In the first of his weekly blogs for thewisdencricketer.com the former England fast bowler Devon Malcolm has a look at the England bowling attack.

To bowl fast you need to have confidence and good rhythm. I don’t believe Steve Harmison has a problem with rhythm. It’s something in his mind. Pace comes with confidence. If you have a confident mind and you are fit, you will bowl fast. If you’ve got a little something in the back of your mind it will slow you down.

Read on here.

As someone who’s always revelled in underachievement, we’ve been taking quite an interest in the Kolkata Knight Riders over the last few days. Bottom of the IPL with a captain averaging 10 and an ex-captain indulging in a sulk that could melt your teeth from 30 paces, the Knight Riders aspire to being a shambles. We think we’re starting to love them.

Their website is well worth a read. The owner, Shah Rukh Khan (SRK), was doing a blog, but he only got as far as two posts before it became apparent that he’d have to do a lot of apologising if he carried on.

His most recent post, from three weeks ago, is a delight. It revolves around ‘taking the hit’. Shah Rukh Khan notes that even great sports teams have to endure defeat, overlooking the fact that by definition they don’t have to endure it perpetually, as the Knight Riders seem to be doing.

He sees it as a good thing: “We have been hit and hit hard, so the difficult part is over now.” At this point it’s worth considering that the IPL only started about three weeks ago, so ‘the difficult part’ was far from over when he wrote this. All his not-so-fist-pumping words in the blog clearly came to nothing: “We can take a hit; we can fall down; but we also know how to scrape ourselves from the floor.”

At least the fans have responded. When we checked, there were 1,109 comments. The most recent was addressed directly to Shah Rukh Khan and made reference to ‘UR NIGHT MATE BUCHANON’ – John Buchanan being Kolkata’s coach. The comment before that referred to SRK as ‘srgay’ 112 times.

Even while we’ve been writing this, Kolkata have been putting the finishing touches to another lacklustre defeat. Go Knight Riders.

See King Cricket’s regular blog at www.kingcricket.co.uk. King Cricket is a cult figure in the world of cricket blogs and was TWC’s first Best-of-blogs winner in April 2008.