Healy also suggested putting a Mars bar on the pitch to get him to move. Only 8 years= I’m really on top of it.
Four years ago the ECB decided they’d focus relentlessly on winning the World Cup, even if it meant putting Tests on the backburner. It worked, and England [del]tied[/del] won in dramatic fashion. Hooray!
Now, we can see the price. We don’t know who the best team is, players are struggling to revive Test match skills that haven’t been practised, we put so much reliance on Anderson that we broke him, we don’t have a plan B other than to take an excellent white-ball cricketer and discover in real time what happens when he bowls 20 overs on Thursday and 20 more on Saturday.
This seems like poor management, but it’s not really. It’s just the cost of doing business.
The pitch became progressively more two paced.
Burns copped a brute of a ball. Lyon bowled several shooters but got wickets with extra bounce.
You also need to factor in fatigue. The loss of Anderson and Ali being ineffective then the guy most likely to get bounce (Broad) was over bowled. Root seems to have an issue with Woakes and Stokes was hot and cold.
Much easier to bend your back and extract whatever assistance there is from the pitch when you are chasing a win rather than trying to bowl a team out for under 500.
But ENG had AUS 8-122 with Anderson only able to bowl four overs.
Plan B couldn’t have been expected to work much better, surely?
Excellent analysis as usual, thanks. It’s just frustrating to see (as far as the scorecard tells it) only one or two batsmen showing belief that they can play the sort of substantial innings required. To not even get close to making it is hard to forgive, looks like a complete lack of mental toughness.
I heard Michael Vaughan (who I find to be a consistently good contributor, knowledgeable and forthright) say on day 3 or 4 that 150 would be a tricky chase and he was absolutely right.
I also need to give you credit for this comment:
Let’s move on - would anyone care to disagree with this selection for Lord’s, or comment on the likelihood of it actually happening?
Burns
Roy
Root
Denly
Stokes
Buttler
Foakes
Woakes
Leach
Archer
Broad
I want to find a place for Curran but I think the only way to do that is to leave out Foakes (with Buttler keeping) and I don’t think that’s a net benefit overall.
ETA: I am of course assuming Archer is fit and Anderson is not, both of which may not in fact be the case. If neither is fit I think I’d have Curran over Wood. If both are, Anderson over Archer. And I’d want the physio to be at least 90% confident about Anderson being able to bowl throughout.
Ali is worth his place in the side for his bowling. His batting has been poor, and i’d probably like to see Woakes coming in ahead of him, but he’s still our best spinner.
Bairstow is still not showing why he’s being picked ahead of Foakes.
Regression to the mean is a terrible thing, and 122/8 is the point where it kicked in. None of these guys is inept. Broad and Woakes are Test bowlers and they took Test wickets. But a 2-seamer attack isn’t going to get to 122/8 very often. And in the second innings, when wickets weren’t falling for Woakes and Broad, Stokes and Ali couldn’t provide reliable back up. 122/8 is as good as it could get, and the decline from that to 284 and 487/7 was the mean restablishing itself over the variance.
Anderson is out, probably for the series. If we’re lucky, he can come back and perform heroics in a dead rubber.
I’d probably have much the same team. I’d consider Malan for Denly - he’s been scoring first-class runs this summer, he’s got Test experience at No. 4, and Denly was there to be No 3 so the rationale for keeping him at 4 is slim.
I’d quite like to put Stone in as well (Wood’s out for the season), in what is admittedly a dice roll - I’d just like to see what two ends of pace from him and Archer could do. But I can’t quite see who I’d drop for him - we need all the batters we can muster.
Teuton - I agree that Ali on paper is good enough to be in for his bowling, but he’s very much a confidence player and you have to think that his confidence will be pretty low right now.
Exactly, I stood corrected on Ali’s bowling but I think his batting woes are affecting his bowling confidence. His biggest threat to the batsmen this Test seems to have been beamers at the head, I haven’t checked but I suspect he averaged one poor (i.e. boundary) ball an over without looking like getting many wickets. Leach should be given his chance. It’s not pressing the panic button, it’s making changes before it’s too late to affect the series result.
I wouldn’t be unhappy to see Malan come in for Denly but I think the former deserves a bit more of a crack.
