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Now Harry Brook’s started innovating in the field of pterodactyl wrangling as well

2 minute read

England T20 captain Harry Brook simply cannot do anything normally. If it isn’t batting, it’s pre-match hydration, and if it isn’t pre-match hydration, it’s pterodactyl wrangling.

We’ve previously reported on Babar Azam’s hugely impressive competence as a pterodactyl wrangler.

Here he is beckoning one down while Moeen Ali watches the beast descend.

Look how calm Babar is – almost detached. Note how calm Moeen is also: a clear indication of his complete confidence in Babar’s ability.

Most feel the Pakistani has mastered all the necessary skills for this respected but niche pursuit. Just witness this demonstration of ‘the claw’ technique and tell us he couldn’t have turned pro.

It always seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do. But here comes Harry Brook to do things differently once again.

We’d always assumed that the central premise of pterodactyl wrangling was to coax the creature down and ‘land’ it on the turf.

That’s the whole point, right? That’s what it’s all about? Everybody knows that. You’d have to be embarrassingly ignorant to be unaware that wrangling is all about getting a pterodactyl from A to B and that A is the air and B is the ground.

It therefore never once crossed our mind that while executing a descent, a wrangler might see fit to extend his arm as an inviting perch, like a falconer.

No gauntlet or anything. Think of the talons! Madness.

As ever, Brook has elicited contrasting emotions with this innovation. Mike Atherton is clearly amused by his ambition, while Mitchell Santner looks tense and concerned at how events might unfold.

Richie Richardson’s response is the easiest to interpret however. If ever a look said, “Just what do you think you’re doing?” it’s this one.

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It’s NRR time… but NRR isn’t as fun in a T20 tournament because there’s so little scope for nrrdling

2 minute read

We adore nrrdling (the hugely unambitious art of batting to make defeat slightly less awful because it improves your chances of going through to the next stage of the tournament should your team finish level on points with another). It’s not really a thing in T20 though. Due to the constricted nature of the format, the way you bat to make defeat slightly less awful is pretty much exactly the way you’d bat when still actively trying to win. There’s nothing to enjoy in that.

A really good nrrdle – something like Marnus Labuschagne’s 46 off 74 balls in the 2023 50-over World Cup – is utterly detached from the supposed goal of a side batting second, which is trying to score enough runs to actually win. That’s the thrill of the endeavour: watching a professional sportsperson conduct themselves in such a way that they seem wholly unaware of their central purpose.

The whole point of playing international sport is trying to win. To watch someone perform in a way where they are actively making victory less likely with every nrrdled single therefore provides a 1.21 gigawatt bolt of electric wrong-headed contradiction.

We love it. Seeing an international sports team with a perfectly legitimate reason to aim so low just makes our heart sing. Feel the thrill!

As such, we were momentarily uplifted to learn that there is a net run rate (NRR) situation brewing in Group 1 of the Super 8s phase of this T20 World Cup. India got hammered by South Africa and their NRR is not good and now there is a chance they’ll finish level on points with someone. Huzzah!

But then we thought about NRR scenarios a bit and it is actually vanishingly unlikely that we’ll get a situation where a batter is looking to take singles to preserve or improve his team’s NRR. It just doesn’t work like that in this format. Totals are smaller, innings are shorter. By the time defeat is inevitable, you’ve generally only got a handful of balls left to play with, so you may as well try to hit them for four or six anyway.

We must now finish with an apology: we have somehow never once seen Revenge of the Nerds. Given Robert Carradine’s death earlier this week, this article is positively crying out for a Revenge of the Nrrds reference. Perhaps someone could contribute something appropriate in the comments section.

(We’re pretty sure you’re not meant to have favourite lines within the obituaries of people who’ve just killed themselves, but if it were acceptable, we’d go with The Guardian’s, “Carradine spent time undercover at the University of Arizona convincing real students he was an actual nerd.”)

