And a Test match would last a month. You’ve seen the delay a review takes.
Presumably Teuton wasn’t advocating a delay in the game for each delivery to be checked and I’ve never seen anybody advocating that as it’s patently ridiculous. However I would like to see the third umpire given the authority to signal to the umpire when they see a no ball in normal play.
Watling gets a double century and New Zealand declare with a lead if 252. England have about 110 overs to weather.
That is not the law;
21.5.2 the bowlers foot must land with some part of the foot, whether grounded or raised ii) behind the popping crease.
ie the same foot placement that would see a batter give out stumped would be a fair delivery by a bowler.
I didn’t know that! That makes the call much closer, of course.
Square leg umpire needs to judge the majority of calls, with back up from the third umpire. There is time between deliveries even with a spin bowler to check as long as they avoid the theatre of showing people that they are checking. Just a glance would do it.
The problem seems to be that they don’t want to put in a system that wouldn’t be perfect.
Seems like we are heading for the third innings defeat in a test this week. Maybe within 24 hours. Not sure with all the time zones.
More so than that.
If making a judgement with camera technology from in line with the popping crease is problematic, it makes the visual and live assessment from the umpire standing back a couple of feet from the stumps four feet from the popping crease an impossibility.
Therefore “benefit of doubt” on the legality of a delivery goes to the bowler.
At some point recently the umpiring fraternity have decided that they will not call “no ball” except for the most egregious (and then only through habit) because in international cricket batters now get an automatic review on their dismissal. (and bugger how the rest of the cricket playing levels accommodate this) and taken the judgement that this major but occasional benefit to the batsmen is counterbalanced by the cost (in this case) of 22 runs from illegal deliveries in a single day’s play, the opportunity to score from the near four overs of rebowled deliveries, the effort from the bowlers to do this and the time penalty to bowl the additional overs within the minimum daily quota.
As that cricketing tragic Oscar Wilde might have said, “To miss one no ball may be regarded as a misfortune, to miss 22 looks like carelessness.”
Note this is also another case of asymmetry in that if a batsmen were to get a life due to losing their wicket off a delivery actually called as “no ball” there is no opportunity for the fielding team to review that call.
England hammered by an innings and 65, with only some late order hitting by Archer and Curran getting us up towards 200.
The disappointment was on the second day, though, when we threw away a great start to finish on a score that was a good hundred runs below par.
Greetings from Hamilton. After being made redundant, I decided to take my “fuck off” money to…well, fuck off. Have been on a jaunt that has taken in the first two days here for the second Test (I am not doing the rest of the match - off to Auckland tomorrow and then out to Australia on the 3rd - ideally I am around to see some BBL when I am out there or maybe even the Boxing Day Test).
I have learned nothing from these two days. NZ are ranked second in world cricket, so they’re good. England are average (I was going to say a side in transition but we’ve been transitioning for about 2-3 years - I think at some point we have to accept we’re mediocre). This is exactly what was shown in Test 1 and England are well up against it here.
I think I have basically had enough of Root as captain. He’s actively bad at captaincy imo - just has no feel for the game. On Day 1, he took Broad off after he got a wicket and had started to ratchet the pressure up; presumably this is because we have a lot of bowlers and he wants to keep spells short to keep them fresh (something he criticised Archer for -!!!- in the last test; you’re the captain, you dictate the spell length you utter cretin). But if you’re feeling the game you probably give Broad another couple as he was looking dangerous.
Curran comes on, Root moves Woakes wider at fine leg, as I say to myself, if it goes fine it’s 4, if it goes wider, a finer fine leg can get around as the boundary is wider there and the outfield is relatively lush. Of course, immediately Curran drifts onto the pads, it gets tickled fine for 4. Curran then bowls on the pads again, shot beats square leg. So Root pushed square leg to the boundary instead of telling Curran to get off the pads. Next scoring shot, on the pads, dropped into the vacant square leg to midwicket area. 1 run.
Meanwhile we manage to take a wicket by bowling 4th/5th stump line. Just stick to the fucking plan and leave your field for it. Make the bowlers bowl to it and if they can’t, take them off. It’s not like he’s short of seam up options, particularly in this game.