I’ve got to say, that was a fairly satisfying win, especially after the first two days of play, when England were looking pretty decent. The Aussie bowling attack, especially Lyon, was outstanding on the last day, but that was also a pretty bad capitulation by England.
What the hell was Roy doing? They need to bat out the day on a turning pitch, and he plays a shot straight out of the last overs of a one-day game. He got nowhere near the ball.
I thought Siddle bowled better than his figures suggested on the last day. He was unlucky not to get at least a couple of wickets. He had an edge beat the keeper early in the day, and near the end Steve Smith dropped one that he would normally catch at second slip.
Speaking of Smith, he was incredible. As an Aussie, I was really fucking pissed about the cheating in South Africa, and if they had banned Smith and the others for even longer, I would have been fine with that. But he really is fantastic to watch, and all cricket fans are, in some senses, better off when he’s playing. I completely understand why the Pommy crowds boo him, though; I’d be doing the same thing if I were them. 
My best friend, an Aussie, was in England on vacation last week, and he attended the first two days at Edgbaston. He was about the only Aussie in his section of the crowd, and he spent most of those two days copping a friendly earful from the English supporters, first as the Aussie wickets fell, and then as England passed the Australian first innings total. He wrote on Facebook that he wished he had been able to stay for the whole test match and throw it back in their faces on the fifth day.
Roy was “playing his natural game”. The idea is that you can take a destructive ODI/T20 player and turn them into destructive Test players with minimal modification. It’s an idea that has some merit - skill at hitting a ball with the bat should translate from one format to the other - but falls down badly on the shifting risk/reward ratios in the different games. I get what Roy was trying to do - if he could have hit Lyon out of the attack with a few overs of destructive T20-influenced batting, it might have shifted the tactical advantage in England’s favour. But given the lead, Lyon could afford to lose any number of runs, as long as Roy missed one in the end. As it happened, he missed the first one, but even if he’d missed the 20th, it would have worked out fine for Australia.
It was great(ish) to see Smith bat like that. I felt much the same about Amir, having seen him at Lords against Australia*. Such an exciting talent that, however you feel about the punishment, it’s good to see him action.
*Ponting in 2010 form facing this skinny 18 year old, and Pakistan have the cheek to put 6 men round the bat and it’s totally justified because he has the ball going round corners and Ponting is basically guessing about where to put his bat. Genuinely amazing to watch.
Not only that, but it’s very rare that a batsman in a one-day game is facing a spinner on a fifth-day pitch with cracks and bowlers’ follow-through footmarks to deal with. You just have to change your batting technique under those circumstances.
Because I live in the US, and don’t follow cricket anywhere near as closely as I used to do when I lived in Australia, I’m not as familiar with the England team as I would have been twenty years ago, when I knew every player and could offer a decent analysis of what changes they might need to make for the second test. Still, based on watching this test, I found this analysis interesting.
His central argument appears to be that this loss can’t really be blamed on poor player selection, or on poor performances by the English players. Rather, he argues that English cricket has basically ignored the “red-ball game” in favor of “white-ball talents,” and as a result they just don’t have enough players who are good enough to really compete at the international test level. I’d be curious to hear what England fans, and other cricket fans who watch more cricket than I do, think about this argument.
I think a big factor in this particular loss was Anderson’s injury, and I don’t think anyone is really to blame for that, shit happens. Some players could have performed better and I’m not convinced about Root’s captaincy (he got the job as the only realistic option and that’s pretty much still the case, ideally someone else would be captain and this would allow Root to focus solely on his batting - it’s been suggested before, but it’s not totally wacko to bring in Morgan as captain). But overall I think that’s a fair argument - see post #263 in this thread.
Oops! Somehow I missed that post. 
In fairness, that post may have been triggered by seeing the article you linked! But it’s been on the cards for a while - not just in the lacklustre performances but in the increasing difficulty of answering the question, “Yes, but if you drop X, who would replace him?”. Development of Test players clearly hasn’t been a priority for the ECB for a while, and now that chicken is coming home to get slaughtered.