The post It’s NRR time… but NRR isn’t as fun in a T20 tournament because there’s so little scope for nrrdling first appeared on King Cricket.

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Log it in your online calendar: It’s less than a week until Abhishek Sharma v Brian Bennett in the Super 8s

2 minute read

Excuse us looking so far ahead – they’ve each got another match to play before India v Zimbabwe on Thursday – but we’ve been sucked in by the wildly diverging fortunes of Abhishek Sharma and Brian Bennett so far this tournament. We can’t wait to see what happens when they play in the same game. Things cannot carry on like this, you suspect.

For those that don’t know, India’s Abhishek Sharma is currently top of the men’s T20 batting rankings. Coming out at the top of the order, he charges, slices and carves and just generally hits a great many straight and off-side sixes. He tonked 135 off 54 balls against England this time last year.

But so far this tournament, Sharma has made a duck against the USA, a duck against Pakistan and a duck against the Netherlands. In his most effective performance so far, he missed the game against Namibia due to the wild shits. He notched a couple more ducks against New Zealand in the series just before this tournament too.

He also made a duck on his debut, against Zimbabwe in 2024, when he was dismissed by Brian Bennett in the opening over. This was slightly weird because Bennett isn’t a bowler. He has only taken six wickets in 55 T20Is.

Like Sharma, Bennett is chiefly an opening batter. Unlike Sharma, he has had no interest in getting out at this T20 World Cup. So far he has made 48 not out, 64 not out and 63 not out.

It is very weird for an opening batter to finish not out in a T20 game and very, very, very weird to do so three games in a row. Bennett’s scoring rate hasn’t been electric. He doesn’t come across as the most ambitious strokemaker and is yet to hit a six. It is however worth noting that Zimbabwe have won every time.

This could change. The Chevrons – for that is what they are called – play the similarly unbeaten West Indies on Monday, so Bennett may actually be dismissed before he gets the chance to increase the contrast between his own returns and Sharma’s flock. Meanwhile, the India opener will get a fourth opportunity to get off the mark before then, against South Africa on Sunday – bowels permitting.

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How Australia’s T20 World Cup one-downmanship culminated in a Bernie Lomax of a performance

2 minute read

It ended as world tournament exits so often do: with a day of drizzle in a game they weren’t even playing. England sacked their coach after losing in the semi finals of the last T20 World Cup. Australia failed to make it that far in either of the previous two editions and this time they’ve gone one worse by being knocked out in the group stages. The big dead rubber against Oman is on Friday. We can’t wait to see how they go.

How did this happen?

The boilover against Zimbabwe stands out as the ‘upset’ but Australia’s loss to Sri Lanka is the one we can’t help but marvel at. We’re not sure we’ve seen such total commitment to self destruction since we read the instructions on how to commit seppuku with a frisbee on the Real Ultimate Power website in the early 2000s. (Step 1: Get a frisbee from the store or friend. Step 2: Clean the frisbee…)

To recap, Australia were 104-0 off 8.2 overs, batting first – a period during which Sri Lanka also lost their best bowler to a hamstring injury after he’d only bowled four balls. You need to lose pretty much every single subsequent moment to cede a T20 match from that position and that seems doubly unlikely when you’ve won pretty much every single moment up until that point. But that is nevertheless what Australia achieved. Quite the feat. It’s a game of four quarters, as no-one ever says.

This is of course not something a team can achieve on its own. Sri Lanka deserve huge credit for what took place in Pallekele. At the same time… this is not something a team can achieve on its own. Australia more than did their bit.

It takes two to tango, apparently, but this was no tango. This was one partner doing backflips and one-handed chair flare while the other just flops about like the titular character from Weekend at Bernie’s having invited Marcus Stoinis to open the bowling for the second match in a row.

The post How Australia’s T20 World Cup one-downmanship culminated in a Bernie Lomax of a performance first appeared on King Cricket.