He’s a waste of space captaincy wise and it’s damaging his batting. Give it to anyone else - we’ve had this discussion further up thread but I have got to the point where anyone would be better I think, so no need to rehash the names - and let him focus on batting.
NZ meanwhile trundle on, greater than the sum of their parts due to exemplary leadership. I don’t know whether any of their guys would get in a World XI apart from Williamson but they’re a fantastic red ball unit. Their series against India upcoming in Nz should be good and could have done with being longer, as it’s a shootout between 1 and 2 in the rankings.
In other news, I dislike David Warner and think he’s a flat track bully who prospers on pitches and with the Kookaburra that offer no sideways movement. Even still, with more than 3 days to play and him having a chance at Lara’s record and the team still being able to win, that declaration seemed harsh to me. I expect his autobiography will have a chapter all about it claiming he was made to eat shit for his part in SandpaperGate.
Hello fellow cricket tragics. PT your posts make everything a lot clearer and I thank you.
I see Warner broke Bradmans highest score record at Adelaide Oval. I have to be honest- I am disappointed- I believe Bradman would have scored about 800 in the time against such a listless bowling attack. (As with Cumbrian I am not a fan of Warner). I read somewhere that when Steve Waugh scored that memorable double century against the Windies with McGrath the last batsman McGrath jokingly stated after Waugh got out that he was on his way to a century (McGrath).
I thought the Mark Taylor’s decision to declare when 334 not out (equal to Bradman’s highest score) was one of the sports finest moments.
Haydon’s belting of 380 off a hapless and sub-Test standard Zimbabwe to be Australia’s highest TEst innings was just wanton thuggery IMHO though a notable effort of concentration.
Personally I’d have been happier if Paine had declared with Warner also on 334 but a matter of no great import
I agree with you. Further, Brian Lara was a splendid batsman but those two massive innings were on flat pictures against rather mediocre English attacks. Context is so important.
Just an aside but Brian Lara was at the Adelaide Ground when Warner got to 335 not out. When Lara broke the batting record of the immortal Sobers it was Sobers who emerged at the ground at Barbados and congratulated Lara.
Asked if he would have done the same, Lara (who had finished his media commitments) commentated that he was getting changed to go to the the ground to congratulate Warner if he had been given the opportunity.
The batting records of hitting massive scores always seem rather dubious to me. Generally you need flat tracks, ordinary attacks and someone needs to stay with you which tends to diminish the record when they score a lot.
I’d pefer to recall the efforts of Waugh in his 200 in the Windies and reading of McCabe and Trumper (who was possibly a Kiwi) on bad terms than flat track bullies getting massive scores.
January 2016 there was a two-day U16s cricket match between K. C. Gandhi High School and Arya Gurukul School in Mumbai.
Arya Gurukul scored 31 runs in their first innings, bowled out after facing 20 overs.
In reply K. C. Gandhi team declared on 1,465 for 3 with 15yo Pranav Dhanawade scoring 1,009 not out, from 323 balls. They must have been playing on a field the size of a tennis court.
In their second innings Arya Gurukul were dismissed for 52.
One wonders how many were inspired to play on and how many swore off cricket for life as a result.
Bob Willis has died.
He was just before my time - he retired in 1984, when I was 9, and I don’t have any cricketing memories from that far back. But he’s been a voice on Sky for as long as I remember, and one of the better ones. His 8-43 arguably did more to win “Botham’s Ashes” than Botham’s own 149*, which has always niggled me a bit (although it certainly needed both).
It was a great performance, no doubt. But Botham’s knock was just magical. I only followed this match via BBC radio, but when Botham came in, England were 100% done and dusted. Dead as anything I had seen in cricket until then (I was 13). It was just mind-blowing what he had done by the end of that day.
He had planted the doubt in the Aussie mind that Willis so ruthlessly exploited.
Well, I have just has an interesting “day” at the cricket. Having moved on to Melbourne before heading up to Cairns to go the Barrier Reef, I decided to take in the Sheffield Shield game between Victoria and Western Australia at The MCG.
We got 40 overs before play was suspended (at first until 4pm then for the remainder of the day) as the pitch was achieving steepling bounce. Peter Siddle cracked a couple on the head from what looked to me to be reasonably legitimate short deliveries, though if you look at the video online you might argue that they’re back of a length and shouldn’t be taking off like that. He also managed to get several guys fending off around the short leg area. For a guy with not much pace, I was clued in to the pitch being somewhat spicy.
