On the plus side, there haven’t been any giveaways yet - Sibley never got going, Root was a little unlucky to be run out, Stokes got a good ball, and Burns fell to a sharp catch having made a good score. OK, we’re not going to get 400 (let’s be honest, we’re not going to get 300) but 250 is still doable if one of the remaining batsman can stick around, and that might prove to be a defensible total. I wouldn’t say WI have proved Holder made the right decision just yet.
Pope and Buttler double the score, leaving the West Indies looking for wickets with the new ball. 250-4 is presumably not what WI were planning this morning.
Odd-looking decision to play two spinners and then put England in - was it overcast and forecast to swing early?
I think bowling first was a very odd decision. They could have given an extra day’s rest to their seamers, they are playing an extra spinner, and it’s going to be overcast every day of this test so what was so special about today?
I think Fiendish Astronaut asks a very good and pertinent question. No real idea what was going on there and Windies were very nearly screwed when Gabriel looked like he pulled up lame in the morning session. If he’d gone out for good, they’d have had a very tough day. Unless they were worried about being shot out under cloudy skies by England and losing the match in innings 1, they should have batted, with their two spinners.
Pope wasn’t chanceless (but what innings of substance ends with the very first chance given by the batsman? Not many of them) but looked in very good touch. Buttler has probably scored enough already for England to persevere with him in the coming Pakistan series. Rain on Days 2 and 4 mean England are going to have to do something pretty good to win this match I think. A good start would be both of these guys surviving the new ball and then pushing us up to 400. Then we need to get into them.
Draw the favourite I think.
Can anybody explain the WI strategy bowling to Broad?
He was standing outside leg and swinging for the gates and they are setting spread fields and giving him the single?
I think they had money on him getting to fifty.
Seriously, I didn’t think they had a plan. Broad used to be hard to bowl to, because he scores in unorthodox ways. Then he got lamped in the grill and just bowling short was enough. It’s really good to see him get a score.
Is the only purpose of recording leg-byes for the bowler’s and batsman’s statistics? The run outcome is the same and It still counts as a bowled ball, so I find it hard to understand why it’s important enough for the umpire to make a big show of it. Perhaps it’s to give the umpire some exercise. I’m a cricket layman, but it appears that it could even be a viable strategy for a batsman to use his leg for runs, depending on the field set up.
Pretty much. The signals are for the scorer to be able to know from a distance what to write down. You’ve got to be careful to use that tactic because if you’re adjudged as not playing a shot the LBW requirements change in favour of the bowler.
Also you’re not allowed to run leg-byes if (in the umpire’s opinion) you weren’t trying to hit the ball with the bat. It’s very rarely called, and batsmen usually get away with a vague wave of the bat in the general direction of the ball, but it’s on the books in case of someone who is blatantly trying to play football.
137-6 overnight and it looks like the West Indies middle order has juuust done enough to avoid the follow-on, but they won’t be feeling happy, particularly as the forecast rain never showed up.England will be hoping to have a thrash tomorrow and give themselves two days (less rain) to get the wickets.
So, as someone casually interested in cricket, but pretty damn ignorant of the overall game. Questions:
- When they talk about a session, how many are there in a day? It looks to me like 3 - morning, early afternoon, then evening. How many overs are ‘guaranteed’ per session (weather permitting)?
- Is there a max number of overs per innings? Or do you play until all out or you declare?
- In this situation, if both teams don’t get their full 2nd innings, it’s a draw?
- Assuming 3 is true, it looks to me like England will declare after some point to give WI their best chance to get in a full 2nd and avoid the draw (apparently the weather looks dicey). What lead would be considered “safe” in this situation. In other words, I assume England has some “target lead” in mind, but what is it?
- When they were saying yesterday that WI had avoided the follow-on (which I do understand, England making WI bat back-to-back because they think they can hold the lead and never even have to bat the 2nd time - or bat minimally anyway), why is that? Is it because WI had batted long enough that it’s to England’s benefit to give their bowlers the day’s rest? Or some other reason?
This Yank thanks you in advance!
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Yes three sessions per day. There are a minimum of 90 overs to be played per day (rather than defined per session). If the 90 overs are not bowled before the scheduled end of play, and if the conditions allow it, they will keep playing until all 90 are played.
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No maximum overs per innings. If a batting side are able to they could in theory bat for all five days and get a draw - although I can’t remember that ever happening. A few teams might have batted on when one of their batsmen might be about to break some significant record.
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Yes, to win a match you have to get the opposition out twice so you usually need to take 20 wickets - the exception being if the opposition have declared in one or both of their innings, but that’s on them, once they’ve declared they cannot go back in to finish their innings.
