Matt Renshaw has been very difficult to ignore this week, whereas Jack Leach apparently remains incredibly easy to overlook.

We went to a Test match in Kandy once (Sri Lanka v West Indies if you’re wondering) and a Sky cameraman came into the stand and filmed us from about a metre away for what felt like 50,000 years.

At no point did he utter a single word to us. He didn’t, for example, ask, “Would it be weird if I filmed you watching cricket for what will feel like 50,000 years?”

To this we would have answered, “Well, it would be considerably less weird than filming us anyway from a distance of one metre WITHOUT EVER ONCE SPEAKING TO US.”

As for why he filmed us, it’s fair to say we did stick out a bit at Asgiriya that day. Casting an eye around the stands, it was clear our visual appearance was very, very different. This was because we do not look like an empty plastic seat.

Say what you like about attendances, but the empty plastic seats still turn out for most matches and they were treated to far more entertainment than they would have expected in Durban this week. This was because the first Test between South Africa and Australia made the unusual, old-fashioned move of carrying on until day five.

Bad light was perhaps a bigger contributor to that outcome than the two teams’ batters though, because only two players managed to pass 50 in the entire match.

The second half-centurion was Aiden Markram, who batted six pointless hours for 75, trying and failing to save a Test that was lost when Temba Bavuma had neglected to make any effort to prevent Matt Renshaw taking singles for the best part of a day, earlier in the match.

Renshaw finished that first innings with 190. He then made 82 in the second innings.

We have long felt that Renshaw was easily worth a place in Australia’s misfiring batting order, but we haven’t liked to mention it in case someone noticed and actually picked him. We are not here to encourage Australia to pick the correct players.

That particular machiavellian ploy has been rather ruined by this performance. The genie can’t be put back in the bottle. (This is a terrible idiom, by the way. One of the Arabian Nights stories is literally about a fisherman tricking a genie into going back into a bottle. It’s not even that hard. He basically just goads him into it.)

On the plus side, this does mean we can again write freely about Matt Renshaw without having to subcontract all referencing to people who are attempting to pass him off as little-known. If you’re wondering why this is such a positive development, it is because we get to point you all to a series of articles we have written about the time Renshaw had to retire hurt because of the wild shits. (Steve Smith does not emerge well from those tales.)

Speaking of involuntary expulsions, it sounds like Jack Leach is very much out. Asked about the spinner’s prospects on Wisden Cricket Weekly, national selector Marcus North said England were, “focusing on a slightly different direction,” for the foreseeable future.

Bit sad. We’ve always had a lot of time for Leach – although being as he’s not Australian, at least we’ve been able to say as much.

Raise your glasses: Jack Leach’s three silliest innings

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It was one of cricket’s biggest ever headlines – one we’ll never forget – and it was the product of a story that was first born on Australia’s last Test tour of South Africa. Much has been said and done in the years since, but it’s worth remembering that if it weren’t for that whole sandpaper thing we’d never have been treated to “Disgraced Smith a sad sight drinking alone in New York”.

What a time! What a media frenzy! What a headline!

We loved it so much that we felt moved to pick it apart and learn its complex workings so that we could then create The Steve Smith Headline Generator.

Back once again, with the ill behaviour 

Like a nettled child reluctant to grasp a nettle, Australia’s Test team has been reluctant to return to South Africa until now. This could be a good series. It could be a poor one. Either way, it should prove colourful. 

If nothing else, these are England’s two biggest Test opponents in the next 12 months, so it’s interesting to see how they’ll go about things. Reacquainting ourself with South Africa, in particular, they are not really shaping up how we were expecting. 

Actually, the batting is – at least on whatever the digital equivalent of paper is. The names may change, but South Africa has always done a line in stolid, meat and potatoes batters with weighty first-class records. 

The bowling though? When you think of South Africa v Australia Test cricket, it immediately conjures images of two groups of fast bowlers trying to out fast bowler each other in the firm belief that success will win them the title Most Fast Bowlerest Country In The World. 

And for the first Test? You go extra hard, don’t you? South Africa have brought back Anrich Nortje for seemingly just that purpose. He’s even brought facial hair that wouldn’t look out of place in the Gem Saloon (serious language and violence if you follow that link) so that he really looks the part.

But South Africa have also picked two spinners.

Two of them! Two!

That number again: Two!