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Zimbabwe have blown Australia’s lid off again

2 minute read

Australia were whitewashed in Pakistan going into this tournament and earlier in the week lost their captain to internal testicular bleeding. Defeat to Zimbabwe could therefore plausibly still rank as being ‘on the up’.

Today’s result moves Australia’s T20 World Cup record against Zimbabwe along to ‘played two, lost two’. In the previous match, in 2007, they were bowled out for 138, so 146 all out again smacks of progress.

Throw in the fact that the team back then featured both Matthew Hayden AND Brad Haddin and it’s hard to argue that great strides aren’t being made here.

If you’re wondering how Cricket Australia’s official website reported on the result, they’ve gone with the obvious headline of “Boilover!“

The main body of the article reports that, “Zimbabwe have edged Australia in a stunning T20 World Cup boilover in Colombo.”

Australian sporting slang is a source of endless joy for us. We’ve been reading Australian sports reporting for about 20 years now and we can’t recall a previous ‘boilover’. We’ve no idea how it’s passed us by, but we feel huge confidence that we’ll now encounter it roughly once a week until the day we die.

For what it’s worth, we regularly suffer boilovers ourself as when we leave a pan simmering with the lid ajar, it always seems to jiggle its way back into position, at which point the internal heat rises and the pan boils over. As far as we can tell, there are a great many online ‘hacks’ to prevent a pan boiling over, but pretty much all of them seem to involve not using the lid in the first place.

Australia have greatly minimised the number of Zimbabwe boilovers they can suffer through the simple tactic of largely avoiding ever playing them. Perhaps we can all learn from that. Maybe we should do without a pan lid.

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Watch out! Rahmanullah Gurbaz has discovered a new angle

3 minute read

Afghanistan’s Rahmanullah Gurbaz was already more than a match for most bowlers back when he tried to scythe every single delivery through point for four. Recent evidence suggests he’s consulted his protractor and supplemented that angle with a couple more. Further explorations in geometry could get very messy indeed for his opponents.

Way, way back in the Scotch mists of time – barely discernible now that so many other world tournaments have been and gone to wash more ancient memories away – Rahmanullah Gurbaz made 80 off 57 balls against England to secure a supposedly memorable victory for his team at the 2023 World Cup.

Rahmanullah Gurbaz has a point to make and a point boundary to pepper

On that occasion, England’s bowlers belatedly worked out that if you bowl outside off stump to Gurbaz with fewer than seven point fielders, he’ll unfailingly carve you for four. So they started bouncing him. And he responded by hooking them for six.

Clamping down on an apparent strength can backfire if the batter is so good that what appeared a strength is in fact no such thing. We’re starting to wonder whether having Rahmanullah Gurbaz carve you through point for four is actually the least bad option.

His first scoring shot against South Africa was a four through the covers. A short while later, he hit upon the idea of hitting a little straighter and considerably higher.

As he made his way to 84 off 42 balls, this became his most important shot, supplemented by the fallback option of hitting a six over third if the ball was shorter.

Just as he had against England, Gurbaz was peppering the off side boundary – but on this occasion with the very conspicuous exception of point.

Not only that, but cast your eye to the other half of the field and this is a very weird T20 wagon wheel with only one shot at even faint risk of clipping a cow grazing in its designated corner.

Afghanistan’s coach, Jonathan Trott, top-scored for England in the infamous 2009 defeat at Centurion when Graeme Smith and Loots Bosman went full bovine (Smith was eventually caught at long on, Bosman at deep midwicket) – maybe he’s inculcated in his charges a strong aversion to that quadrant.

Gurbaz wasn’t finished anyway. Rather unusually for a T20 game, he actually played three innings against South Africa.

After scoring a single off the only ball he faced in the first Super Over, our man walked out for the third and final time with Afghanistan needing the small matter of four sixes off four balls in the second Super Over.

