None of this matters in the slightest. Was the ball going to hit any of the three stumps in the umpire’s judgement? If yes, give him out. Who cares whether he is getting them by hitting off stump, at the base, on the bails, at the outer edge, on middle and off or anywhere else?
DRS has been fantastic in my view, simply for waking umpires up to the fact that more is out than they previously thought. The game is already too heavily weighted to the batsmen. Get them triggered - they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, when we’ve years of evidence from DRS that balls they previously thought weren’t going on to hit the stumps were going on to take out leg stump half way up - or the left arm spinner is effectively straightening the ball to take out middle pole (another area that umps never used to give but have had their error corrected).
As for Broad - and to repeat myself for the third time - the cupboard is that bare, there’s no one else to do it, it’s a bad situation but not as bad as letting a bad captain continue to captain badly. People assumed Botham would be a good captain - he wasn’t. No one really thought Morgan would be a good captain, turned out he is (at least in white ball cricket).
I’ve got to say, I don’t quite understand the point you’re trying to make here.
Is Broad getting more wickets with DRS than he would have gotten without it? Most likely, yes. But every wicket that he takes is someone who was, according to the laws of the game, actually out. I’m now sure how and why Broad should be singled out as a beneficiary of a system that (a) is showing us how bad umpires are at judging many LBW appeals, and (b) applies to all bowlers, and not just to Broad.
The underlying argument here seems to be that cricket was better when we let the umpires make the decisions, and lived with the fact that their human error was part of the game. I understand that position, and indeed I used to lean that way myself. But as time goes on, I’ve come to accept that, the more correct decisions get made, the better the game will be, and if having more correct decisions requires relying a bit more on systems like DRS, I’m happy to live with that.
The same thing’s been happening with baseball here in the states, where some people want to move to a system where technology calls balls and strikes. The technology itself allows us to see how bad umpires sometimes are at this. If their errors were completely random and always affected all teams similarly, it might be acceptable to leave the human error in play, but just about every long-range statistical study of officiating in sports show that umpires’ errors are much more likely to favor the home team.
None of this is intended as a slight on umpires, or a comment on their integrity. They have an incredibly difficult job, and the studies suggest that home-team “favoritism” among umpires is almost completely unconscious and unintentional. I completely understand why Joel Wilson gave Ben Stokes not out against Lyon at the end of the third test, even though the replay showed him to be out. In some ways, baseball umpires have a consistently harder job, because for almost every pitch, they have to judge exactly where a ball goes and compare it to an imaginary box drawn in mid-air. And it’s a different size for each batter.
Australia have retained the Ashes, and England have to win the next one to draw the series.
Not sure I see them doing it. The Test we won was against an Australia that was weakened without Smith and required one of the best innings ever to achieve. They are undoubtedly going to mess with the batting order again in some way, and so the England test shit show will march on.
3-1 seems about fair to be honest. If we’d have got a draw here, it would be been unwarranted. A draw and then winning at The Oval would have been daylight robbery. Interesting to see what England do from here - there are nominally Test Championship points on the line in the final game, the possibility of at least not losing the series and so on. Equally, Australia will be going full bore for their first Test series win up here since 2001. Not sure it’s the time to just chuck in new faces - on the other hand, why keep going with guys that aren’t going to make it? I think, on balance, I would advocate changes for the 5th Test, primarily at 2 and 3 (pushing Root back to 4).
3-1 seems about fair to be honest. If we’d have got a draw here, it would be been unwarranted. A draw and then winning at The Oval would have been daylight robbery.QUOTE]
I rarely disagree with you, but I don’t buy this as a concept, generally speaking. OK, New Zealand deserved to share the World Cup - that was a big exception. But England deserved to win at Headingley. Australia deserved to win if they didn’t waste a review or if Lyon doesn’t crack under pressure. But that’s not how things turned out. Also, England were well on top of the drawn match and could easily have won that given just a bit more time. OK, Smith was absent - but as has been pointed out, if your team is heavily dependent on one player, and they get injured, do you ‘deserve’ to win? See also: Glen McGrath.