This is not the way. The resultant fast bowling shortfall has resulted in Wiaan Mulder – an accurate medium-pace all-rounder best known for declaring on himself when he was near Brian Lara’s record Test score – opening the bowling. He did it well. We don’t know what to make of that either.

Long Boi

Australia are more familiar and we’re reassured to see they’re still engaging in shenanigans with their opening batters.

Today’s instalment in this seemingly endless saga involved bringing Nic Maddinson back for his first Test since 2016.

Maddinson hasn’t actually played any first-class cricket since March 2025. He lasted almost an hour, which wouldn’t have been too disastrous had he scored even a single run in that time.

Meanwhile, holding things together further down the order like a bit of tape (perhaps one garnished with “some granules from rough patches on the wicket“) was Matt Renshaw, who Australia quite sensibly seem to have started picking again.

Sundries

In the spirit of getting to know these teams ahead of their clashes with England, Ged Ladd has submitted what he bills as a “pre first look” at five less-well-known Aussie cricketers to watch out for in the coming months. Renshaw (somewhat inexplicably, given this is the 40th time he’s played for Australia) features among them.

Ged told us that the list of players was compiled by “Boe Blong Pete” ahead of “another Ashes visit to England by Aussie Pete and his family“. Ged duly investigated each of them, but rather than delivering the kind of deep dive that none of us would have time for, he has instead taken a far, far shallower one. This involved carrying out the kind of very light googling¹ that we also do not have time for.

In the spirit of the contribution, we have not checked one single detail² of what is published below.

1. Or if not googling then yahooing, duckduckgoing, or ecosiary – we don’t know what Ged uses. Perhaps it should have been binging in this instance, in honour of little-known Aussie speedster, Brett “Binga” Lee. ︎
2. Actually, we couldn’t help but notice he’d spelt Cooper Connolly’s second name two different ways. We deduced at least one of them must be wrong, so we corrected that. Nothing else though. ︎

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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.)

Tim writes…

Much has been written about the difficulties that scheduling cricket in September imposes on the players, and on the integrity of the various competitions that have their finale in the month. But about the suffering of the September spectators there has been barely a word. Until now.

When neighbour Steve and I set off to cycle the couple of miles to Headingley to watch Yorkshire versus Essex, the day promised to be one of patchy sunshine with only the possibility of rain in the final session to dampen our spirits.

Nevertheless, I put a thermal T-shirt on underneath my normal attire, and put my winter hill walking jacket in my pannier just in case.

As we settled into seats in the upper tier of the North East Stand, I was glad I had. Our elevated position at long off/fine leg offered a great view of the action, but put us right in the path of a stiff chill wind. Mind you, it did help display the flags of the rival teams to great advantage.

Earlier we had passed the pleasingly low key security bag check, and locked up our bikes on what must be the best bike parking in Headingley. For £18, you can leave your bike under cover all day with security guards patrolling, and you get a free cricket match to watch if you fancy it.

The ground was far from full, of course, but still I estimated a good 600+ folk had braved the leaden skies on a Thursday. Naturally, many were clearly retired. I wasn’t sure whether as a 50-something I felt young in this company, or disconcertingly at home.

What I definitely felt was envious of the many who had brought a hat; even more envious of the couple with a blanket.

Talk soon turned to food, and Steve proved his foresight by producing a box of homemade cake. He also had a flask of hot coffee – anything stronger being off the menu given the temperature (although glühwein would’ve been good).

A little while later, we decided we didn’t need to wait for the official lunch time to have ours and tucked into our sandwiches in the hope they might provide fuel to warm us up – mine a cheddar and homemade refried beans in white bread combination.

A pleasant chap in the row in front told us that, in his opinion, Grace Road has the best food on the county circuit, but that Headingley was still okay. However, not being members we were unable to enter the pavilion to verify this, and with the Pimm’s kiosk closed for some reason (did I mention it was freezing?), we opted instead to leave the ground during lunchtime.

40 minutes was plenty of time to go record shopping at the excellent Vinyl Whistle, and buy some veggie samosas from the corner shop opposite the Kirkstall Lane gates. These provided some tasty spice heat, but no actual warmth. 

Before play resumed, there was just time to visit the gents, charmingly unmodernised, where many patrons expressed their relief at being able to warm up their hands in the hot water in the sinks. 

Hoped for sunshine in the afternoon mostly failed to materialise, apart from for a few, brief, blissful moments. At one point, a large red kite floated across the ground, but there was not much left of the Essex batting line up for it to pick over – and thankfully we in the stands looked lively enough to keep it at bay. Perhaps it was all the violent shivering. 

