Thanks for clarifying. It must indeed have been Ed Smith I heard, a relatively unfamiliar voice for me though I’m still not sure how I confused him for Vaughan!
Thanks for the updates folks as I don’t get to see a ball of the game. Penultimate Thule, you may be the best to ask- did Starc look lame in his bowling action?
I do hope Smith can kick on tomorrow. Guess I’ll find out when I wake up.
I’ve read Kimber avidly since this article about Brendon McCullum. He’s the only sports journalist that I actively seek out.
Nice to see Bob Hawke enjoying a beer as well.
He wasn’t right. Probably right to play, not 100% right.
In Brisbane he averaged over 140k, yesterday he didn’t hit 140 until the 2nd new ball was taken.
There’s an article on cricinfo by Brettig
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Thanks. And another fine prediction by me- I immediately put the mockers on Smith.
Just as an aside, I was wondering how many of the current Australian side would get into the Waugh side of around 2001? You could probably have Smith ahead of Mark Waugh or Martyn and maybe Starc ahead of Lee, but that is a tough call on those players.
Holy fucking hell it got today! If the Poms had walked off and forfeited it would have been hard to blame them.
In Shires cricket our play was suspended when the official temperature exceeded 43C. It got to 44.5 before falling a couple of degrees and the game was completed.
How an opening bat can get their mind set to bat 2 hours when 300 runs behind having been in the field in those conditions facing a bowling attack who’ve had their feet up in the aircon and refreshments beats me. I’d retire and sleep in a fridge. At lunch the on-field temp reached 55.7C. Stretches the definition of cricket and sanity to my thinking.
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They moved yesterday’s Caulfield horse races in Melbourne to today because it was forecast for 42˚ Saturday and 21˚ today. It was certainly stupidly hot today in Sydney.
I suspect Teuton and Cumbrian will be too modest or indeed too depressed to quote themselves, so I’ll offer them props for these predictions, made before the start of the series and during test two respectively. I think Malan is about the only England player to emerge with any credit from this tour.
I think you are selling a few of the newcomers short.
Malan is very likely a find.
Overton was missing a yard of pace for Aust but looked OK. With his twin Jamie you might have a double.
Curran did quite OK for a bowler not suited to Aust conditions. Needs to be tighter and will be better in conditions where the ball bobbles around a bit.
Crane, if he recovers from bowling 50 overs for 1/193 on debut, is worth persevering with.
Stoneman didn’t get much luck. Save for Cook’s epic he was the 2nd best opener of the series.
That’s five solid prospects from one tour.
That’s a good result to build from for future given how badly burned the squad was.
If Root had converted one century in the first three Test’s he’d have had a good series. His captaincy is a worry.
Bairstow did a little better than expected. I have doubts on his keeping but it’s sound enough for the bowlers he had. They didn’t get many edges but he took those that did come.
The difference was the quality of the Australian bowling. Cummins 23 @ 24.7, Starc 22 @ 23.5, Hazlewood 21 @ 25.9 & Lyon 21 @ 29.2.
It didn’t matter who had the ball (save for Bird in Melb), the pressure was on batsmen from both ends through out the innings. No reprieve and little respite.
For England Ali (5 @ 115) bowled 100 overs less than Lyon so the additional load needed to be taken up by the seamers who 1) were down on pace and 2) were rarely able to get either seam or swing to work. The one time they did, the evening session at Adelaide showed that the England attack in England might quite capable.
You need somebody who can chuck pies @ 140k+. Broad is busted. You’ll might squeeze another series out of Anderson. There has got to be either a RH or LH orthodox spinner floating around the county circuit. I think Vince can bat no higher than 6, but I have no notion of who you slot in @ #3.
The crying English fans on twitter are certainly a sight to behold. “Too hot”. 41C? Come on. Bunch of sissies.
This is the crux of it. You can potentially take 100 wickets in a 5 match series. England took 58. If you average taking 11.6 wickets per match, it’s very likely you’re going to lose and it’s pretty likely you’re going to lose heavily. We only dismissed Australia 3 times in the whole series and one of those was when we had the benefit of the lights in Adelaide, where we got conditions that looked somewhat like England. Meanwhile, Australia had the wood on us for the whole series when they had the ball.
We’ve kind of already had a bit of a post mortem further up thread. I’m not hugely up for a root and branch restructure as a knee jerk response to this series, though it seems obvious to me that, if red ball is going to be any sort of priority, the ECB needs to do some tinkering to encourage bowlers of different types to that which we are producing at the moment and assess that talent better (as they have failed to do in the case of James Vince). What is clear for the immediate future is that we’ve got to find a spinner that is going to work for us more often than not, particularly away from home and we probably need at least one bowler who offers pace, possibly two, and another couple who can offer better depth than the likes of Ball and Curran (personally, I’m not convinced he’s going to make it as a red ball bowler - but he could well wind up being more than competent in white ball cricket).