Then Marcus Stoinis got hit around the heart (by Fekete) off a ball that definitely shouldn’t have gone through there - was probably on what should have been a good length. So off everybody trooped and the groundsmen have been rolling the wicket and hoping it will dry out too - apparently there’s too much moisture in the surface and the ball was creating indentations that were helping it fly and these needed to be ironed out.
I’ve not seen much like it in my time watching cricket (though I was at The Oval for the abandoned England-Pakistan game, that wasn’t to do with the pitch). I guess this is meant to be about international cricket so the obvious link is that the next match on that square is the Boxing Day Test v New Zealand. Better get the pitch right for that…
This match at the MCG got abandoned on Day 2. Appreciate that it’s not the strip in use for the Test but that’s still got to be a concern. When I was in NZ I came across a number of people who were making the journey across the Tasman for this Test specifically, so there’s a lot of people potentially to be disappointed.
The MCG centre wicket area has been barely district cricket standard for decades, albeit more more likely to toe busting shooters than helmet rattling.
1955: 3rd Test vs England the pitch was so badly cracking at stumps on day 3 that the curator resorted to watering the pitch during the rest day.
1979 Sarfraz takes 7-1 in 6 overs of inept Australian batting though the pitch was more suited to bocce.
1980: Two Sheffield Shield matches moved to Geelong after complaints about player safety.
1981: Australian captain Greg Chappell threatens the Australian Cricket Board committee room the teams will not take the field due to the an uneven and over-prepared wicket.
1988-89: West Indies captain Viv Richards, looking at a pitch more resembling corrugated iron, says to Allan Border: “Why are you guys preparing a pitch like this, mon? You will get yourself f------ killed!”
1996 MCG switches to drop-in pitches
2005: The Boxing Day Test vs South Africa is delayed by half an hour because of a damp pitch, after curator Tony Ware over watered it on Christmas Day
2017: The MCG pitch for the Ashes receives a “poor” rating from the ICC. On a lifeless deck, England batsman Alastair Cook makes a stirling and remorseless 244 not out with 24 wickets falling in five days.
There was not one outright result in first-class cricket during the entire 2017/18 season at the MCG.
There have been changes to the structure of the drop-in pitches this year in an effort to make them less resembling pre-stressed concrete. Early season results hinted they may be headed the right way but the groundstaff haven’t yet worked out the procedure yet.
The problem is twofold 1) despite the substandard surface 80,000 Victorians and a few others will show up on Boxing Day and 2) the MCG is a football venue first, and a cricket venue second.
Imagine if Old Trafford hosted ManU and cricket on the same surface, rather than adjoining fields.
Personally they should take the game to Bellerieve just to provoke the MCC to demonstrate they have fixed the problem before they get their Test back.
As a Melbourne boy who has spent many years of my life at the MCG, I would like to take issue with some of your comments - but, in all honesty, I can’t.
The MCG pitch has been poor for many years - usually lifeless, occasionally veering towards stone motherless dead. There have been plenty of results, but that’s a consequence of how Test Match cricket is played these days. The pitch is still very slow. The last Ashes test was absolutely dreadful. The new curator tried to spice things up a bit for the Shield match this week- yeah, got that a bit wrong, did the new boy.
I’ll take issue with you about the drop in wickets and football being the problem. They have only come around since the 1980s (Packer cricket invented them so they could play in non-cricket stadiums). So for decades prior, the MCG wickets would be ripped up by football boots every winter. So were the WACA wickets - supposedly the fastest pitches in the world. The SCG still has AFL played on it each winter, and the wicket square isn’t removed. And for decades before the Swans moved up there, it was Rugby League HQ. Ditto - the Gabba. As for moving the Boxing Day game to Bellerive - well, they play AFL there too.
The Adelaide oval was a road for decades - but they moved to drop-in wickets a few seasons ago, and their wickets are now generally regarded as the best in the country.
Apparently the MCG is growing new wickets based on the technology used in Adelaide - but they are a couple of years away still.
They need to get it right.