Fair enough. The commentary I read suggested one or two players could have got into better positions to defend against it.
I suppose the question now is whether this represents the blossoming of Marsh as a Test bowler, or if it’s just a flash in the pan.
Fuck me. Apart from Smith, these really are two pretty woeful batting sides. Someone on another message board that I frequent opined that it’s probably the worst two batting teams to contest an Ashes series since WWII, and right now I’d be inclined to agree.
Amazing catch by Burns to end the Aussie innings. Great work by Jofra Archer to get 6.
Erm…maybe?
I think a lot of the time you get a better idea of what is happening at the wicket off the TV. Field placing wise I thought Root was, yet again, odd today. But bailed out by Archer and latterly Curran doing a better than good job (Smith missing a straight one also a help).
We’re ahead and now need to press home the advantage. As has been pointed out by Mhendo though, aside from Smith, dear lord these sides are not good with the bat. The bowlers are decent but not so good that someone shouldn’t be able to put a score together.
Best bit of today was Cummins ridiculously reviewing his lbw. Didn’t even need to see the ball tracking in the crowd - once it was obvious he hadn’t hit it, it was so plumb. Waving him off before it even got to the ball tracking was pretty fun.
Something you might have missed, being at the ground, was that it seemed like Smith, at the non-striker’s end, who strongly encouraged the review. As one of the commentators said, Smith is clearly a better batsman than he is an umpire. 
Also shows Smith isn’t absorbed with his own interests ie saving the review for himself.
Probably the second best day for England to watch of the summer, Cumbrian, after Stokes at Headingly, you picked a good one!
Long way to go though, and England do have a lead, but it’s not a massive one. England’s last few innings have shown some batsmen showing a little grit, and we’ll need more of that today. Hopefully we’ll get to see an actual top-order partnership, and maybe Joe Root scoring more than Steve Smith’s lowest score of the series (80).
Curran has come back in and shown that he shouldn’t have been dropped, but bowling hasn’t really been the issue for the series (or, indeed, the last few years of problems).
Well, England’s lead is now over 200, with the loss of only two wickets. If I were a betting man right now, I’d put money on England to win this match and draw the series. If that happens, it would be the first drawn Ashes series since 1972.
And, to be honest, I think it would probably be a fair result. England haven’t been great, but apart from Smith, neither have Australia. On the other hand, if the Aussies come back and pull of a victory here, I’ll be very happy.
ENG lead by 382 with two tail end wickets in hand.
An unspectacular but thoroughly sound team batting effort, of the caliber any cricket fan would expect from a Test.
ENG will win this by 200 runs and two sessions to spare, even if Smith gets 200.
Fair squeeze.
The game will be over today and hopefully so will the Paine reign. Even with loust fielding it was a risk sending England in- and one that wasn’t necessary.
AUS 1-18 with Harris bowled by a handy Broad delivery that kept a touch low.
Best AUS opening partnership of the series! ROFL
Warner continues his dud run and AUS are 2 for less than 30 as usual.
The usual suspects now hold whatever faint hope AUS has of making a fight of it on the last day.
Be interesting to see if Leach can run through the order on a wearing pitch with a well padded target to defend.
Leach starts well with a nice bit of flight to draw Labruschagne well forward, slightly over balances and lifts his back foot, enough turn to beat the bat and Bairstow has the bails off.
Neatly done.
It was. I must say, I do love a stumping.
Smith gone for 23, and Marsh just dismissed by Joe Root, fercrissakes. It will all be over soon.
I must say, it’s been a very entertaining series, despite (because of?) the massive flaws in both batting lineups. As I said yesterday, a drawn series is probably a fair result, and at least the Australians get to retain the Ashes.
According to Sir Geoffrey in the highlights, the later stumping of Wade was more like a run out, he was so far down the pitch.
I agree that England deserved to draw the series, but also Australia deserved to retain the urn. They were on top more than England, and Smith’s runs plus some top class pace bowling was enough to get them over the line. You have to think that they would have put up more of a fight in this game were the Ashes still on the line.
Any comments about my putative England team from a few posts ago still welcome, in particular why Ballance doesn’t seem to be in the frame for a recall.
Think of the discarded Australian opener Joe Burns. 16 Tests, four centuries and averages 40. Marcus Harris 9 Tests 2 50’s and averages 24.
Congratulations to Australia for deservedly retaining the Ashes, and kudos to England for getting up off the floor and squaring the series.