Mo needs dropping. Vince needs dropping. Not totally convinced who is going to play in their stead. Stokes wouldn’t have won us the series - the result may well have been pretty much identical actually - but his importance in balancing the side is becoming ever more apparent. With him, you can drop these two and pick Crane, probably with Woakes at 7, and not be in too bad a shape. Shame he’s a bloody idiot.
Also, to add on the Aussie pace attack - it could have been much worse for us. I think Pattinson is in Australia’s best pace group and he didn’t play at all, plus Starc was out injured for a match.
I agree to some extent, there are areas we can build on, but I’d rate Malan as the only “solid prospect”. Possibly Stoneman as well - the others we just haven’t seen enough of. We will be competitive in 2019 but at the moment Oz look solid favourites to retain.
I don’t think Broad is done, if he can get properly fit again then he could still be dangerous with both bat and ball. Admittedly he has had a poor series.
It didn’t have much to do with our abject performance so this is not an excuse, but I do think 41 degrees is too hot to be playing cricket. Admittedly it’s less strenuous than tennis, but don’t they come off at the Australian Open if it gets above 35?
Congratulations once again to the Australians, although it wasn’t competitive in the end, it was an absorbing contest for large parts of it.
In Aust Open play is suspended if above 40C and Wet Bulb exceeds 32.5. In Melb humidity is typically much lower than Syd.
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If a heat rule is imposed, how would that affect play in the sub-continent or even the West Indies? (Of course they may not adopt it).
Separate note, I think every wicket to a bowler went to a New South Welshman (and even the run out was Nathan Lyon).
On an even more separate note I thought the day would start well when I heard Australia had won. We are in Krakow and it started to snow. On the way to Auschwitz- Birkenau our bus had a smash with a car so we had to get another bus (fortunately no one injured). And it snowed even harder as we walked around one of the most depressing places on earth.
All ENG wickets in series went to NSW bowlers. And if we made a state of origin claim on Bird only 32 of 881 overs were not bowled by NSW
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In the tennis much of the heat issue is the radiant heat off the synthetic surface which can melt the rubber off shoes. Less of a problem when you are standing on green grass.
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I think we’ll win in 2019, because conditions will be just as much in our favour as conditions in this series were in Australia’s.
I mean, it’s a year and a half away, so things could happen, but we do have the bowlers to exploit our conditions, and time and again we’ve shown we can beat teams in the UK at the moment, and I don’t see any reason to believe this time will be different. It’ll bounce back to us, and then when it’s played in Australia again they’ll probably get it back.
The England win in Aus in 2011 is looking for and more special, to be honest.
I sort of agree with the following caveat: it’s a lot easier for Australian cricketers to get experience of English conditions than vice versa. There’s more counties for a start, so there’s more overseas player slots. The English counties are also much more likely than Sheffield Shield sides to pick an Aussie. The number of English players with Sheffield Shield experience totals 1, I think: Mason Crane.
There are 9 Aussies in the county game in 2018, at least according to some article I was reading the other day. Most of these are in and around the Test side. They’re going to be better prepared for the conditions in England next time out.
My googlefoo was only able to find from definites to maybes:
Shaun Marsh
Mitchell Marsh
Nathan Lyon
Cameron Bancroft
Peter Handscomb
Matt Renshaw
The ones you want to watch for are those who aren’t yet in Test consideration and are playing Div2/Div3 or League cricket honing their craft.
The number of English batsmen out here playing grade cricket is a more substantial cohort. Stoneman played 3 seasons in Sydney. Many Sydney grade sides have an import, though not necessarily English. I expect this also applies with the other state’s grade competitions
I had a look at the 2017 Aussies in County Cricket list:
George Bailey (HAMPSHIRE)
Adam Voges (MIDDLESEX)
Aaron Finch/Moises Henriques (SURREY)
Peter Handscomb/Travis Head (YORKSHIRE)
Michael Klinger/Cameron Bancroft/Andrew Tye (GLOUCESTERSHIRE)
Mark Cosgrove/Clint McKay (LEICESTERSHIRE)
James Pattinson/Daniel Christian (NOTTINGHAMSHIRE)
John Hastings (WORCESTERSHIRE)
There are some very handy cricketers there to be sure but most were not in or were past Test consideration and most are white ball specialists.