Woakes and Bairstowe haven’t forgotten.
A little late on this (on hols) but just popped in to say that, in such conditions, is there any better bowler than Jimmy Anderson?
He bowled so many unplayable balls that 5-20 looks a little meagre.
Solid batting from the middle order and with “weather” looming do we declare with a 250+ lead and have a pop? I think so. With Jimmy in this form a 10-fer is least he deserves.
I doubt they declare overnight, although it may depend on the actual forecast tomorrow morning. India will have to bat significantly better than they have in the series before to even draw level.
Well, it wasn’t a great match as such,but England will of course be delighted with how they comprehensively turned India over. With Kohli injured (and he was a bit unlucky to get out the way he did) it could be a long tour for them.
I think the results would be similarly lopsided in the other direction if these two sides played in India.
1023 balls - the shortest completed test at Lords since 1888.
I agree, and it’s a real problem with test cricket at the moment. Home team advantage is getting out of control.
Here’s all teams home recordsover the last ten years. And all their away tests.
Only South Africa have a positive away win/loss ratio. And some of the home win/loss ratios are ridiculous.
So, Ben Stokes back in the squad, who to drop to bring him back in?
Sam Curran, after his heroics in the first test? Chris Woakes, after a maiden ton at Lords and a clutch of wickets? Adil Rashid, and go with a 5 man pace attack and hope Joe Root will keep things quiet if the pacemen don’t blow through the Indian order in a session like their last 3 innings? Ollie Pope to let Stokes bat a bit higher?
It’ll be interesting to see who they do drop. For me, it would be Chris Woakes.
Does Stokes have to come straight back in to the team? It seems incredibly harsh to drop Woakes, surely it has to be Pope or Rashid if anyone? Or just make Stokes wait a bit. I’m surprised he’s been recalled before the disciplinary hearing, to be honest. Clearly the ECB has put pragmatism ahead of principles.
Well, Stokes is in, in place of Curran. Which makes sense in the narrowest view - they fill the same slot and you’d back Stokes to bat and bowl better than Curran - but pretty brutal on Curran, a young player who’s done precisely nothing wrong.
Also a strong hint that the ECB aren’t planning to throw the book at Stokes in the disciplinary hearing.
Interesting that in all the variations, I don’t think anyone suggested playing Stokes in place of Buttler, even though Stokes’ batting average is better.
Apparently the longer-term plan is for Buttler to take the gloves while Bairstow moves up to No.4 - which shows how desperate England are getting for quality players in the top 5.
I think they desperately want to shore up the batting which still looks extremely fragile. Curran has obviously batted really well but if you were to have to bank one on of them to get you 50 runs I know who I would pick.
Plus I guess they wanted to show Stokes that this nasty business is not going to affect they way he’s treated in the dressing room and that it’s a safe space for him.
Well, that was rubbish. England bowled out in a session, and India leading by 292 which, by the series so far, is already enough, and they have only lost 2 wickets.
England’s batting was an utter shambles, and it seems like that’s been said a lot recently. All the batsmen got starts, but no one could go on and post anything like a score.
Earlier in this thread, I gave India a game which they went on to lose. If England manage to win this, I will eat my cricket bat.
Over the last 12 months England have had a higher average innings score in ODIs than in tests. To think they were 50-0 at one point as well.
Impressive though the Lords result was, England’s runs relied on 2 players, only one of whom was in the team primarily to bat. It’s not the sort of performance you can expect to repeat, and once again the batting lineup has been found out.
Listening to the afternoon session yesterday, the collapse felt inevitable. You just can’t have any faith in that middle order to stick around. It was Day Two. There’s no rush. All that mattered yesterday afternoon was for people to go in and stay in. Michael Vaughan picked up on a matter of technique - even when playing defensive shots, players were moving the bat into the ball rather than letting it come to them and dead-batting it - but that absence of technique goes hand in hand with the lack of the defensive mentality. And while it sounds all very swashbuckling and glorious to say that the best defence is a good offence and you can dominate the bowling by carting the ball to the boundary, the truth is that sometimes pure defence is what’s needed and you can also dominate the bowling by wearing them down as they bowl and bowl and bowl and you stick stubbornly in.