If England had managed to bat out the overs today, the result would absolutely be warranted. And if that were followed by a winning performance at the Oval, why would they not deserve to win the Ashes?
Anyway, the main point of course is Australia have clearly been the better team thus far and do in fact deserve to retain the urn. I want to see England do all they can to square the series at the Oval. Unfortunately I have no idea how that might be achieved.
ETA: a road like pitch so we can try to score as many as Smith?
Dead Cat, I think I agree with Cumbrian rather than your take. Australia has been the better team for 75% of the time (not saying they are a good team by any means). Your post is littered with “ifs” rather slanted one way. If England has more time they could have won, if England had batted the time they deserved a draw, if (Australia) is dependent on one player you don’t deserve to win.
Anyway, wouldn’t be much of a series if we all agreed.
See Root has come out and said his team can be proud of the determination etc they showed. It may just be a “Rally round the flag” speech (although not exactly Henry V stuff) but his team has been bowled out for under 200, losing 8 wickets for 170.
My most vivid memory of Abdul Qadir is this 2010 article about his stint with Carlton in 1998. He was obviously playing against a lower standard of opposition but still did some remarkable things at 43.
I agree that as things have turned out, Australia fully deserve to win the series. What I am arguing against is the notion that if England had in fact played a bit better, they wouldn’t have deserved it.
How much better would England have had to play to “deserve” something out of this series? I would argue substantially better. Not hanging on by a thread in this match to take it to The Oval, relying on a miracle at Headingley and needing Stokes again to drag them to a total that Australia actually managed to bat out against reasonably comfortably in the end at Lord’s but without which, we’d have lost.
One doesn’t get to simply make the argument - remove Smith and these are evenly matched sides - without also having to answer the question, what if you got rid of Stokes? Without Stokes, it would be 4-0.
Ah but what if both weren’t there? Well, I also challenge the idea that Smith is the only difference between the sides. He is a very significant difference but Australia’s bowling attack is substantially better than England’s. In a composite bowling attack, only Broad would get in it (Stokes would obviously get in to a composite side - and bowl too because he’s the all rounder - but that would principally be due to his batting). Australia’s 3rd and 4th seamers have been better than Woakes and Overton. Archer shows immense promise and I look forward to watching him in future, but he’s not bowled better than Cummins or Hazelwood.
A composite of the two teams would probably only have Stokes and Broad play from 4 down - for Head and whichever 3rd seamer you care to mention from Australia. Labuschagne and Wade have comfortably outperformed the non-Stokes elements of our middle order. Paine has outcaptained Root (not difficult). That you’d probably pick Denly in a composite side says how weak Australia’s top three are but otherwise they are comfortably better than England.
Ultimately, what I am looking for in sport is evidence that the team I am watching can win in repeatable ways. This suggests that they don’t need superhuman efforts or large slices of luck to get over the line - that their tactics and play exhibit a plan that the opposition are going to have to nullify. I stand by what I said, Australia deserve to win this series, anything else would have been due to victories in “non-repeatable fashion” and barring a total capitulation by them at The Oval that’s exactly what they’re going to get.
For England, a new coach will inevitably bring new ideas. It will be interesting to see what happens post The Oval. There are several players that need to go but whether they go for youth or back to the well with some of the players that may have been jettisoned too early (or both in the case of Pope) only time will tell. Roy, Denly (harsh given his grit over the last couple of matches but I’d prefer to bring in someone younger to try and push the side forward in its rebuild) and Bairstow (to kick him up the arse and force him to fix the deficiency which is seeing him bowled too frequently) all need to go, I reckon. Two of these will happen - getting shot of Bairstow (or anyone else in the inner sanctum of the England dressing room) would be a real indication that the coach is a man of his own mind - I can’t see it happening, but hope I am wrong.