We talked about working on farms around the world, the eating habits of teenagers, and various membership ticket prices with another friendly fellow fan – also a striking result in a local junior 20-over match, where one team had scored 270 and then bowled the opposition out for 6; a contest even more one-sided than the one in front of us.

Then we were able to go home early before the rain arrived, thanks to the effort and skill of George Hill and particularly Kuldeep Yadav. 

All in all a very enjoyable day out, and we’ll be back – but probably not before it turns warm in May.

Mark Wood’s international career was defined by his total commitment to probably the most important idea in cricket; a mad idea that even its firmest disciples eventually turn away from because the risk-reward ratio of pursuing it is so unfavourable. It’s a very simple idea. It’s the idea that there is a speed at which a cricket ball can be bowled above which the batter simply cannot hit it.

We suspect we’re misremembering the following reference a little, but it’s a misremembrance that’s likely more useful to us than the truth, so we’ll leave the finer details uninvestigated. 

In one of the early episodes of Netflix’s Mumbai Indians documentary, Cricket Fever, an interviewer asks New Zealander Mitchell McClenaghan whether he feels he might have sacrificed his body a little to sustain his career as a quick bowler. And McClenaghan just sort of laughs, like it’s the most redundant question anyone has ever asked; like the interviewer has asked him whether he eats food, drinks water and has a head on top of his neck.

Of course he’s sacrificed his body. It’s ruined. That’s a central pillar of the job. You have to be willing to do things that damage your body. You must then continue to do them, even when you can feel the damage, and do them again and again, right up until the point you need surgery. After that, you will endure whatever rehab is prescribed so that you can start the cycle again.

Most fast bowlers lose their appetite for this insanity sooner or later. History suggests you can do 95% of the job bowling at 90% of the pace and that this will probably bring only 50% of the injuries. 

Mark Wood never accepted this equation. He fought like hell to get fit for what proved to be his final Test match, the first Ashes Test in Perth, but still went into it with knee and hamstring problems. He said with hindsight he was “nowhere near ready” for that game and yet he still bowled at 93mph.

It was that very last, hardest-to-deliver 5% of being a quick bowler that was always Wood’s primary focus. Why? Because while there are plenty of occasions when bowling quicker doesn’t achieve a damn thing, every now and again, it really matters. And when that happens, those extra few miles per hour become the most exciting thing in the game.

Australia were 2-0 up and 27-1 when Wood first came on to bowl in the 2023 Ashes in the third Test at Headingley – and the one wicket that had fallen was David Warner to Stuart Broad in the first over, so it wasn’t even a real wicket.

Marnus Labuschagne hadn’t been in the form of his life, but Usman Khawaja was going okay. He had in fact forgotten that cricketers aren’t obliged to be on the field for the entire duration of a Test match and had already racked up 20 hours of batting since the start of the series.

It was early in the match, but the backdrop of the series meant the general vibe was that England were up against it.

Labuschagne faced Wood’s first three overs. 

“Go back a yard, Jonny,” said Michael Atherton on commentary, even before the first ball. It was 91mph.

Wood’s second ball was 93mph.

Have you felt a cricket ball recently? If you’ve got one nearby, go and remind yourself what one feels like. Throw it from hand to hand a few times.

Even gently looped just a foot into the air, a cricket ball lands in your hand with a thud. You’ll feel the impact on the padding at the base of your fingers, even though your hand reflexively gives a little as you catch it. 

Now throw the ball a metre in the air and will yourself to keep your hand absolutely rock still as you catch it. It smarts a little, doesn’t it? We did this two minutes ago and we can still feel the exact spot where it landed.

Now imagine how that same impact would feel on your thigh or your forearm bone.

You see where we’re going with this, don’t you? Cricket balls are heavy and hard enough that there is essentially nothing you can do with one that won’t hurt you at least a little.

Wood’s third ball to Labuschagne was 95mph. 

And so it continued. His second over went 93mph, 95mph, 96mph, 95mph, 94mph, 92mph after Ollie Robinson had bowled his 79mph nude nuts the over in between. 

Wood’s third over began 94mph, 95mph, 94mph, before a ludicrous bouncer that went for four byes. Had Robert Wadlow – at 2.72m, the tallest man in recorded history – been the wicketkeeper instead of Jonny Bairstow, there is an outside chance those runs could have been prevented. But probably not.