We used to have Cook and Trott for when the going got tough. Prior could put in a shift when he had to. Now who do we have? Who would you rely on to bat for more than an hour on a tricky pitch to save your life? Not Cook any more. Root hasn’t done it for a while. And there’s no-one else you’d ever expect to even try.
Case in point: India have finished the morning session having scored 70 runs for no loss in 28 overs. 2.5 runs an over might sound meagre by the standards of today’s game, but it’s been a fantastic session for them. Without attempting to force the pace, Kohli and Pujara have seen off some good bowling, kept the scoreboard moving and crucially, held on to their wickets giving themselves and their team a platform for faster scoring over the next two sessions. Meanwhile, England are feeling frustrated and under pressure, and their bowlers have burnt energy to no avail.
Well, 521 to win. To be honest I think a team total of 300+ would go some way towards redemption, but do they have the bottle for it? Or will they just roll over as we have seen many times before? Clearly, winning the game is not an option but it seems like a great opportunity to practice how they might play if they had to just, say, bat out a single day for a draw. Or will they see it as licence to swing away, given even salvaging a draw is so unlikely? That would be disappointing, in my view - plenty of opportunity to do that sort of thing in the white ball game.
Decent effort by England, who are 297/9 as I type. Can’t imagine they really want to come back tomorrow, indeed for the last several overs the tailenders have basically been throwing the bat at everything (and why not?). Credit to Buttler and Stokes for showing some backbone. The others, not so much, particularly Pope who seemed to get out playing a silly shot. Several were victims of very good bowling and catching, to be fair. Had they put this innings together the first time round, India wouldn’t have been quite so comfortable in their second knock and that could have been enough to swing the game.
In a way I’m glad that my fears of an uncompetitive series have been put to bed. Just a shame that England made it so easy for India with that first innings batting performance.
One of the nice things is that the partnership between Stokes and Buttler made a lie of my assertion earlier that the 292 lead India had at the start of the third day would be enough.
It really was just them, though. Apart from Stokes and Buttler, with 62 and 106, the scores in the innings are 17,13,13,16,0,4,30*,20,8*. Compare that to the first innings of 29,20,16,10,15,10,39 (Buttler again),8,5,0,1*. Not much difference, huh?
All over mercifully quickly.
To follow up on Teuton’s point, our scores from the top 6 in the previous tests were:
Edgbaston 1st innings: 13, 42, 80, 8, 70, 21; (av. 39)
Edbaston 2nd innings: 0, 8, 14, 20, 28, 6. (av. 12.666…)
Lords 1st innings: 21, 11, 19, 29, 93, 24. (av. 32)
There’s not a lot of 40s, 50s or 60s in there. There’s more scores in the 20s than there are in single figures. If we win it’s because someone (not necessarily a top-order batter) has a very special day.* It’s not because the batting unit put in decent collective performance. They’re quite likely to get in and score a bit, but not deliver on that start. Essentially, our scores aren’t driven by the average but by the variance. And that’s not a strategy that can pay off long-term.
Stokes and Buttler have delivered a bit of a lesson to their team mates about what can be achieved. Can this lesson sink in?
*Also, you know, bowling.
And we’re off to a flyer, with Jennings lbw while trying to leave one, and Root surviving an lbw appeal that was otherwise plumb because the bowler overstepped. (Bumrah being the bowler in both instances). Time for England to dig in for some gritty batting.
But the baseline for a decent batting unit is one that can consistently produce 300 in the first innings. Do that consistently and you are very hard to beat.
Scoring 300 “simply” requires one of the top order to get a ton, another get 50 and the rest chip in, maybe a bit of a tail wag. But any combination works.
The sound Aussie batting line-ups in the Waugh/Ponting era did because there were seven of them who could provide the ton.