Yeah - I am a disciple of George Dobell, so it’s unsurprising that I agree with the vast majority of that and have battered on at length here about several features of the latter half of the article. Just so as you know I don’t have any original ideas…
I don’t think we disagree on all that much (though surely Burns would get into the composite side, he’s been by far the best opener in the series, though that’s not saying much). My point is mainly that England deserved to win at Headingley, they were only ‘lucky’ insofar as they got a helpful decision on that lbw (which while Hawkeye said it was out, I believe it’s still unclear as to whether the ball may in fact have straightened on clipping the front pad). The rest of it, while unusual (and to use your term, probably not repeatable), was not luck, it was skill by Stokes and poor play by Australia (burning the review, Lyon dropping the ball). Australia played really well for 90% of the game to reach a position in which they win 99% of the time, then blew it.
Now, I share your disappointment and frustration at what might, if you’re feeling very generous, be called the inconsistency of the England side. Added to that is their complete failure to take any sort of momentum from the Stokes miracle. And I don’t particularly blame the players - no doubt they are preparing as well as they can, doing their best etc. The fault lies elsewhere, as we have discussed ad nauseam. But sport is a results business, and I don’t think England needed to be ‘substantially’ better to get a draw yesterday - they just needed to bat slightly better than they managed in the first innings (admittedly on a deteriorating pitch, but still, it wasn’t really Lyon that did the damage, was it?). I know I’m one for foolish optimism, but if one can take anything positive at all from the game, it’s that they at least batted out 90+ overs, getting well into the evening session - I was actually expecting it to be over shortly after lunch. So I think there is a bit of progress there. It still isn’t good enough, but as you say, the Aussie bowling attack is actually pretty good.
Burns would obviously be in a composite side - in point of fact the top 3 would probably all be English because the Australian top order have been terrible. Stokes and Broad are the only others that would get in the side. The series has been won from 4 down though, since both sides have had a fairly bad time of it at the top of the innings - the odd innings from Burns and Root aside.
Burns is someone who has exhibited a level of self awareness and graft that could probably do with being replicated elsewhere in the England side. He was awful against Ireland, so went away and fixed his failing coming forward, rode his luck to get a ton at Edgbaston but has subsequently seen a lot of short deliveries, and in the gap between Headingley and Old Trafford, went back to work out how he was going to play that, and did will in the first innings here. He is willing to work on his game in a way that several of England’s batsmen seem unwilling to do. Burns is not going to let his opportunity go by without fighting for it tooth and nail. He’s not out of the woods yet, I would say (he’s going to see nothing in his own half from Kagiso Rabada this winter for instance) but it’s pleasing to see someone rectify their faults and put shots away that are going to get them out. This is old school thinking and I like it. It’s not good enough that several of the rest of the side aren’t doing this.
In one, limited, sense, you are right. If you don’t take the 20 wickets required, you don’t “deserve” to win a Test match. On the other hand, if this were boxing, Australia would be going away on points in pretty much all the matches and Headingley would be a wide points victory for Australia overturned with a Rocky like last round knockout.
Again, we largely agree, and as always your analysis is much better than what I can offer. My last word on the subject is that it wouldn’t be sport if upsets didn’t happen, and in many upsets the underdog does indeed deserve their victory. But over a series of 5 matches, the superior side will triumph much more often than in one-off contests, and so it has proved here.
Elsewhere in world cricket, fantastic news as Afghanistan record their first Test win - against Bangladesh - and in grand style too; a 224 run victory is a pretty good hiding.
It is, in fact, their second Test win, since they beat Ireland.
Afghanistan have played 3 test matches and won 2 of them, a record equalled only by Australia’s early efforts. Bangladesh have lost their first test against every opposition that they’ve played.
They got a bit lucky with the weather too - the got an over or two in early, but then it rained all day and instead of a full day to get the 4 wickets they needed, they only had about an hour. But they got them!
Well Dobell’s thoughts on Roots’ press conference were the same as my own- and I hadn’t seen the article at the time. Great minds (or fools never differ).