Midway through the following over, bowled by Chris Woakes, Khawaja did a very silly thing indeed: he scored a run. Perhaps taken aback by this benevolence, Labuschagne failed to summon the motivation to continue rotating the strike and played out three dot balls.

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We live in a world of highlights packages, but the great thing about a truly great fast bowling spell is the way our sense of it builds. Wood bowled frighteningly quickly from his very first ball that day in Leeds and he was basically at top speed by his third. Yet that isn’t really a clear measure of how we all experienced it.

No matter how many people attend a day’s play, the live audience at any given moment is unavoidably only a percentage of that. That’s the nature of Test cricket. It’s a long day. People dip in and out. 

Sometimes you’re caught up in a conversation and you miss a ball or the captain spends an eternity moving fielders and you start rummaging in your bag and don’t realise the bowler’s finally started running in. People wander off to queue for a beer or a coffee or to discharge the biological consequences of having done so earlier.

Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes the (in)action simply cannot command people’s attention.

Fast bowlers have an advantage here. When one comes on, it’s an obvious cue to start paying attention. Watch footage of Wood’s spell and you can detect that distinctive engaged murmur while he’s waiting to bowl his first ball. It’ll still only have been a percentage of the total crowd though and that sound is hope, not expectation.

With every subsequent delivery, Wood not only drew more people in, he changed how they felt too. He built tension. The greater the tension, the greater the eventual release.

A wicket out of nowhere is a cold water shock, but that’s not the only way of having an impact on people. Emotional reactions are often sharper and more extreme when your nervous system’s already running hot. 

If you think of films, it’s the difference between a jump-scare out of nowhere and one delivered after a long, slow build of anxiety. Anton Chigurh driving off in No Country For Old Men is a puzzling but calm scene until it very suddenly isn’t, whereas the climax to the diner scene in Mulholland Drive would barely make a dent on you if it weren’t for the protracted, creeping dread that drags you towards it.

For 23 balls, Mark Wood drew people in and set the scene. There was above average engagement for his first ball and audible chatter each time the speed gun readout went up another 1mph, but it was probably the final ball of that first over that meaningfully opened the collective cortisol taps. 

That’s when the effect on the batter became a little more obvious. The bounce was just that little bit steeper than Labuschagne was expecting and he both looked and sounded uncomfortable. 

“Sheesh!” he said, and it was the kind of “Sheesh!” that’s about more than just that one delivery. ‘Sheesh that was fast. Sheesh that bounced more than I expected. Sheesh I could be in trouble here.’

It was the “Sheesh!” of someone trying not to think about how heavy and hard a cricket ball is.

By Wood’s ninth ball, some of the crowd started doing that roaring crescendo thing as he ran in; the one that’s normally reserved for hat-trick balls. They hadn’t been doing that in the first over.

In the third over, the ball that went over Bairstow for four byes hit the boundary advertising with a proper bang and blacked out a chunk of the digital display. If you get an audible sense of how hard the cricket is from some extras then something pretty serious is taking place.

By the fourth over, when Khawaja finally came on strike, the clock was ticking though, and this brought another element of tension to proceedings. If there wasn’t a wicket soon, all of this might have been for nothing. Bowling at 95mph doesn’t come without a physical cost. Vanishingly few people are even capable of it and even they can only do it for so long.

Facing the third ball of that over, Khawaja ducked, took his eyes off the ball, but got away with it. Wood’s pace was still high. This was very definitely still fast bowling.

The sixth ball was the last before the drinks break though and most likely the end of Wood’s spell. After all this rising tension, everything was on this. One final chance, everyone watching, everyone on edge.

Only one type of dismissal is entirely satisfactory in this situation. No-one wants the haltingly disrupted catharsis of an LBW appeal that’s upheld following a review. You don’t even want to have to follow the ball through the air to a fielder. You want a wicket that’s instant and obvious and unequivocal.

You want a wicket like this:

This is how you do fast bowling. Not merely so uncommonly quick that people simply have to watch because they don’t know when they might see this kind of thing again, but also for long enough that you raise adrenaline levels to the very tops of everyone’s psychological flood defences.

And then you finish things off. You do this by providing evidence to support that simple, childlike idea that’s always driven you; the one that has sustained your entire career through all those injuries and comebacks…

Yes, there is a speed at which a cricket ball can be bowled above which the batter simply cannot hit it.

