Graham Gooch’s 333 against India at Lord’s in 1990 was the first eye-wateringly big innings we can remember. The idea that one guy could score that many runs on his own in a Test match recalibrated what we thought was possible. There have only really been a handful of oversized surprises from England batsmen since then.

England batsmen have made 24 double hundreds since Gooch’s triple. None was predictable, but some were more likely than others.

Let’s talk surprises and let’s do it with reference to the Sopranos. (So maybe skip to the next subheading if you’re 20 years behind with your TV viewing.)

A lot of people get killed in The Sopranos. That doesn’t really qualify as a spoiler, but if we can now refer to something that perhaps is, the death of Richie Aprile was a bit of a shock.

It was not a surprise that Aprile was killed, because a large proportion of the second series was devoted to setting him up as a problem. His death was a surprise because of who killed him: Janice – seemingly out of nowhere. You just didn’t realise she had it in her. (It is hard to think of a better two seconds of television than Richie’s smug contempt immediately followed by the look of surprise as his chair keels over backwards.)

This is the kind of impact we’re looking for.

To bring this back to cricket, Alastair Cook, Jonathan Trott and Kevin Pietersen double hundreds weren’t generally that surprising. Because of who they were and how they played, you knew these players were capable of such feats. Joe Root is another batsman who is so good that passing 200 doesn’t often seem newsworthy.

Now that isn’t to say that these guys couldn’t surprise you. It just means they were operating with a bit of a handicap. They had to have it large in a more unlikely context to truly take your breath away.

Okay we can start now.

These have been the eight most surprising England double hundreds since Gooch’s triple…

Nasser Hussain 207 v Australia, Edgbaston 1997

Those who have listened to the first episode of The Ridiculous Ashes – the podcast we do with Dan Liebke – will already know our feelings about this particular innings.

This was the situation: England had lost every single Ashes in the 90s, Australia had just been rolled for 118 and England were now 50-3. At this point, Nasser Hussain and Graham Thorpe put on a 288-run partnership.

What was especially remarkable about this one was that it somehow remained surprising long after it had happened. Is it possible to repeatedly feel surprised about something you know full well has actually happened? Apparently it is.

Hussain’s second-highest Test score was 155 and England batsmen didn’t make another double hundred until the next one on our list, five years later. England also continued to get thrashed in Ashes series for quite a few years afterwards.

All of this meant that every time they flashed up Hussain’s highest score in a TV graphic and highlighted the fact that it was made in an Ashes Test, we’d all have to try and come to terms with the reality of it all over again.

Even now, getting on for 25 years later, it is a hard one to wrap your head around.

Graham Thorpe 200* v New Zealand, Christchurch 2002

This Graham Thorpe innings is often overlooked because it wasn’t even close to being the most remarkable double hundred in the match.

England batted first and lost two wickets in the first over. While they ultimately recovered to 228 all out, New Zealand could only manage 147 in reply. England’s second innings then subsided to first 85-4 and then 106-5. And then Graham Thorpe hit what was at the time the third fastest Test double hundred off 231 balls.

As we’ve just said, it had been five years since an England batsman passed 200 and while Thorpe was England’s best batsman of the era, his was a reputation largely forged on gritty fifties. To give a bit more information in support of that, despite finishing his Test career with an average of 44.66, his second-highest score was only 138.

It was a really, really, highly surprising innings. People would probably talk about it a lot more if Nathan Astle hadn’t then tried to chase 550 on his own in a session.

Rob Key 221 v West Indies, Lord’s 2004

If King Cricket is anything, it’s a website that knows how to share a Rob Key picture with the world. The fact that this was an event that needed to occur was in large part due to events at Lord’s in 2004.

Key was a batsman who earned a modicum of Australian respect and a niche UK fanbase off the back of a couple of small but phlegmatic innings during the 2002/03 Ashes series. He only made one fifty in eight innings – plus what Wisden admiringly referred to as “a stout, mostly passive knock” in Perth after Nasser Hussain, Michael Vaughan and Alec Stewart had all been dismissed on the first morning – but it was the way he made those runs that won many of us over.

