As I type this, we’re onto the fourth game of the ODI series. The series is 2-1 to England at the moment, after a batting collapse by both teams in different games, and now Bopara and Buttler have 53 balls to get 80 runs.
It’s also not long until the test matches start, and the England team is as open to new caps as it’s been for a long time - Has Chris Jordan done enough in the ODIs to secure a place? Who’s going to keep wicket?
Ok, so nobody wants to talk about the ODIs. Fair enough. But now it’s the test matches!
Interesting team selection for England - lots of new faces, which we had to expect given the fallout from the appalling winter tour. Great to see England getting up past 500 - should mean that Sri Lanka will struggle to win the game, even if it looks at the moment like a draw could be on the cards. Long way to go yet, though, SL aren’t even halfway to the follow-on target. I wonder if they will enforce it if they get them out below it.
Also great to see Matt Prior back and playing like he can. England’s new strategy of “not playing Australia every game” seems to be paying early dividends!
Caught most of the highlights programme today - great knock by Ballance keeps England as favourites after some poor strokes by most of his compatriots. I don’t wish to make excuses for them but I suppose it can be quite difficult psychologically to bat in the position they were in, i.e. should they play safe or go for quick runs? On the other hand, they are professionals who have been in that situation many times before, so they should have worked out how to cope with it by now. Indeed, Ballance gave the perfect demonstration - solid defence mixed with attacking the looser balls. Which pretty much how to approach Test cricket and always has been.
Anyway, with the pitch seeming to have a little life left in it, hopefully we will declare as late as possible before start of play tomorrow morning and then bowl the tourists out.
As I watch it here, just after lunch, with Sangakkara and Jayawardene batting, it doesn’t seem as if a wicket is likely soon, although they are not scoring fast enough to make a serious challenge on the total likely.
Still a long time to go though.
On a knife-edge at the moment - Test cricket at its best!
Fucker. Huge lbw shout off the penultimate delivery with one wicket needed - inside edge onto pad. Then final delivery edged to the slip cordon but just fell short.
Cracking last day, shame not many were there to see it. Including me - I was following online. A lot of comments seem to be criticising Cook for letting Root and Ballance get their (double) century before declaring. No doubt those same people would be the first to jump down Cook’s throat if he made an attacking declaration and then saw SL chase down the runs (on what was, after all, a flat pitch on which we had no credible spinner). Personally I think both declarations were well-timed, particularly the second - there’s something to be said for keeping the other side guessing a bit overnight.
The main thing is that England seem to have found the bones of a decent side here, if the newbies can keep up the good work. Roll on the next Test, here’s hoping we can build on this performance.
Great days play. It’s a shame we couldn’t get another wicket before lunch, really, we left ourselves a little bit too much to do after lunch. But to come so close…
I think the lack of a Test class spinner is going to hurt us until we can find one. Just think what an in-form Swann could have done on this final day pitch - I think we’d have won before tea.
There’s no spinner to pick at the moment - and following the series against India later this summer, I think I am right in saying that we don’t play much Test cricket at all until next summer, due to the World Cup. In which case, if I am the ECB, I ask for green seaming tracks for the rest of the summer, kick the can down the road a little bit and hope that a spinner develops that you might want to take on over the course of the county season and work on him over the winter.
No real problems with the declarations or the timings of them. What I do have a problem with is both sides very slow over rates during this match. Overs were lost in the match due to it. Ceteris paribus, with those overs in hand (and as a result of a declaration on the same score, a couple of overs at SL last night), that game could have had a result - I reiterate that England were just as culpable in this, so it’s not a case of blaming the Sri Lankans. The point is more that the ticket paying public are getting short changed by the sides. It’s a disgrace and needs sorting out.
I don’t think we have any Test matches at all this winter do we? It’s all ODI’s, including a 7 match series in Sri Lanka.
I agree absolutely with what you say about over rates. 17 overs were lost in this game - that’s more than half a session. With that extra time, not only could England have forced a win, but Sri Lanka could have made that total seem gettable. I think it’s time to think about fining teams runs for slow play, to be honest. 5 runs per over not bowled, with match-referee adjudicated allowances for play stoppages and such. It’s about time test match audiences got the play they payed to watch.
If they introduce this, I’ll be willing to wager that they rarely have to use it.
Fascinating field placing England were using late in the day - it looked very Bodyline-ish with five close catchers on the leg side!
Agreed about the over rates. What is the current maximum penalty - 50% of the captain’s match fee? And would I be right in thinking that this was introduced in the days before central contracts, when cricket was only just finding its feet as a professional game? These days, with the players (rightly) getting proper salaries rather than relying on match fees and testimonials, the fine is probably less of a disincentive than it used to be. A bit like footballers only being fined a maximum of 2 weeks’ wages - it worked in the 60s, but not with today’s hugely inflated salaries (granted that comparison is unfair to cricket, but it’s the same principle).
Penalising teams by docking them runs seems like a great solution, as teams are most inclined to engineer slow over rates when they are behind in a match and are playing for the draw. My only reservation is that it could perhaps lead to delaying tactics by the batting side. Sometimes it could be hard to determine what is actually causing the slow rate. Or is this not really an issue? Either way, I agree that this measure should lead to it almost never having to be applied.
