who else is selected, that leaves the team short of either top order batting or frontline bowling and means other people have to fill awkward gaps with whatever they find in their pockets.

7. Is Buttler going to be stripped of the captaincy?

It’s easy to shrug at the Champions Trophy, but this is a thing that could happen in the next fortnight. If England’s tournament turns into a debacle, it’ll be three crap tournaments on the bounce for Buttler and with only three matches in the group stages, it wouldn’t take much for a debacle to unfold.

In July, we suggested that Buttler should become England’s white ball coach on the basis that it would probably accelerate his deposal. That’s no longer necessary because if England balls-up another tournament, he becomes the common thread of up-ballsery linking three successive failures.

Conversely… it might all work out. England didn’t play much 50-over cricket last year and playing India in India will tend to highlight rust. Maybe things aren’t so bad. The whole Champions Trophy is only five matches long and England have some players, so a surprise hot streak wouldn’t even have to last that long.

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The post Seven questions that tell us the (somewhat dodgy) state of England’s one-day cricket right now first appeared on King Cricket.

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Are we crazy or is McCullum shaping an old-fashioned and outright bad England ODI bowling attack?

3 minute read

Either Brendon McCullum’s ahead of the curve on this one, or he’s found a brand new road to a very familiar destination. England have moved quite some way from one of Eoin Morgan’s central principles when it comes to putting together a one-day international (ODI) bowling attack.

“Pace just adds that little bit of uncomfortableness for the opposition, and allows the chance to potentially blow teams away and get on top,” said Brendon McCullum at the start of this white ball tour of India. “We’ll be looking to try and take wickets, and having that extra little bit of pace helps.”

Does it?

Eoin Morgan wanted a diverse bowling attack. He wanted fast bowlers, left-armers and all kinds of spin. He wanted options. Interesting options. Distinct options.

McCullum just picked an ODI attack with four right-arm quicks in it.

The other guys

Once upon a time, England made 481-6 against Australia. Not unreasonably, no-one paid too much attention to the bowlers in the team that day.

England played a fast right-armer, a left-arm swing bowler, an off-spinner, a leg-spinner and a Liam Plunkett (calling him a right-arm seamer doesn’t seem to do justice to Plunkett’s relentlessly armpit-focused old ball modus operandi).

That is a diverse bowling attack. Realistically, no matter how flat the pitch, you can most likely defend 481 no matter who you pick, but this attack was representative of those times and the ever-changing rhythms from those bowlers saw Australia bowled out for 239.

If the batters of that era were Samuel L Jackson and the Rock, causing eye-catching carnage and leaping off buildings, the bowlers were hot-tempered peacock Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell with his wooden gun. In their own weird way, they got a lot done.

Evolution

We’re told that white ball cricket evolves rapidly, but has it evolved to a point where it’s a good idea to wade into a 50-over game in India with Saqib Mahmood, Gus Atkinson, Mark Wood and Jamie Overton, which is what happened earlier this week?

If that’s the case, it feels rather like we’ve reached the futuristic year of 2008, when England went into the first match of an India ODI tour with an attack built around James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Andrew Flintoff and Steve Harmison. They conceded 387-5 that day and then lost the next four games as well, before the Mumbai attacks saw the last two matches cancelled.

“Pace just adds that little bit of uncomfortableness” says McCullum – but you feel pace most keenly when it contrasts with something.

And honestly, how fast are most of those guys anyway? Wood is beyond slippery, but Atkinson, Mahmood and Overton? They’re faster than some, and each has some degree of potential to be faster than most on a good day. But on a bad day? On a hot day in Cuttack? We imagine once Wood’s got the adrenaline flowing, India’s batters don’t feel that much “uncomfortableness”.

The game before, England had gone with Mahmood, Jofra Archer and Brydon Carse. Only three right-arm seamers on that occasion, but only really because they played fewer frontline bowlers. Rashid was, of course, in the team, but the fifth bowler was Frankensteined together out of Jacob Bethell’s medium-pace, Joe Root’s off-spin and whatever Liam Livingstone happened to be purveying that day.

If that’s the future, it feels a bit ‘Samit Patel and Paul Collingwood with a few overs from Kevin Pietersen’.

Back to the future

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads; we need green, nibbly, seaming wickets or hard tracks offering plenty of bounce. Except where we’re going for the Champions Trophy is Lahore.

Neverthless, if McCullum’s calculations are correct, when England hit 88mph, you’re going to see some serious shit.

• But will Brendon McCullum get a literal new hat?
• Eoin Morgan – the captain who ignored everyone and gave England ambition

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The post Are we crazy or is McCullum shaping an old-fashioned and outright bad England ODI bowling attack? first appeared on King Cricket.

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Champions Trophy: D’ya eye these ODIs or did ya already OD on those ODIs?

