SA 50/3 in reply.
England’s first innings yesterday was very frustrating, the stereotypical “everyone getting starts, no one going on” innings with scores of 34, 38, 35, 47 and 29 - Ollie Pope ended on 61* for the highest score of the innings.
Australia had a similar looking scorecard in their test against NZ, except that one of them stayed in and got 215 - Labuschagne has been unstoppable since he came in to replace Smith in the summer Ashes.
Heh- that was my attempt at humour. He’s still scoring runs at a pretty good average but by his standards of the Ashes that is a slump.
Sitting in Paris, so haven’t seen any cricket- draw in the Test vs NZ?
Dead Cat I saw your post re the English slump- it hardly seems a slump to me (or collapse- forget the terminology).
Jonathan Agnew nails it, as usual: “it is a question of two fragile batting line ups”. SA 215/8 at the close, 54 behind.
England doing better today - 171/2 - when was the last time England were 171/2? - 217 ahead, with two days to play.
A pretty decent Test match in the end, SA surviving 130 overs before being Stokesed in the final hour of play. Deserved win for England, albeit both sides struggled with injuries and illness. Series nicely poised at 1-1. I’m sure both teams will be glad of the 9 day break that follows before the next Test.
And England win with 9 overs to go in the fifth day. Great play from both teams in their second innings - England to build their lead, SA to keep their nerve and get close to the draw. Fantastic cricket and (as both captains pointed out in their post-match interviews) something of an advert for the five-day game.
Decent first day for England in the third, closing at 224/4. OK, so the scoring is slow, but Stokes is at the crease, and if they can see a bit more shine off the new ball tomorrow morning, there is the opportunity to accelerate.
In other news, I see Moeen Ali has had a bit of a whinge about always being the first one blamed for England’s defeats. Well Mo, my recollection is that was usually justified by you consistently playing silly shots to get out when patience was required, while not setting the pitch alight with the ball. Hope you come back stronger.
With England it’s impossible to say whether they’ll get to 450 or 280. Either is possible - probably the latter is more likely.
Well, England have just declared on 499/9, with Pope finishing 135*, and Curran and Wood coming in late on to do what Buttler should do, but he’s been rubbish.
Some rules oddness a little earlier, when Root declared when Wood was given out, but it turned out to be a No Ball and so the wicket was overturned, and so was the declaration… but there’s a bit of chat around whether the rules say he could do that.
My take on it is the rules about declarations probably don’t allow for that, but a good, pragmatic decision by the umpires to allow him to reverse it, given it was based on what turned out to be wrong information (it was pretty obvious that the strategy at that point was to declare as soon as England reached 500 or lost a wicket, whichever came first).
SA 60/2 and facing a fight tomorrow. It appears there’s not much in the pitch - yet - if I were SA I’d be treating this almost like a second innings, looking to bat as long as possible. They can’t win this game, prolonging their first innings is their best chance of a draw.
SA fell over today, losing 10 wickets in a shortened day and leaving it all for them to do to save the game tomorrow. If England can get any time at all out in the middle, you’d back them to win!
England have been transformed into a proper test team. But South Africa’s batting has been so so poor.
They’ve wrapped it up comfortably enough this morning, despite 28 off a Root over as he failed to get his fivefer. A good win and some promising performances, but there’s plenty of time for this to be another false dawn. I, as ever, remain hopeful, but SA have a lot of problems of their own, and folded like a proverbial folding thing in this Test. So let’s not get carried away. But one very good thing is they have gone for some young players rather than taking my suggestion of Ballance.
Yes, it wouldn’t be surprising to see England throwing it all away with an 8-for-40 collapse in the next Test. But it’s a young team, winning Tests away is hard and the good news is that they’ve started to shade in some of the boxes that have been empty for a few years now - runs from top-order players not called Root or Stokes, wickets for the spinners and the seam attack not turning into pie-throwers when the ball stops moving around. And they’ve won by an innings without their first-choice opener, first-choice spinner and first-choice pace bowler.
South Africa, meanwhile, look to be sliding into a hole that England will find familiar. They’ve lost a lot of big names - Amla, de Villiers, Steyn, Morkel - in relatively short order and new players haven’t come through. Philander and du Plessis are on the way out. That leaves a big hole in the batting line up between Elgar and de Kock, currently being filled by a rotating cast of new faces averaging less than 30, while the bowling looks toothless when the pitch isn’t helping the quicks. (Rabada getting himself banned really doesn’t help. Nor does management turnover, contract disputes, no money and the constant bleed of players to Kolpacks).
Day 3 of the final Test, and South Africa have folded over the last couple of sessions, and have been bowled out 217 behind. England will likely bat again.
Wood has been excellent this game, both with the bat yesterday and his 5 wickets this innings. Him and Archer opening the bowling could be quite a handful over the next few years, if he can keep himself fit!