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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.)

Sam Blackledge writes…

Kitted out in helmets, gloves and protective clothing, the team worked in partnerships throughout the day. Laying foundations, building a platform, guarding studiously against any risk of sudden collapse.

A nudge here; a bunt there; every so often a more forceful ‘thwack’, the sound echoing sharply across the gloomy Birmingham skyline.

The new four-star hotel being erected on Edgbaston’s eastern boundary certainly added a dystopian quality to the chilly late September air.

Meanwhile, down below the cinder blocks and scaffolding – and a giant crane poised to pick up the tiny flannelled fielders one by one and deposit them into the River Rea – another cricket season was drawing to a close.

I left home at 7am on day two, arriving at the ground shortly after the start of play, determined to soak up every minute.

The match itself was something of a serviceable squib – no rain interruptions, a couple for bad light – but it will nevertheless live long in the memory.

In particular, day three dawned bright and sunny and once the on-field action was complete, we stood basking in sunlit glory, holding up our mobile phones, straining to get a grainy video of Oliver Hannon-Dalby kissing a little golden cup somewhere in the distance.

Supporters were permitted to join the celebrations by perambulating on the outfield. One keen fan had come dressed as Scooby Doo, which was of course much more ridiculous than an entire Hollies Stand full of fancy dress.

As the festivities continued, the Edgbaston faithful didn’t know whether to sing ‘Warwickshire La La La’; ‘You Bears’; or ‘Campiones, Campiones, Ole, Ole, Ole.’ In the end, they settled for a combination of all three.

By this time, the workers on the building site had packed up and gone home. I wondered if they were seeking out a shorter form of the game, perhaps one with flame throwers, pitchside DJs and coloured clothing to match their own hi-vis uniforms.

The hotel is set to be up and running by this time next year. I look forward to booking a room to see the Bears retain their title, undisturbed by so many clangs, bangs and giant swooping cranes.

England are still playing home internationals and fast bowlers we love are retiring, but we’ll get to those things later. (Well, we’ll get to the second one.) For this week at least, let’s cast our gaze on the final round of matches in the 2026 County Championship, because even though it’s almost October, we still don’t have a winner.

For a while there, it looked like we were going to get a real, three-way, ding-dong, nail-biter of a finish to the County Championship. (Should that be ding-dong-ding? Ding-dong-dang? Ding-dong-dung?) Unfortunately, Somerset and Nottinghamshire slightly knackered-up that prospect by losing last week.

It might still happen though. It’s just a little less likely because Warwickshire start the final round with a sufficient buffer that upcoming coverage of the tussle is likely to be defined by not inconsiderable use of words like ‘mathematically’ and ‘technically’.

This is how things stand before the first pitch inspection:

If you want to derive meaning from that, we’d probably also better tell you that teams get at least 16 points for a win and up to 24 points should they snaffle full bonifications. (It’s eight points for a draw.)

Two significant factors clearly affect point scoring here.

1. Who each contender is playing against
2. The fact it’s autumn

It’s not merely meteorological autumn either. It’s full-on astronomical autumn because these matches begin after the equinox. Even if it’s sunny and warm by day, it’ll be a much shorter span of sunshine and warmth than in high summer.

To be more specific, Warwickshire are playing Leicestershire at home at Edgbaston, where the hours of daylight will drop below 12 halfway through the match. Birmingham gets almost 17 hours of daylight in late June. Even if the sun weren’t also massively higher and hotter at that time of year, this amounts to a lot less pitch drying time.

These things matter. Things could get nibblesome. We’ve seen some seriously low scores in the Championship this month. There is a good reason why cricket is a summer game.

As far as opponents go, Leicestershire aren’t the strongest and only technically/mathematically have something to play for. Even if they manage to score 20 points more than Essex, they’d still need their appeal against a 27-point pitch penalty to be upheld to avoid relegation. Warwickshire therefore have the edge in both ability and motivation.

Somerset have of course never won the County Championship. At some point, it would be nice if they did – if only for their continuing out-of-step commitment to spin bowling over recent years. They host Surrey, who have generally struggled to either win or lose games this season, although they’ve been twice as successful at delivering the latter.

Nottinghamshire host Yorkshire, who we honestly cannot get a handle on at the minute. Their only successful batters this season walk out at numbers seven and eight. It can work though. That’s precisely how they beat Somerset last week.

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.)