3 minute read

“I’ve always enjoyed 50-over cricket,” said Jos Buttler this week. “It’s always been one of my favourite formats.” Really, Jos? You don’t say. One of your favourites? Would it make your top three?

Speaking of third-bests, the Champions Trophy looms, well, not large exactly, given its status as very much the bronze medallist out of the three regular international tournaments. It looms medium-sized. It looms ignorably, if you were feeling unkind.

History does however suggest that it can be a fun thing. We still rather like the middle format when the time and place is right. It’s where you get overlap. It’s the place where the stars of the other two formats meet.

Is the Champions Trophy the right time and place though? Kinda. We’d argue it showcases the one-day international at its second-best. Unlike the T20 World Cup – which comes around so often that you can legitimately write a preview of the next one if you for some reason don’t fancy covering the final of the current one – the 50-over World Cup is still only once ever four years. This means that the Champions Trophy, while not quite the real thing, can serve as a half-decent Methadone.

England’s three group stage games – against Australia, Afghanistan and South Africa – will take place in Lahore, so the 50-over leg of their current India tour represents decently-relevant preparation, all things considered.

Preparation for the preparation

England have lost today and there’s a good chance that’ll hold true even if you don’t read this article until Sunday. England don’t win one-day series in India too often. The Guardian’s Taha Hashim reports the last such result came 40 years ago.

They didn’t win the T20 series either, going down 4-1. How relevant is that? Well, the lengthening of format has meant just one meaningful change for England: Joe Root is now in the squad. He made 19 off 31 balls today, but we wouldn’t bank on him continuing to play so ineffectually. Joe tends to work things out.

India have had a bit more staff turnover. Out goes Abhishek Sharma, who made 79 off 34 balls in the first T20 and 135 off 54 balls in the last one. So too Tilak Varma who made an unbeaten 72 off 55 balls in the second match.

They are replaced by the legends: Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli.

Rohit continued his stellar recent form today, making 2 off 7 balls, having made 3 and 28 when he turned out for Mumbai last week for the first time in 10 years. Kohli missed the game with a knee injury after scoring six whole runs in his first appearance for Delhi for 12 years.

Shubman Gill also missed the T20s. He made 87.

Ravindra Jadeja, who’s retired from T20s, took 3-26.

Champions Trophy prospects

India can improve.

England can certainly improve.

It’s worth mentioning here that while the Champions Trophy is, on paper, the first global tournament to be hosted by Pakistan in 28 years, India will in fact be playing all their games in Dubai. And if (and only if) India make the final, that’ll be in Dubai too.

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The post Champions Trophy: D’ya eye these ODIs or did ya already OD on those ODIs? first appeared on King Cricket.

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The Hundred sales: What do these billionaires honestly hope to get out of their investment?

7 minute read

Hundreds of millions of pounds are being spent on 49% stakes in tinpot teams that play a niche format of cricket watched by hardly anyone in the host country. Everyone seems to have an opinion on this, but if there’s one group of people we’d like to hear from, it’s those distant, wordless investors themselves.

Remember millionaires? Back in our youth, a millionaire was worth remarking on, but now there are literally millions of millionaires in the UK alone. These days you’re not properly, remarkably rich until you’re a member of The Three Comma Club. And before too long we’ll be facing the grim prospect of the world’s first trillionaire.

Back in 2016 when the Hundred was first mooted as a “city-based T20 competition” we spoke to our cricket-sceptic friend Prince Prefab about it.

Pondering what such a project might mean, he suggested that it seemed like the first step towards “footballising” cricket. “So yes, it would probably bring in a new audience, but is it an audience you want?” he asked.

Audience-wise, that assessment now seems wide of the mark. Prince Prefab’s belief that, “the wankers would get interested,” wasn’t entirely incorrect though because the billionaire/wanker Venn diagram has massive overlap.

And that’s where we are, as of this week.

“Control”

We’ve not really reported on The Hundred sales too much before now because the whole thing is opaque and abstract and not entirely cheering.

To quickly bring you up to speed: Only minority stakes in each team are being sold by the ECB. The competition itself is not up for grabs – the ECB will retain ownership of that.

As far as we can make out, that positions the governing body as arbiter in a future dispute should tensions later emerge between billionaire investors and county members. We imagine that’ll be quite a straightforward thing to manage, because if there’s one thing the wider world has shown us in recent times, it’s that administrators are more than a match for frustrated billionaires who are keen to get their own way.

Throw in the fact that some of the franchises will in fact be majority owned by private investors, if either (a) host counties sell any of their stake, or (b) said counties are already owned by private investors, and you can see that we’ve now arrived at what is euphemistically described as a new “landscape” in domestic cricket in this country.

The investors

Billionaires are almost without exception terrible people. There, we’ve said it. It’s out there now. We can all stop pretending they’re just like the rest of us because they definitely aren’t.

Sure, you get the odd one who’s merely a complete weirdo, but they really are the exceptions that prove the rule.