But while picking apart dodgy batting techniques and dubious selections is fun, I don’t think everyone here is giving Steve Smith enough credit. He scored 774 in 7 innings - to put that in context, Stokes got 440 runs at 55 and Labuschagne 350 at 50, so Smith was just about as good as the next two players - on either side - put together (and it’s a fair drop after those three - no other England player averaged 40 and no other Australian averaged 35). Put another way, if he hadn’t been hit on the head he would only have to have scored another 200 runs in potentially 3 innings to beat Bradman’s all-time record for runs in a Test series.
Take Smith away from Australia, and they could easily have lost 4-1.
Incidentally, somewhere in the archives (couldn’t find it, but I remember seeing it) is a newspaper pundit’s comment on crazy selection decisions, around the end of the 2010-2011 Ashes. Something along the lines of “whoever thought Steve Smith was a Test-class Number 6?”
Steve Smith was definitely the difference between the sides,and nobody else was really in the running for the Australian man of the series.
England batting starting to look better at the end of that series. I don’t think Ballance will come back, nor do I think Foakes will come in for Bairstow, but Burns is selling in at the top of the order and Denly has at least shown he’s playing the correct game. It’s still not brilliant, but these are the guys we’ve got and I suspect we’ll be sticking with them for the winter tours.
My issue is that even if Burns and Denly settle as a decent opening pair (which would be a cracking result and a real positive outcome from this series), if that leaves Root at 3 and Stokes at 4, then what? Bairstow 5, Buttler 6, then the bowlers (some of whom - Curran, Woakes, Archer - can be handy with the bat, but they’re not quite Test-class all-rounders yet). Basically everyone is batting one position too high in the order (and Bairstow has no form whatsoever at the moment, apart from burning reviews).
Cicero, I’ve never heard of this Joe Burns chap - why was he discarded, then?
merrick, you’re right about Smith, but as someone else pointed out upthread, if you’re going to remove him from the equation, you should also remove Stokes, which means England lose at Headingley. My brief assessment of the series is that England were poor at Edgbaston and deserved to lose, were on top of most of the game at Lord’s and would have won given another session, would have lost the game at Headingley 99 times out of 100, came closer to a battling draw at Old Trafford than they have done for several years but ultimately deserved to lose, and were good value for their win at the Oval. So I think you could say a ‘fair’ result from the series would be 3-2 to Australia. But that includes the full-point ‘swing’ at Headingley, which shows that England weren’t all that far away from an upset, even if it wasn’t in a ‘reproducible’ fashion. Put another way, if the 1877 series had ended with this outcome, no-one would have been talking about the death of English cricket.
I also wonder, given the manner of his dismissals at the Oval, whether Smith might have got out to Anderson had the latter been playing? I mean, we saw how lost Australia were without Smith, it’s easy to forget that we were missing an all-time great for almost the entire series (and in fact his presence in the first Test, through no fault of his own, was counter-productive). On such small margins can series turn.
I think this is about right, although I’d probably score it 2 to 1.5, rather than 3 to 2. Aussies definitely didn’t deserve to win 3, and England probably didn’t quite deserve to win 2. I still think a drawn series was, overall, a fair result.
Again, I think this is right, but with a caveat.
Jimmy Anderson has been a historically great bowler, and has served England fantastically for 15 years. But when you’re a 37-year-old fast bowler who has played almost 150 tests and almost 200 one-day internationals (not to mention another 500 first class and List A matches), some physical deterioration is inevitable, and the chances of injury or chronic pain increase with every passing match. I guess what I’m saying here is that, if you’re playing someone this old, with this many miles on the clock, then he’s going to break down sometime, and that’s a risk you take by keeping him in the side. This is not intended as a criticism of the selectors; I’d have put him in there too. It’s simply an observation that Anderson’s injury can’t be put down merely to “bad luck”; this outcome was predictable, even if the exact timing of it could not be accurately forecast.
Yes, very true, and the same goes for Broad of course. Without him as well, our attack could have been rather toothless. Certainly Warner would have likely doubled his average :). That’s why I backtracked on the side I posted earlier: relying on Anderson, Broad, Stokes, and Archer as your four fast bowlers would be trusting way too much to luck.
There is also the fact that your sole plan to get someone out can’t revolve around a particular bowler being available all the time. And it’s all hypothetical anyway - perhaps Smith would have swatted Anderson around just as easily as he did the others.