Buttler failed again. The rest of the batting order is slowly, but it seems surely, getting itself into some kind of decent state, with runs coming from people other than Root or Stokes, although our first innings 400 wasn’t exactly a batting masterclass - Crawley’s 66 is the lowest high score of a Test Match 400+ score ever.
England were heading for a fairly average 330-ish with several batsmen getting in and then not going on until Wood and Broad sloshed 80 off 8 overs for the last wicket. This was put into perspective when South Africa finished the day on 83-6.
Good to see Mark Wood getting a chance and doing well. He’s had terrible luck with injuries and was in danger of being stereotyped as a bang-it-in one day bowler. There’s a lot of competition for England seam-bowling places at the moment (not that any sane seam bowler wants to tour Sri Lanka), which is a good thing as we head into the post-Anderson era.
For SA, this is what happens when a team is in a slump. Nortje bowled well without much backup and they had England 160-4 and 270-7 only to lose the plot. They shuffled the batting, brought back Bavuma and he failed. De Kock ended up batting with the tail again, and just when it looked that they might avoid the follow-on the lost they last 3 in 4 overs.
Well, SA made slightly heavy weather of getting the last few runs, but the result was never seriously in doubt following an excellent partnership between new captain de Kock and Bavuma. England never quite got going in their innings and the total proved just short. They really missed the hitting of Buttler and (especially) Stokes, I feel.
OK - so, we’re back, kind of.
As was always likely to be the case once we had brilliant weather in late April, through May and most of June, the Test series starting today between England and the West Indies has a start delayed due to rain. Sod’s law.
Still, the first international cricket since the lockdown is about to start, in front of no crowds, first at Southampton and then up to Old Trafford. For those not aware of why/what’s going on - this is essentially because both grounds have hotels on site, so they have “bio-secured” (whatever that means) the whole venue, have the players live on site and then practice and play in the arena. There’s loads of other Covid stuff going on (no neutral umpires, no saliva for shining the ball, no crowds and much more besides) but, at least, we’re going to get some cricket, in a thus far barren summer.
England owe West Indies and Pakistan (the summer’s later tourists - playing in the same venues) a huge debt for agreeing to come to an island that hasn’t got on top of Covid properly by any stretch; a debt I hope is remembered in future ICC deliberations about divvying up money. I won’t hold my breath and have no problem with the players from the tourists who have declined the opportunity to tour; good that they were given the opportunity to have their say.
England’s side, whilst not yet confirmed, seems broadly like the side that won in SA at the turn of the year. Bess is the spinner, rather than Leach (now fit) or Moeen (back in the fold - though I suspect is being looked at for the limited overs games). It looks like Broad has been dropped for Anderson. Archer and Wood probably together to try and bowl pace when the ball may not swing, due to the regs on ball preparation. With Root missing for the birth of his kid, Stokes is captain and Burns is back opening with Crawley and Denly shuffling down to 3 and 4 respectively. They are probably in a shoot out for a long term place in the side, once Root comes back.
The Windies bowling attack looks more than handy - Roach, Gabriel, Holder all pretty swift - and Cornwall’s spin, at least by the stats, looks like it will be pretty good too. Question is whether they will score enough runs. Most of their top order has struggled for runs. This is a very different series though, so who knows how each player will react.
More generally, cricket in England looks like it will get under way for the recreational game on Saturday. The county game is going to run in August and September - a short red ball competition run on regional groups of 6, with some sort of final at Lord’s in early October and the T20 competition pushed into September in the hopes that, by then, some small crowds might be possible.
NZ clearly best placed to have actual cricket as we know it played but we’ll need to wait for the back end of the year for that. Victoria being locked down not helpful/looking good for “normal” cricket in Australia once the season start - but a lot of water to pass under the bridge. India have agreed to tour Australia in the Aussie summer - I imagine that a lot of eyes are on how these internationals in England go. Plenty to learn in the hopes that cricket can crack on despite the current global health situation.
Whether all of this is wise, I leave up to you.
Ahh, cricket as I remember it! Not actually raining, but not quite dry enough to get on with the game. I believe they’ve gone for lunch.
Will be interesting to see if Broad is dropped for this one. That may be the plan, but with the clouds forecast all week is pretty much tailor made for him.
The WI are missing some of their players who (reasonably) didn’t want to come on this tour - they will miss Hetmeyer’s runs, I think. But their bowling looks strong, and our batting lineup is still new and potentially fragile,especially in this first game without Root. This is their best chance at a win, and being 1-0 down will get England nervous. Of course, we got hammered in the first test in South Africa and went on to win that one. I think it’ll be a surprise to see WI get anything from the series.
England win the toss. England will bat.
Immediately following the toss, Stokes shook Holder’s hand - messing up the social distancing straight away. It’s going to be weird.
Broad definitely dropped - Wood, Archer, Anderson, Stokes, Bess are England’s bowlers.
Windies have not picked Cornwall and have Chase to bowl spin.
Windies are happy to have lost the toss by the sounds of things. Good overhead conditions for bowling, Stokes claims the wicket is dry underneath. We’ll see