One of our favourite niche categories of news story at the minute is “Sir Jim Ratcliffe penny pinching at Manchester United.”

You wouldn’t think this would be an especially well populated news strand, but oh Lord yes it is. INEOS head honcho Jim has pissed away millions in terrible decisions – chiefly by handing out hugely remunerative contracts to coaching staff he later sacks – but what we find endlessly amusing is the unfailing meanness he then displays when attempting to claw back the merest fractions of his losses. No more donations to the charity that supports former players. £40 M&S vouchers instead of a £100 Christmas bonus. No more matchday lunchboxes for agency staff.

Awfulness is what creates a billionaire. It’s what fuels them. You don’t find the drive to become that wealthy through being a fundamentally balanced human being. Billionaires are either psychologically unsound or progeny of the psychologically unsound with all the woeful characteristics both nature and nurture might then confer.

So what do these people want?

As the above section perhaps illustrates, we’re by no means averse to thinking the worst of billionaires, but we’re not entirely swayed by this argument that investment in the Hundred is obviously some financial masterplan and that they’ll therefore demand change to ensure a return.

Now they may very well demand changes, but more likely for the simple reason that they’re pampered, isolated freaks who are accustomed to always getting their own way.

Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Liew makes the point that the Ambani family, who’ve invested in Oval Invincibles, have so much money that their £61m investment is honestly next to nothing to them. It’s hard to get a handle on this when you get into the millions and billions, but if you want to get a sense of it, just knock six noughts off. Imagine they’re worth £240,000 and they’ve invested £61.

Are the Ambanis looking to make their fortunes with their £61 investment? No, they’re not. There is no means by which investment in Oval Invincibles can ever meaningfully shift the dial on their wealth. Even if they quadruple their investment and sell in five years’ time, it’s not going to warrant the effort.

So what do they want?

Having watched the Netflix IPL documentary about their team, the Mumbai Indians, we’d say the answer is ‘a plaything’ and more specifically, a plaything through which they can impose and sustain an excruciatingly awkward corporate culture.

Why? Because they’re billionaires! They’re mental! They’re utterly detached from human life and have long since lost any awareness of how insane they are (if they ever even had any to begin with).

Watch Nita Ambani give a speech to her team. Does Nita Ambani know how boring and uncomfortable she’s being when she drones on and on about what Mumbai Indians means to her when she does that? No, she does not.

There is a lot of team-building in that documentary. There are a lot of speeches. Nita often talks about the franchise’s legacy, and what it stands for, and how they’re all a family. These speeches are not borne of some masterplan to win the IPL, or somehow generate enough revenue to buy Saturn or some other gas giant. This is something she wants to do.

Nita Ambani wants people to care about her thing and she has zero idea how to make people actually, genuinely care because why would she? Most things she wants, she just pays for.

There’s no stellar wisdom here. You can see with your own two eyes that Nita blithely glides through life with no-one telling her, “Seriously, that’s enough. Wrap it up now.” And so she just carries on. And on. And on.

Liew thinks the Hundred investment is largely a product of, “the idea of buying a cool thing simply because you could,” and while we’re sure each investor has their own motivations, there’s got to be at least a thin seam of that running through it for most of them. This seems likely because – regardless of how it turns out in the end – investing in 49% of a Hundred franchise doesn’t at this minute scream ‘cash cow’.

Unless, of course, they’ve got some of their fibre optic cables crossed. We were amused by a Lalit Modi comment on Twitter the other day, aimed at the consortium of US tech billionaires who’ve invested in London Spirit.

“I hope they realise they are paying 295 million for the lords team and NOT ACTUALLY FOR #lords cricket ground.”

Surely that couldn’t happen… could it?

Welcome to the world of tomorrow

Having written about cricket for near enough 20 years, the line that most struck a chord with us from that Liew article was his observation that, “English cricket has had 150 years to create a sustainable business model for itself, and basically failed.”

It is such a great sport, with such potential, but the inaccessibility of county cricket has only mushroomed like the wealth of a billionaire in our time covering it. Competitions and formats have multiplied. (You can add to the English cricket season but you can never take away, as we always say.) Prospective new fans have unavoidably been repelled by all the barriers and confusion they face.

Back in 1890, it was suggested that county cricket be divided into first, second and third classes with eight teams in each. Even at this remove, that seems a coherent plan – a simpler system than we have now.

But county cricket has never encountered a plan it couldn’t massively complicate or reject. On this occasion, none other than WG Grace later reported that, “The scheme of classification did not give general satisfaction, and a newspaper warfare was kept up for some time afterwards.”

That culture has persisted ever since.

Which leaves us here: county cap in hand, begging for handouts from the billionaires.

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How did Mumbai Indians celebrate their IPL win?

The post The Hundred sales: What do these billionaires honestly hope to get out of their investment? first appeared on King Cricket.

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