Implausibly, he hit three in a row, before – even more incredibly – leaving the fourth delivery.

He didn’t leave it for no reason, of course, and it was duly called a wide. What would this madman do with the crucial extra delivery?

He sliced it straight to a fielder… at point.

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Feel The Thrill: Highlights and lowlights of the official song of the Men’s T20 World Cup 2026

4 minute read

We’ve loved official World Cup theme songs ever since Who Rules The World in 1992. Rock hasn’t come much softer and theme songs haven’t come much more naff. We suspect it’ll never be beaten. If you’re wondering how the 2026 T20 World Cup’s Feel The Thrill by Anirudh Ravichander measures up, well, it’s better than you’d think – at least when measured by the correct metrics.

Let’s frame this.

In 1971, England recorded The Ashes Song to celebrate their victory Down Under.

Just marvel at its “this’ll do” lyrics.

When we arrived people said
The Aussies would leave us for dead
But we knew we would prove them wrong
And that’s why we’re singing this song
Oh! The feeling is great
For losing is something we hate

The Ashes Song very much set the lyrical bar for all subsequent cricket songs and thankfully it is a bar no-one has felt much inclined to raise in the many years since.

This is the kind of stuff we’re after here from our latest entry in this rich and prestigious lineage. Over to you, Feel The Thrill. (The English bits anyway. We are, alas, not qualified to comment on the Hindi.)

“This is our year”

That’s the first line of the song. It’s almost certainly a wonderfully banal opening, but you could, if you were feeling very generous, instead take it as a covert dig at the incredible frequency of ICC world events.

If it wasn’t your year for the world cups in 2021 (T20), 2022 (T20), 2023 (50-over) or 2024 (T20), and the 2025 Champions Trophy didn’t bring you any joy either… maybe 2026 is your year!

Failing that, there’s always 2027 (50-over).

The laziest rhyming this side of Fly Away by Lenny Kravitz

Lenny’s not on his own with this one, but he does earn a lot of points for getting pop music’s lamest rhymes in right at the very start of Fly Away (which is also a terrible song title).

“I wish that I could fly, into the sky, so very high,” sings Len, inconsequentially. After a momentary lull to allow the majesty of those words sink in with you, he follows them with a terrible lyric that is all his own: “Just like a dragonfly.”

Anirudh has also gone for a sky/high rhyme. We’re pretty sure his effort goes, “Dreams on backs with the best held high. One more ball and we touch the sky.”

You’ll note the reference to a ball there. That’s right! We’ve struck gold!

It’s…

Lyrics that explicitly (and awkwardly) reference specific aspects of cricket

Official World Cup songs want to be cool, but official World Cup songs also quite often want to make reference to cricket. Those twin desires simply cannot be accommodated.

Ordinarily, the former wins out and all cricket specifics are omitted in favour of abstract vibes-based triumphalism. Say lots of stuff about believing in yourself and triumphing against the odds and people can take that as being about the Netherlands beating England in that incredible final over in 2009 if they want to.

It’s an easy get-out. You can plausibly claim you’ve fulfilled your cricket song remit, yet you haven’t undermined your track by saying ‘googly’ or ‘Mitch Marsh’.

However, on this occasion Anirudh has quite admirably gone the other way. He mentions bats and pads and all sorts. Crucially, he does all this without putting in any lyrical effort whatsoever.

This is probably our favourite bit.

Eyes on the World Cup
Hands in the air
Born for this moment 
T20 vibes everywhere

It’s not quite up there with the bit in Who Rules The World where the fella literally just lists each of the nations who took part in the 1992 World Cup, but it’s unarguably cut from similar cloth – specifically, the ‘let’s just say a few cricket things’ cloth.

Chris Woakes gets a look-in

One of the great things about using footage of previous World Cups in your cool video is that it’s that bit harder to keep everything on brand. There’s always an interloper or two.