Ok, England fans, enlighten me. Who exactly are these Chris Jordan Gary Ballance et al and what was their rep in County. They seem quite good.
I’m afraid I don’t follow the game closely enough to give you a full answer myself, but I know Ballance has been making big scores for Yorkshire for the last couple of seasons and it was just a matter of waiting for the right moment for him to get his cap. I had never heard of Chris Jordan prior to this series, but that says more about my lack of knowledge than anything else.
Did anyone else think the Sri Lankans looked rather cumbersome in the field? I know they don’t have the best reputation as fielders but even taking that into account, they looked some way off the pace of international cricket these days.
Jordan’s rep mostly came from limited overs cricket but he was playing so well with the white ball that he has forced himself into the reckoning for the Test side. He is perhaps a little less consistent that Anderson and Broad but he seems to have a knack of making things happen (or having things happen to him if you prefer). He can also bat. He’s played a couple of match changing knocks in ODIs. Also, the rare debutant who walks into the side and goes straight into the slip cordon - he’s got better hands than a lot of the older players. I like him. He’s probably our most exciting cricketer.
Ballance actually got on the Ashes tour and had been accumulating runs for quite some time at county and England A level. He almost certainly deserves his chance given the weight of runs accumulated but there’s a few people I have seen talking about his weight distribution being a bit unorthodox and, possibly, being a flaw. I’m not sure - though he seemed very skittish in the first innings here, he looked a bit more composed in the second innings, especially considering wickets were falling around him.
Robson is a naturalised Australian. Also scored a lot of runs at county level. I don’t know much about him except that he is thought to be very attritional - unlikely to be winning any beauty prizes for his batting, nor scoring especially quickly.
Ali is probably the guy I am most interested to see. He too has scored a lot of runs at CC level and is a lot wristier than you traditionally find in English players. Has played some long innings at the level below. Long term, he’s my preference for 3 - though they won’t be moving Ballance anytime soon, given he’s just scored a ton. There’s this theory that he can be a spinner and, supposedly, has a doosra - but anyone with a first class average of 40 is unlikely to be your front line test spinner. He’s a bat as far as as I can see.
I would like all of them to succeed but, honestly, Ali looks the most likely to me. I’d love it if Jordan became a permanent fixture in the side. Ballance might well succeed. Robson seems like the longest shot - we’re trying anyone at opener these days and having someone partner Cook (himself not in good form) and playing at the same pace as him may not be the best for the team pacing an innings.
Forgive me, but this seems dangerously reminiscent of the 1990s when you had players come up for one or two tests and then be never heard from again.
Maybe, it’s certainly a risk - but would should they do instead? Jordan is in because the likes of Tremlett and Rankin went down under and played poorly or got injured. They obviously have got rid of KP so there’s one hole in the batting line up. Carberry is 34 or so, not one for the future and only averaged 30 with the bat in Australia, so you can argue that they should move on from him, opening up the opener role (again). Trott is out with his stress related illness, opening up another hole in the batting order. Swann had to retire because his elbow is blown out. I understand, as a Pakistan fan, you’d quite like us to keep trotting out an over the hill Carberry, a stress knackered Trott, an out of his depth Boyd Rankin or a broken Chris Tremlett - but it’s not going to cut it for us, as we’ll keep getting beaten, even if these guys actually have some experience. Better to move on and see what else we have got.
Some of these will sink. Some will swim. They’ll all get the summer though I would have thought, barring catastrophe, so they’re unlikely to be 1 or 2 Test wonders - plus due to the vagaries of the international programme, they could well stick around for the next batch of Test, which will also be at home, giving them a nice long bedding in time in conditions that they should be familiar with. If they’re going to make these changes, now seems as good a time as any.
You’ve got to make your debut sometime and a lot of the potential guys they could have picked have already had double figures in Test matches and been found wanting (Bairstow for one).
Ali will stick, I’m confident - his ability and temperament seem pretty sound. Jordan will too, even if only at ODI level and he deserves his chance for his performances there.
It could be my Somerset fan bias, but I’m surprised that Nick Compton has moved so far down the list. I can understand them not wanting a similar player to Cook opening with him but, from what I understand, Robson is that anyway.
I was at Lord’s on Sunday. England promoted Robson to 1 and had Cook at 2 - it seemed as if the plan was for Robson to accumulate and for Cook to accelerate. Cook certainly played more attacking shots on his way to 28 - but having got there and *literally just as I was thinking, “Well, he’s played himself in now so this is his best chance for a long time of getting runs” - he played a slightly careless shot and got out. But it looked like he was trying to play a different role to Robson.
This of course raises the uncomfortable spectre that we may need to bring on not one but two new openers in the near-to-mid term, but let’s not dwell on that.
In similar news, it was fantastic to see Sanga get his Lord’s century but the point was very much made that he and Jayawardene are in the farewell tour phase of their careers, which is going to leave a big hole for Sri Lanka. Silva looked pretty useful as an opener but do they have anyone to fill in the middle order?
*Yes, it’s my fault. Sorry.
Regarding the slow over rates, this Cricinfo story says that England have been fined for their slow over rates, but that Sri Lanka have not been sanctioned. Which surprises me, since I thought Sri Lanka’s efforts on the first day were really slow, but perhaps they made it up later in the test.