Ged Ladd writes…

Our Heavy Rollers group has sat in either the Priory or Raglan Stand at every Edgbaston Test since the previous millennium. When I tried to book there for the 2026 Test, the system drew a blank. We were to be homeless. I booked excellent seats in the South Stand instead.

At the same time, July 2025, I also booked a seemingly excellent apartment in Moseley for me and Daisy. In September 2026, fewer than 24 hours before we set off for Brum, AirBnB informed me that our booking had been cancelled. Total dumpster fire.

By good fortune, in the nick of time, I found a place we’d stayed in before – not ideal for picnic-istas, but well located.

Day Zero: Dinner with Nigel Father Barry

Over dinner the night before the Test, when I told Nigel Father Barry our late cancellation story, he sympathetically said that such stress could make anyone turn to drink.

Day 1: Picnic hell and art heaven

Making the picnic in an ill-designed and barely equipped kitchen is not a job for wimps, yet I mustered smoked salmon bagels, flame grilled chicken and mayo brioche rolls, strawberries and veggie options for Harsha.

Daisy loves graffiti art and there is now plenty of it around Edgbaston.

My picnic worries were exacerbated by the concern, for reasons too cricket to explain, that I might only need to provision picnic for one more day, but might need to do so for two more days. I forged a Plan A and a Plan B in my mind.

HARSHA: Don’t you use a spreadsheet for planning and implementing the picnics?

GED: No.

Day 2: Our party complete but rain also to compete

We were joined by Neophyte Gazza, a first-timer for our group. He asked one of the stewards to photograph us all. Edgbaston stewards are almost universally friendly and helpful.

Following the precautionary principle, I persevered with the most perishable food for the Day 2 picnic, so that no food would be wasted if there was no Day 3 picnic. Hence smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels, strawberries, then chicken, avocado and hot honey sandwiches. Harsha had falafel and hummus instead of the salmon, then feta instead of chicken.

When the rain came, the others rushed away, while Daisy and I sheltered until the rain stopped. Wise locals (and Pakistan fans) did similarly.

Day 3: How might we celebrate the end of our trip?

When we arrived on Day 3, I ran into Bamm-Bamm Rubble and Pebbles Flintstone, clearly lost at the back of the South Stand.

I directed them to the Eric Hollies. Later we saw them, together with a battery of other Flintstones, on the march.

Our former home, the Priory and Raglan Stands, will from next season be a hotel and the Dennis Amiss Stand. Nothing amiss about that naming – Dennis was one of my childhood heroes.

The construction workers were hard at it that Friday afternoon.

I too had been hard at it early that morning. Pickled herring bagels (feta cheese and hummus for Harsha), grapes, then cheddar cheese with spicy tomato chutney brioche rolls for all. “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” as Marie Antoinette almost certainly didn’t say.

We didn’t lose our heads, but we were heady with the joy that Test cricket with friends brings. Edgbaston also looked rapturous.

Daisy and I were the only ones staying over on Friday evening. After the others had gone, I suggested that we might continue celebrating our successful event, deep into the night.

GED: Let’s go out on the razz.

DAISY: Nah, I think we’ve had enough Raz today.

Daisy was right. We went back to our emergency AirBnB for a much needed early night.

Just to let you know, we have recently done everything we can to remove the content of this website from the various AI models. If you’d like to know why, please read on. Let’s see whether we manage to crowbar a cricket reference in somewhere to make it worth your while.

To be clear, we have no particular issue with AI technology as a concept – it can be useful for some stuff. It’s more the fact that as a business, it’s slowly strangling independent web publishers and using their own time and work as the garrotte. (Jeez, at least source your own murder weapon, you overfunded clowns!)

We don’t especially mean small sites like this one when we say that. We’re talking more about the medium and larger ones with full time staff – although we’re impacted too.

Web traffic is down, for everyone. People are increasingly getting all the information they want from Google’s AI Overviews or via follow-up questions within the same system. Either that or they’re going to ChatGPT or Claude and doing much the same thing over there.

If you’re a person who finds out stuff and writes about it, those are your main competitors these days. Competition is fine – there’s always been competition – but it isn’t currently fair competition. That’s because AI content is currently colossally subsidised to the extent it is entirely free of charge for most end users.

It is pretty hard to compete with that. (Entirely free! Bargain!)

How are AI firms able to offer this level of subsidisation?