It’s only the briefest moment, but it’s nice to see Chris Woakes dropped in there among all the sunglasses and fireworks. It’s slightly offputting that he looks like he’s just about to punch a small child, but fortunately it’s Chris Woakes, so you know that fear is unjustified. (Imagine if he did though! Entire world shaken.)

Phoning it in

Footage of songs (supposedly) being recorded is a music video staple because it’s exciting to see the very genesis of an artistic work.

This is somewhat undermined when the footage in question depicts the vocalist reading the lyrics from his phone for the recording.

Nothing says ‘knocked these out in five minutes while I was taking a dump this morning’ better than lyrics so vapid you didn’t even bother committing them to memory.

In summary

Feel The Thrill by Anirudh Ravichander is a classic of the oeuvre. 9/10

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What shall we do with the drunken captain of the HMS McCullum? Chuck him in the long boat ’til he’s sober? Or just leave him alone to pursue a T20 World Cup win?

3 minute read

We’re inclined to agree with Brendon McCullum that it’s “quite annoying” there’s currently so much focus on the night Harry Brook got chinned by a bouncer. We would however disagree with his assessment that it’s all about the specific players involved and that, “piling on to them is not helpful for anyone.”

We don’t doubt that there’s hand-wringing in the usual places – hand-wringers gonna wring hands – but who’s piling on exactly? To our eyes, the focus is not on the players, but on McCullum and other higher-ups at the ECB, no?

Because ‘young sportsman has wild night out’ isn’t really much of a story, in all honesty. ‘Young England captain has wild night out on the eve of a game against backdrop of wider concerns the head coach might be running a bit of a loose ship’ has more of a hook.

Those concerns don’t need to be 100% legitimate, but they do need to have at least a faint air of truth about them for the story to stick.

Loose ship

"Small or big - take your pick. It doesn't have to be legit. It's gotta be a loose ship. It's gotta be a loose ship."

For what it’s worth, McCullum takes issue with the perceived looseness of his ship. He says it’s a “misconception”.

We’d agree that while there’s certainly evidence some players have drunk too much a couple of times during his three and a half year tenure, we haven’t exactly been washed away by a tsunami of piss-ups. But that’s the other reason the ‘quite annoying’ focus on the Brook thing persists – because the ECB clearly tried to keep this one quiet. In which case, WHAT ELSE ARE THEY HIDING?

This is perhaps the crux of it. If you’re the one who hid something and it then came out, but you know you aren’t hiding anything else, then constantly being asked “What else are you hiding!?” is probably ‘quite annoying’.

At the same time, from the opposite vantage point – where a thing that was hidden subsequently came to light – it’s perfectly natural to wonder if there might be a second, third and fourth thing you haven’t been told about. It’s then ‘quite annoying’ when the people who tried to conceal Thing 1 get all stroppy and demand that you move on.

Of course none of this clears up what should be done with our drunken sailor above and beyond the £30,000 fine he’s already been given.

Hoo-ray and up she rises!

It has to be said that as drunken sailors go, right now Harry Brook is performing perfectly acceptably. We don’t feel any burning desire to rage against the ECB’s decision to deal with him by inviting him to captain England in a T20 World Cup. What else could they do? Put him in the scuppers with a hosepipe on him? Drag him by the leg in a running bowline? Who even knows what those things mean?

Somehow, despite a perception that England’s red and white ball teams are both starting to fall apart under McCullum, the T20 one has in fact won 10 of its last 11 games.

It’s become quite an interesting team too.

Where the Test XI has tightened to right-arm fast-medium monotony, the short format strategy has become a looser fit. Run your finger down the team’s top wicket-takers of the last 12 months (like a literacy-challenged simpleton) and the bowling types progress as follows:

Leg-spin
Slow left-arm
Left-arm fast-medium
Slow left-arm
Left-arm medium
Off spin
Right-arm fast

Lovely stuff. A veritable household of misfits; a team that has won after making 304 for 2 and also when defending 128-9.