“He doesn’t give a shit about much and is real relaxed,” said Steve Waugh. “I like that in a bloke; it stops him getting overawed.”

In an era when England batsmen tended to default to quaking in Ashes matches, these were highly desirable characteristics. ‘If only he could make a few more runs,’ you thought to yourself.

Recalled to the side for the first Test against the Windies in 2004, Key still had only that one Test fifty to his name. We monitored the scorecard from a warehouse in North-West England, desperately hoping he’d make another.

He did. And then he turned it into a hundred. And then he turned it into a double hundred.

It was all rather satisfying.

Paul Collingwood 206 v Australia, Adelaide 2006

Like Thorpe’s, Paul Collingwood’s is a double hundred that doesn’t get talked about much – but for very different reasons. This is a shame because it was quite the moment.

One Australian newspaper had called Collingwood England’s worst-ever number four ahead of the Adelaide Test. This was not an isolated thing; it was symptomatic of sneering that extended to – in fact originated in – the UK.

There was a general sense that even though he was at that point averaging 41.77 in Test cricket, Collingwood wasn’t a proper batsman. A lot of people felt that he was actually just a rather fortunate utility cricketer who’d benefited from his willingness to carry drinks on tour.

So that was where Collingwood was. Now consider the state of the series.

Despite winning at home in 2005, England hadn’t won an Ashes in Australia since 1987. They hadn’t even competed really and after conceding a 445-run first innings deficit in the first Test, things didn’t exactly feel rosy ahead of the second.

At the end of day one, England’s worst-ever number four was on 98 not out. We stayed up to watch him make his hundred the next day and then we carried on staying up and watched him make 200. It was the first double hundred by an Englishman in Australia for 78 years.

We don’t ordinarily much care for landmarks, but there was an awful lot wrapped up in this one. The match famously didn’t pan out all that brilliantly for England in the end, but it was such a perfect moment that it almost lives in isolation.

The innings as a whole was so emphatic, and then the shot to reach 200 and the immediate reaction to it so perfect and pure, that we still feel all of the joy that we did at the time, garnished with all of that hugely misplaced optimism about what was to come.

Paul Collingwood was a cricketer you could invest in. This was one of the pay-offs.

Alastair Cook 235* v Australia, Brisbane 2010

It was 2010 and England still hadn’t won another Ashes Down Under because that previous one had ended up 5-0.

Day one of the first Test at the Gabba. Andrew Strauss was out in the first over and then Peter Siddle took a frigging hat trick. On his birthday.

England were out for 260. Australia made 481. Same old, same old. We’d seen this one before.

But then suddenly, out of nowhere, England batted… and batted… and batted.

Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook put on 188 for the first wicket, then Jonathan Trott came to the crease, and then… no further wickets fell.

The match ended with the tourists 517-1. Five hundred and seventeen for one!

Strauss’s 110 was the worst innings. Jonathan Trott finished on 135 not out, Cook on 235 not and the Earth was no longer on its axis.

Kevin Pietersen 227 v Australia, Adelaide 2010

One of the features of this list is that mostly there are quite large gaps between entries… mostly.

Kevin Pietersen’s surprising double hundred came in the very next England innings after Alastair Cook’s surprising double hundred.

As we said at the time, England tours to Australia aren’t so much cricket as visits to a lab where a range of experiments are carried out to help the visitors identify every last one of their flaws. 2010/11 was the one recent exception and Pietersen’s double was when we started to comprehend that this might prove to be the case.

The 517-1 innings was so transcendentally weird it could only have been a complete outlier; a freak event that would never be repeated. So to then see another England double hundred exactly one innings later was almost as surprising.

Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen. ‘Creatures of their time’ we called them. Flat track bullies of entirely contrasting approaches.