Two ways:

1. Excited “investors” who have been funding all the necessary tech infrastructure and running costs
2. By not paying for their most important raw materials (information)

For those that don’t know the mechanics underpinning the large language models that are being passed off as “AI”, they’re essentially steal-and-summarise engines. Rather than trawling the web, finding relevant information and pointing the user towards it, they instead collate what they’ve found and smoosh it up into a single ‘answer’ so that the user doesn’t have to go anywhere else.

Sometimes there’s only really one decent source out there, in which case that collation aspect becomes redundant. In those circumstances, AI takes the carefully researched words of the one person who knows about that thing and it parrots them to the user. (It might also show them a link to indicate where the information originally came from, but there is literally no reason to click it.)

AI companies don’t pay anything for this information. Not really. There are a few agreements with major publications and they’ve paid a little to license some music and books, but by and large they just take whatever’s out there on the web without charge.

This has resulted in the mad situation where a journalist can spend their working life testing products and writing impartial reviews, only for Google to reproduce all of those findings in its own little box. This allows it to take all of the advertising revenue from people ‘consuming’ that content there instead of where it originated.

Even then, that mindblowingly infuriating situation wouldn’t be half as galling if the AI Overview box weren’t still massively unprofitable due to the almost unimaginable costs of the energy and infrastructure that the technology requires. You’re literally stealing your most important resource and you still can’t turn a profit!? Hot damn!

Business time

If you ask us, a business that is still running at a colossal loss when it’s gained/stolen all of its raw materials basically for free ain’t really a viable business.

No doubt that’ll prove the case one day. Either that or the true costs will be passed on to the users – at which point AI might not seem such an entirely free and bargainous source of information all of a sudden.

That’s all great and the true magic of capitalism and all that, but in the meantime these services remain artificially buoyed competitors who are sinking independent publishers daily because independent publishers are in the quaint, old-fashioned position of being obliged to bring in as much money as they spend. (Ideally more, but let’s not lose our heads to pie in the sky fanciful ambitions here.)

For fairly obvious reasons, King Cricket can’t do anything about the obscene and unjustifiable levels of AI funding we’re seeing at the minute. We can however make an attempt to deny large language models free access to a very small volume of raw materials. We have therefore withdrawn our content from Google Search’s Generative AI features. (You’re obliged to actively opt out, obviously. You’re included by default.) We’ve also done what we can to block other AI crawler bots, although we’re sure they’ve some workaround for that.

We know a few of our readers run websites or similar and if you do, we’d encourage you to do the same thing. You won’t lose any traffic. No-one’s clicking any of those AI Overview links and you know it. If the quality of an AI result for a given query is sufficiently eroded by lack of source data, you may even gain a click. (One extra click! Hurray! Dine out on it!) You get what we’re saying here though: giving your competition full access and use of your work isn’t going to help you thrive.

If you’re still waiting for that sly cricket reference, well, sorry to disappoint. We apologise that more thought could have been put into something you read. (If you sign up for our email, no doubt there’ll be some more cricket references along soon.)

In the absence of advertising, it’s our priceless regular readers who fund King Cricket via our Patreon campaign. If you’re in that category – and given all the above, it’s odds-on you are these days – then please take a look at it.

All hail the Pakistani dice of change. A match-winning roll was vanishingly unlikely but one die did at least turn up a Razaullah which means the basic concept of the Pakistan Test team can just about limp on. For that, at least, we are grateful.

This isn’t a sustainable way to go about things. We all know that. The fact there’s even a chance it might work still qualifies as good news though because when we first saw the Pakistan squad for this summer, we got the distinct impression that there were simply no good numbers left on the dice.

That was the depressing thing. Pakistan have frequently been bad, but there’s generally been thin justification for some mad hope to cling to and that has kept many Test matches interesting long after they’d ordinarily have been written off as foregone conclusions. This was the first squad we’d seen where there wasn’t even anywhere to hang your mad hope.

But then, two Tests in, Pakistan reached for the Dice of Change, dispatching seven players and a couple of coaches and rolling for some replacements. It was a sad, desperate, crazy, self-destructive move which also brought with it just the faintest sliver of mad hope.

A lot of dice were airborne. Maybe one of them would land favourably?

Set against this was the quite rational fear that you simply can’t keep doing this. You just can’t. Pakistan’s talent burn rate is now so ferocious that a player like 23-year-old Naseem Shah is spoken about as if is best days are long since over, while 26-year-old Shaheen Afridi is tearfully lamented as if he’s on the cusp of retirement.