It’s a fickle format, of course, and cricket’s sole superpower is in prime form and on home turf for the tournament ahead, which begs the question what is England’s strong recent record actually worth?

Maybe not so much – but it’s better than a taste of the bosun’s rope-end, isn’t it?

Did you see… Harry Brook’s first ball in Melbourne? Unquestionably the 2025/26 Ashes’ finest moment

The post What shall we do with the drunken captain of the HMS McCullum? Chuck him in the long boat ’til he’s sober? Or just leave him alone to pursue a T20 World Cup win? first appeared on King Cricket.

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A Device-like cricket-style bat in a Mexican corrido music video

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.

Stalwart King Cricket contributor Ged Ladd writes…

Regular readers of this website will be familiar with “The Device,” a beer-carrying contraption that King Cricket and family have used at cricket matches for decades.

Such regular readers might also have seen contributions from people like me, who have spotted cricket bats adapted for device purposes – in my case adorning a bar in Sissinghurst.

In 2025 Sam made a gold standard spotting of this kind – an adapted cricket bat in use as a device at a cricket match.

Yet, there is another King Cricket theme – cricket bats in unusual places, which has been running since 2009.

I have made several contributions to that oeuvre, including, in 2024, spotting a cricket bat in a Pigbag video.

That discovery made me surprisingly happy, given my age and stage in life.

But I am now able to set a new gold standard. For I have spotted a device-adapted cricket bat, most incongruously, in a Mexican corrido music video: El Belicón by Peso Pluma.

If you are able to take your eyes and mind away from the offensive weaponry and glamour models that also adorn the video, you will see Peso Pluma wielding the device at around the 12 second mark, and the 40 second mark, and then again a few more times during the video.

I asked Google Gemini (other AI assistants are available) to explain the device with holes wielded by Peso Puma in that video. It replied, with conviction, that the device is a güiro, which is a percussion instrument much used in Central America. This plausible-sounding theory breaks down somewhat when you look at pictures of güiros, none of which look even faintly like the cricket-bat-like device being wielded by Peso Pluma.

Plausible ideas as to why Peso Pluma is wielding a cricket bat device in this music video would be much appreciated. The hive mind of King Cricket readers can surely do better than Gemini.

Sign up for the King Cricket email for the next exciting instalment of Cricket Bats (And Other Cricket Things) In Unusual Places.

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cricket avaxus

Friday, February 27, 2026

Now Harry Brook’s started innovating in the field of pterodactyl wrangling as well

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

It’s NRR time… but NRR isn’t as fun in a T20 tournament because there’s so little scope for nrrdling

Friday, February 20, 2026

Log it in your online calendar: It’s less than a week until Abhishek Sharma v Brian Bennett in the Super 8s

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

How Australia’s T20 World Cup one-downmanship culminated in a Bernie Lomax of a performance

Friday, February 13, 2026

Zimbabwe have blown Australia’s lid off again

Thursday, February 12, 2026

Watch out! Rahmanullah Gurbaz has discovered a new angle

Rahmanullah Gurbaz has a point to make and a point boundary to pepper

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

Feel The Thrill: Highlights and lowlights of the official song of the Men’s T20 World Cup 2026

“This is our year”

The laziest rhyming this side of Fly Away by Lenny Kravitz

Lyrics that explicitly (and awkwardly) reference specific aspects of cricket

Chris Woakes gets a look-in

Phoning it in

In summary

Thursday, February 5, 2026

What shall we do with the drunken captain of the HMS McCullum? Chuck him in the long boat ’til he’s sober? Or just leave him alone to pursue a T20 World Cup win?

Loose ship

Hoo-ray and up she rises!

Did you see… Harry Brook’s first ball in Melbourne? Unquestionably the 2025/26 Ashes’ finest moment

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

A Device-like cricket-style bat in a Mexican corrido music video

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