The match panned out like this. James Anderson knocked out Australia’s top order and then Mike Hussey and Brad Haddin hustled the home side to 245. Testing pitch maybe? England made 620-5.

Cook made 148 and Pietersen – who hadn’t reached three figures in 18 months – made 227 in that particular and memorable way in which he made big hundreds.

Then Graeme Swann took a five-for and England had an innings victory. In Australia. The first of three in that series as it turned out.

Every time England reached 300 in this series, they also reached 500.

Bonkers.

Ben Stokes 258 v South Africa, Cape Town 2016

England made 312 runs in 38.5 overs while Ben Stokes was at the crease for this innings. No matter what you’ve seen from Stokes before or since, that surely counts as a surprising event. Writing at the time, we suggested that he had actually distorted time.

Stokes started at a decent lick and then accelerated – increasingly defensive field settings failing to slow him because they were offset by a Private Hudson level of demoralisation from South Africa. Even with a good number of men on the fence, Stokes was able to move from 150 to 250 in 61 balls.

The innings was so unearthly it actually left Sky commentator Nasser Hussain sombre with admiration because his brain simply didn’t know how to react.

Asked how the England team would be feeling afterwards, Ian Botham said they would be, “literally circling the moon”.

Responding to England’s innings, Hashim Amla batted for almost 12 hours and still didn’t get within 50 runs of what Stokes had achieved in five and a half. Stokes bowled 28 overs.

Zak Crawley 267 v Pakistan, Southampton 2020

Zak Crawley went into this match with a Test average below 30 and a first-class only very marginally above it. He had made three red ball hundreds and none in Tests. He was up against a rather tidy Pakistan bowling attack.

Crawley promplty clipped his first ball for four and then made another 263 runs. He did this as England endured pace, swing, seam and wrist spin, having at one point subsided to 127-4.

The longer the innings went on, the less it felt like a surprise and the more it felt like everything Crawley had done previously was the surprise. At the time it seemed like a Westworld-esque journey inward, after which he’d realise who he really was. ‘Oh, right – turns out I’m the perfect top order batsman.’

Except it wasn’t that, because one dreamy fifty aside, it was followed by a run of complete failures, such that we’re probably now back to the double hundred being the surprise; a weird-arsed soaring peak from someone who can look for all the world like a natural, but who definitely isn’t.

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We’re picking an England XI comprising the players we invested in the most.

In 2017 we launched a campaign for Paul Collingwood to be included in England’s Ashes squad. No-one was more surprised than us that we’d ended up feeling that strongly about him.

There are definitely two ends to the cricketers-who-we-love continuum. There are the cricketers who we loved from the very start and maybe the shine wore off a little bit towards the end, and then there are the players who we didn’t necessarily feel anything for early on who completely won us over until one day we just suddenly realised, oh wait, turns out we love Paul Collingwood, who knew? (Jonathan Trott was actually in this team for similar reasons for a brief mad minute until the stomach-churning realisation that we’d forgotten to include Rob Key.)

Thankfully, Cricinfo haven’t deleted our paean (The joy of Collingwood’s slow burn) so we don’t need to turn this into a 5,000 word article.

The two central pillars of our affection for Collingwood were the oft-repeated backhanded compliment, “he makes the most of his talent,” and off the back of that, the Australian press’s assertion that he was England’s worst-ever number four.

We still feel an almost visceral anger that ‘makes the most of his talent’ was intended as an insult when really it’s a rare and invaluable quality in an international cricketer.

With regards to the ‘worst-ever number four,’ the great tragedy of England fans’ wilful amnesia about the 2006 Adelaide Test is that it erases one of our all-time favourite cricket-watching moments.

Despite (perhaps even because of) all the questioning and ridicule, Paul Collingwood ended the first day of that match on 98 not out. Then, on day two, he conquered his nerves and reached three figures before doubling his tally for good measure. It was immense.

You can’t forget the incredible rearguards either. Acts performed when fans are feeling most desperate have the biggest impact.