Shah was 16 when he made his Test debut and fast bowling careers only seem to have shortened since. When you’ve hit that level of churn, there are simply no younger generations left to turn to.

But while the ‘picking-random-youngsters-nobody’s-heard-of’ pool can only be far shallower, it seems it isn’t yet entirely dry. Razaullah had played eight first-class games before his call-up. We have no idea how he came to be selected.

Every ball of his first over was faster than any Pakistan bowler had managed all series and one of them dismissed Joe Root.

This alone was incredibly silly, but the match then largely continued as the rest of the series had, with England ambling towards a facile victory.

Pakistan were still eight runs behind when Razaullah came out to bat at nine in the second innings. The match was over.

Nine sixes later, it wasn’t over.

When two wickets fell in the first over of England’s pursuit of 130, an old, almost forgotten sensation unexpectedly welled up.

“Hmm, this is starting to get a bit… Wait! I remember this! We’re being Pakistanned here, aren’t we!? They’ve flicked the switch and they’re Pakistanning us!”

They weren’t, as it turned out – but it was an adrenal shot to feel even the possibility there for a short while. This is what Test cricket delivers best: unexpected corners. We’ve not had many of those recently.

With quite breath-takingly cruel timing, Sky had shown a documentary about Shoaib Akhtar midway through the first Test, when the medium-pacers had been chugging away. (We can all see what’s missing, Sky! You don’t need to literally broadcast a full documentary about the very embodiment of it.)

Please tell us the secret of managing the very difficult emotions that arise when watching the Pakistan bowling attack against England

After the third Test, we’d recovered just the faintest whiff of that sort of thing. Razaullah’s Test debut therefore keeps the idea of the Pakistan Test cricket team alive. For now. Not healthy, but alive… technically. At this point, we’ll settle for that.

So while we previewed the series with the grim news that Pakistan didn’t even have a means of being unexpectedly brilliant any more, we are reassured that those days aren’t yet definitively over.

These aberrations don’t change the direction of travel though. Pakistan’s is a cricket culture that has an enviable ability to generate the rarest and most glistening attributes and that is unfortunately allied to a professional cricket system that is peerless at then sanding them off.

As we wrote the other week when lamenting the lack of fast bowlers, it’s almost as if the national board has put together a high friction talent funnel so it can mismanage more efficiently. Exciting players go in; worse ones come out.

‘A fast bowler, you say? But what have you got to offer if we break you and in so doing brake you? How good are you then? What we’re really looking for here are players who can perform when shorn of the very qualities that make them special.’

Good luck, Razaullah. At least we’ll always have your debut.

Edgbaston has a load of “Send money to Pakistan” adverts on the boundary boards for this Test match. At this point in the tour, it’s easy to read that as some kind of charity fundraiser.

Why would anyone shoot fish in a barrel? What’s the point? Save your ammo.

Shooting fish in a barrel is the kind of over the top, right-wing American thing someone like Pete Hegseth would do to showcase his lethality/masculinity – entirely oblivious to the fact it demonstrates the exact opposite.

You want a fish? Just grab one. Even easier: tip the barrel over.

There are so many better options than guns. Ollie Robinson strikes us as a harpoon man – just a few accurate jabs and he’ll get his fish. At least we assume that’s how he went about things because the piscine death toll climbed so rapidly this morning we never actually had time to commit the early executions to memory.

Whatever Robinson did, he must have extracted plenty of liquid as well, because by the time Josh Tongue was bowling after the drinks break it seemed like the barrel contained more fish than water. It was hard to miss.

The only fish batter to emerge in credit was Saud Shakeel, who top scored with 43 after the top five had all failed to reach double figures.

Mohammad Abbas – who has never once hit a 50 in over 300 professional appearances – was the second highest scorer with 21. We assume he was inspired by being entrusted with the lofty number 10 slot.

The bottom step of what we like to term the top scorers podium was occupied by number nine, Razaullah – a man who at that point had as many Test appearances to his name as names to his Test appearances (which is to say ‘one’).

Based on that alone, we imagined further names and Test appearances would follow and indeed, by the evening session, he was already being referred to as ‘Razaullah Khan’. Uplifted by this rapid expansion in nomenclature, he took it upon himself to bowl at least 10mph faster than any other Pakistan bowler all series.

Hush, child! The Pakistani dice of change are airborne!