I have some sympathy with the commercial arguments that, if you want to even half-fill a stadium in summer, a T20 or day/night ODI will sell a lot more tickets than the third day of a four-day FC match will. People like to see a match from beginning to end; especially non-afficionados, who do have to be brought in to the game. But the result of that plus the charge for the World Cup has been to push long-from cricket to the fringes. Add in the international financial incentives for players deciding what kind of cricketer they want to be and Test cricket is very much trying to ice-skate uphill. This is of course not a problem specific to English cricket, but it’s definitely being thrown into sharp relief right now.
Nope.
Don’t be a fast bowler kids, it’ll break you.
Couldn’t disagree more. Smith, Warner and Bancroft got on the wrong side of an Australian, “won’t someone think of the children” witch hunt. They were set for ICC mandated 1 match ban until the ACB got their knickers in a knot. I find the English fans particularly hypocritical given the revelations of numerous English bowlers admitting to using foreign substances on the ball, and Broad and Anderson luckily escaping censure for roughing up the ball with their spikes. Even then, what really blew my top was at the conclusion of Smiths 1st innings knock, one of the finest displays of tenacious batting I’ve seen in recent years, and he was still booed by no small amount of ‘fans’.
As an Aussie working in London, I was copping an absolute hammering on Thursday and Friday. Coming in to work on Monday, not a peep.
I wasn’t even nasty about, I didn’t rub anyone’s noses in it (much)
Schoolboy error by your colleagues there. Having worked with Australians, Saffers, Kiwis, Pakistanis and Indians in various different jobs, I have learned the hard way to keep my mouth shut until at least tea on Day 4*. Anything else is just a hostage to fortune.
*And even then I’m conscious of the enormous gamble I’m taking.
And the one match ban was precisely where the ACB had their knickers aligned.
Until virtually every sponsor ACB sponsor told them that if the ACB didn’t come down like a tonne of bricks they would take their cash and walk. Several majors did.
Prime Minister Turnbull was on the blower to that singular grease ball (ACB Chairman) David Peever.
The Australian Sports Commission expressed outrage and threatened to withdraw funding support from the sport at junior and club levels.
It was quite simply an existential threat to the ACB.
Then magically CEO James Sutherland is on a plane to South Africa, the ACB having just the previous day sent “High Performance Manager” Pat Howard on instructions to hold an enquiry to hose the situation down.
The ACB’s tin ear thinking initially that the affair was a tempest in a tea cup because everybody else has been rumbled doing it, and not so ineptly.
Their action has cost 10s of millions in lost revenue in the current sponsorship cycle and likely more in future cycles.
Financial support of junior and club cricket has been cut, and will need to be cut more in future years if broadcasters decide to play hardball.
It costs more for kids to play the game. I’m remain intractably ropeable about it.
As I said back when this story first broke, this wasn’t some frustrated bowler who made a bad but understandable snap decision to cheat after being hammered for a few boundaries. It was some of the senior members of the team getting together in the locker room and conspiring together about the best way to cheat without getting caught.
What you call a “think of the children” witch hunt, I call an appropriately stern response to a serious issue. I happened to make a visit home to Australia in June and July last year, a few months after the suspensions were handed down, and I don’t think I encountered a single Aussie cricket fan who disagreed with the length of the bans. That includes the friend I spoke about in my previous post, who is a cricket fanatic who can name every Australian Ashes touring team, in batting order, going back to the 1930s. It includes my mother, who records and watched every ball of the Ashes tour. It includes friends and relatives, some of whom don’t really care about cricket at all, and some of whom love it. And it includes strangers I spoke to in pubs and coffee shops.
If it took pressure from sponsors and the public and politicians to get the ACB to do the right thing, then I’m glad they applied that pressure. None of it was done lightly. Smith is one of the greatest batsmen of all time, and the fact that so many cricket-mad and victory-obsessed Aussies supported the ban says something about how seriously it was taken.
You might be right, but how other teams and their fans behave is not really my concern here. I want MY national team to win fair and square, and I want anyone on my team who cheats to be appropriately punished.
As I said earlier, because I live in the US I don’t follow cricket as closely as I used to. If you’re right about the English bowlers, and about Broad and Anderson—and I have no reason to doubt you—then my main response is that they should receive similar punishment, not that the Aussies should have given our guys a slap on the wrist.