At Cardiff in the 2009 Ashes, Collingwood made a four-hour 74 that helped deliver an unlikely draw, and in South Africa in 2009, he played two impossibly lumpen innings that resulted in nine-wickets-down draws. His 99-ball 26 at Centurion was the first and he then produced a one-man leaving/missing case study at Newlands that saw 40 runs scored in more than four and a half hours.

Throw in the fact that he captained England to a World Cup win and took a catch ahead of the 2005 Ashes that we’ve written a whole chapter about for a book that will probably never get published and it’s obviously impossible to leave him out.

Here’s what we wrote when he retired.

Oh, also that time he was an umpire. That was quite something too. Almost forgot about that.

2 minute readPaul Collingwood excelled at all those aspects of cricket which are undervalued; all the ones that are hard to measure; stuff like fielding and unearthing singles that have no right to be taken.

Because of this, he was one of our heroes when he retired from international cricket and he’s not exactly dropped in our estimation since then, playing on for Durham through thick and thin and thinner and thinner still. Now he’s retiring completely.

We’ve nothing left to say about Colly’s cricket. We instead want to quickly talk about a photo that has gnawed away at us ever since it was taken back in 2016. There is something about the scene that is so perfect it almost brings us to tears.

After playing a game against Lancashire at Southport and Birkdale CC,  Collingwood’s Durham stayed behind for a bit and played a knockabout game with a tennis ball with a few kids on the outfield. Colly was umpire.

The players had a few beers, the wicket was a chair, the kids got Ben Stokes out and the whole thing took place on the kind of long summer evening you can only ever really get in the UK.

It is, to our eyes, idyllic, and it will have meant THE WORLD to the kids involved. “It was quite difficult to get them to sleep that night,” one of the boys’ dads told the Southport Visiter at the time.

We don’t think it’s a coincidence that Paul Collingwood was involved in this and while we can’t really put what that means into words, in many ways it seems to sum up the man so we’re just going to leave it at that.

 

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A post shared by Paul Collingwood (@paulcollingwood5) on Jul 19, 2016 at 12:26pm PDT

< 1 minute read

Paul Collingwood!

When a bowling attack’s a bit fast-medium, people always hanker after “genuine pace” – but what about genuine medium-pace? That brings variety too.

If Paul Collingwood were to play instead of Jake Ball say, they’d not only benefit from some devastating dibbly dobbly military medium, they could also bat Jonny Bairstow at seven, Moeen Ali at eight and Chris Woakes at nine.

You’re pretty much guaranteed a run-out with Colly as well and as that seems to be the only real way to dismiss Steve Smith, they could probably justify picking him for that alone.

More on the campaign to get Paul Collingwood into England’s Ashes squad here. There’s a petition and everything.

2 minute read

You can find a link to it at the bottom of our Campaign to Get Paul Collingwood Into England’s Ashes Squad page.

We’ve mostly just created it because campaigns always have to have petitions nowadays. It’s not like we get a million signatories and then something happens. It’s not a means to an end in any meaningful sense. The ultimate aim here is really just to get a lot of signatories and then we can all sort of sit there agreeing with each other.

At the same time, the more we’ve thought about it, the more it’s occurred to us that The Campaign to Get Paul Collingwood Into England’s Ashes Squad maybe has a little bit more to it than what we initially realised. To some extent it’s also symbolic of our feelings about the nature of modern professional cricket.

Once upon a time – not even that long ago, really – there was a very real chance that a professional cricketer or ex-professional cricketer could legitimately harbour hopes of an out-of-the-blue call-up purely on the basis of their physical proximity to the squad.

A bout of illness, a rash of injuries and the national side would be left making a few calls and knocking on a few doors in a frantic bid to make up the numbers. There’s no chance of that nowadays. Performance or Lions squads lurk nearby. Every eventuality is covered.

Is that what we want from international cricket? Of course we want our national side to be good and effective and to do what it can to win, but we can’t help but feel that something has been lost – something shambolic and amateur, sure, but a certain warmth too.

No-expense spared professionalism leaves us a bit cold and we’d like it if there were still just the remotest possibility that an ageing pro serving as part of the coaching stuff might just get another Test match in an emergency.

So again, here’s the campaign and an invitation to be second on the petition via the link at the bottom.

< 1 minute read

What else does nostalgia prove, if not that everything was better in the past?

Let’s do the who, the what and the why.

Who?

Paul Collingwood.

Paul is 41 and hasn’t played Test cricket for England since 2011, so the first thing to say in favour of his selection is that it would be heart-warmingly, life-affirmingly optimistic.

What?

Selection for the Ashes. We want Paul Collingwood in England’s Ashes squad. We want him to play in the Ashes.

It looks like there might be an opening for an all-rounder, but frankly he’s a far better bat than most of the lads they’re taking anyway, so we feel he should be included in the squad as a specialist.

That really is the nub of it: there’s no-one else better.

Why?

Collingwood hit three hundreds and averaged 60 in the County Championship this year. James Vince averaged 30 and he’s in the squad.

Also, he’s just ace.

They wouldn’t even need to book another flight as he’s going anyway as part of the coaching staff. His selection would therefore be cost effective.

There is, quite simply, no way that this is a bad idea.

In summary

Paul Collingwood MUST be added to England’s Ashes squad because…

1. His selection would be heart-warmingly, life-affirmingly optimistic
2. It would also be cost effective
3. There’s no-one else better

Update

There’s now a petition. You can sign it here.

< 1 minute read

Our latest Kings of Cricket piece is up on the All Out Cricket website. The subject is Paul Collingwood. Bear with us. We think we’ve made our case.

It’s mostly about his magical magnetic hand, but there’s more to it than that. Consider it a paean to three-dimensionality; an ode to all the qualities that don’t show up in the stats.

Bangladesh have got a leggie

Fast bowlers and mystery spinners – that’s how you win Test matches. But several years ago Bangladesh spotted a gap in the market for a seven-man attack comprising nothing but conventional finger spinners. They’ve been ploughing this furrow for quite some time despite the complete lack of crops.

But maybe things are changing. They’ve got a leggie. Jubair Hossain took 5-96 in the first innings of the third Test against Zimbabwe. It probably doesn’t pay to get too excited being as this is only his fifth first-class match, but at least he gives their attack something different.

< 1 minute readThe final of the domestic 50-over competition is an odd thing. It took place yesterday, in late September – a fortnight after the semi-finals, three weeks after the quarter finals and a month after the main bit of the tournament. You can see why it works that way, but with the days shortening, it feels a bit like it fizzles out rather than building to a climax.

Durham won and for all the talk of modern scoring rates, it was another low-scoring affair. A party can’t always be dancing and laughter. Sometimes, if it’s your party, it’s more about doing an awful lot of laborious housework. Or, if it’s our party, it’s an oud bruin and a high quality motion picture starring Rowdy Roddy Piper. (Has he ever starred in a substandard film? Not to our knowledge.) Not sure what our parties translate to in this analogy. Probably something Duckworth-Lewis affected.

Yesterday, Ben Stokes drew most of the headlines for taking a couple of wickets and making 38 not out, but it’s been Paul Collingwood who’s been the star of Durham’s campaign. He finishes the competition among the top ten run-scorers and the top ten wicket-takers. He scored 427 runs at 53.37 at over a run-a-ball and took 14 wickets at 22.85 at less than four-an-over. We’ll resist the temptation to write another 5,000 words on him, but suffice to say he’s still underrated and always will be.

< 1 minute readNo, like, we REALLY wrote about Paul Collingwood this time. It’s like a proper article for a proper website. You may have read it a couple of days ago, of course. If you did, we apologise, because this is all you’re getting here on King Cricket today.

But why not read it again anyway? Come on, it’s a good one. On Twitter, none other than Paul Collingwood himself said of the piece:

“Very kind words!!”

Two exclamation marks! For once we’re actually happy about that, rather than irritated. If you think that betrays a certain inconsistency in our attitude to punctuation, why don’t you toddle off and score a double hundred in an Ashes Test? Do that and we’ll be perfectly happy for you to use two consecutive exclamation marks, providing you’re also expressing approval for something we’ve written.

3 minute readThe days of Gentlemen and Players are long gone, but Paul Collingwood would have been the latter – a man who never lost sight of the fact that it was all about scoring runs; taking wickets and catches; and occasionally missing the ball often enough that your team salvaged a draw.

He was a state school batsman where his contemporaries were generally more privileged or from overseas, so he was our representative in the top six. And maybe it all goes back to that era of Gentlemen and Players, but he was subtly patronised by the public school, brahmin-esque cricket establishment for much of his career. He ‘made the most of his talent’ they said. He didn’t have much style.

Substance

Let’s get something straight: batting is about scoring runs. If you score runs, you are a good batsman; if you don’t score runs, you aren’t a good batsman.

Suggestions that Paul Collingwood ‘got the most out of his talent’ so that he could score more runs than ‘better’ batsmen are spectacularly illogical. Getting the most out of his talent is what made Paul Collingwood a better batsman than all the weak-willed stylists and technically correct teasers who trailed in his wake. Every international cricketer should make the most of their talent. That should be a given.

What is style, anyway?

Why should one stroke be more aesthetically pleasing than another? Is there something inherently beautiful about a textbook cover drive or do we learn to appreciate it because of what we hear from other people? Off-side strokes are invariably considered more stylish than leg-side strokes and this arises from the fact that the amateur Gentlemen of yesteryear played into the off-side having been brought up on true pitches, while the Professionals worked the ball to leg, because it was all about the runs.

Paul Collingwood was all about runs.

In India

It was in Nagpur that we realised that Paul Collingwood brought more than just ‘a bit of ginger’ to the team, as he had once claimed. He scored 400 runs at 57.14 in India, which is better than almost every English batsman who’s ever gone over there. That Nagpur hundred held England together.

In Australia

Forget the 2010-11 series. In 2006, an Aussie paper called him England’s worst ever number four. A lot of people said he was out of his depth. Paul Collingwood promptly scored 206.

Far from being out of his depth, Collingwood showed that he was in fact the complete antithesis of the spineless Pom who crumbles at the first ‘g’day’. It should have been no surprise. When he and Alastair Cook had both scored hundreds against Pakistan earlier in the year, Cook had revealed how Collingwood had kept the score ticking over when he himself couldn’t even get the ball off the square.

Cook was openly admiring Collingwood’s ability when he said that, but memories are short when it comes to Paul Collingwood. Where a poor series for some batsmen would be branded ‘poor form’, Collingwood was more likely to be dismissed with a curt ‘he’s crap’.

The grit

You can’t talk about Colly without talking persistence of motive and effort – grit.

Great bowling? Duff pitch? Impossible match situation? Personal poor form? All water off a duck’s teflon-coated umbrella to Paul Collingwood.

He was in dire form against South Africa in 2006 and about to be dropped. In what had appeared likely to be his last Test innings, he worked his way to 94 not out.

Kevin Pietersen had been dismissed going for the glory hundred when on 94 earlier in the day. Did Collingwood learn from this? Yes, of course he did – he learnt that you should middle it when trying to reach your hundred with a six.

How dour and functional of him.

More obviously gritty were the four-hour 74 at Cardiff in the 2009 Ashes, for which every England fan will be forever grateful, and the even more gloriously lumpen twin innings in South Africa that also led to nine-wickets-down draws. A 99-ball 26 at Centurion and a one-man leaving/missing case study at Newlands that saw 40 runs scored in more than four and a half hours.

Apologies if you think this post is a bit long, but we’ve always wanted to do Paul Collingwood justice because we feel like other people won’t. Frankly, he’s one of our heroes.