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This is subjective. England will work out how much time is left and how high a score is too many to get in that time. They would probably like to make the West Indies victory impossible before they declare, although they could set a tempting but difficult target that West Indies might try to go for. Ultimately, England need to win this match to get the trophy back and West Indies retain it if the match (and therefore this series) is a draw, so England will hopefully not be too conservative. They will take into account the weather, the state of the pitch, the ability to get a new ball and anything else. Declaring at the proper time is a bit of an art.
Sorry missed the fifth question:
- In Test cricket you can enforce the follow on if the opposition don’t get within 200 runs of your score. I think that number may be 150 runs in four day games which are played at a lower level.
Thanks for the answers and especially this bit. I didn’t realize there was a rule about when you could force follow-on. I thought it was always the option if the team that batted first wanted it.
So England has two worries: How much of a lead is enough. Making sure that WI has time to get in there and have England take 10 wickets, with weather and time taken into account. No wonder it’s a big worry for everybody. All I see in the commentary is people complaining about England’s run rate.
If you want to go down a rabbit hole then this is a huge cavernous one:
I think England have possibly left it half an hour too long to declare, but we’ll see on Tuesday. We’re still unlikely to get any play at all tomorrow.
Question is, can the West Indies bat all day against an excellent English attack? Hopefully we’ve got some time to pick one up tonight!
A lot has happened since I suggested the draw is the favourite. Given enough time on the field, England should win this match from here, with only 8 wickets to get; the Windies batting line up will need to perform above itself to last out, given what we’ve seen in the other matches.
The Windies bowling attack is pretty good but either lacks depth or they’re not ready to trust some of the younger bowlers they brought with them to rotate the attack. It’s become increasingly obvious that 3 matches in this space of time, using the same pace bowlers to do the bulk of the work, is not ideal. The one time the Windies have truly been on top (innings 1 in Southampton) was made to pay with a Test win. I’ve already moaned at length about England’s propensity for getting shot out for bugger all in this thread - if they could avoid that happening a quarter of the time, they’d have won this series already, given that Windies were 6 down chasing the 200 they needed in Test 1. Set them 280 and England may well have won that match too.
There’s the makings of a good Windies side here though. They need to solve their problems at 1-3, and also have Hetmyer and Bravo, who didn’t make the trip, so there’s more batting to come back. They’ve also made some…odd?..captaincy decisions in this series. Holder is generally accepted as a good leader - and that might well be the case - but I think he could have made life easier for his team here.
It’s not over yet. England still need to get these wickets (and more power to the Windies if they get a draw out of this match) but they should be disappointed if they don’t. Pakistan are likely to be an entirely different proposition; with the likes of Babar Azam in tow, they’ve got a better batting line up than this Windies team for a start. England’s record against Pakistan is also not that great in Test match cricket, so getting this series win under their belt may well be important for confidence.
Yes - it’s been a good series from England’s point of view, and some glimmers of real hope around, for example, the question of finding reliable openers but it’s no slight on W.I. to say they’ve tailed off as the series progressed. It was always a tough ask to bring a small squad for three back to back tests and a lot had to go right for them to stay as competitive as tehy were at Southhampton.
Re: Holder as leader, I think the issues is that one can be an inspirational leader who gets the best out of his team but that’s not the same thing as tactical nous. Managing a dressing room is no small skill, nor indeed is leading the team on the field and it’s this that people closer to the game pick up on I think when they talk about being a leader. They get at least a taste of the dressing room gossip so they can see the effect of leladership in that sense better than we can. Whereas what we look at is the captain as strategist and tactician, because that’s what we see most closely.
It’s a nice question, if you had to pick, whether you’d prefer a captain who got the best out of the side but made bad-to-average tactical calls (e.g. bowling first with a tired attack) or someone who was always two steps ahead of the opposition but couldn’t motivate his side to raise their game above average when the occasion demanded.
It’s a nice question, if you had to pick, whether you’d prefer a captain who got the best out of the side but made bad-to-average tactical calls (e.g. bowling first with a tired attack) or someone who was always two steps ahead of the opposition but couldn’t motivate his side to raise their game above average when the occasion demanded.
Yeah, an interesting question. I think I would take the latter on the understanding that eventually the players would realise that their captain is consistently out-thinking the opposition and, as a result, they’d get motivated by his leadership when the chips are down (“no worries, skip’s got this, just got to put the plan into action”). It’s obviously not as simple as that, but positive results tend to be a panacea for all ills.
England duly wrapped this up. Broad took his 500th Test Match wicket, Kraigg Brathwaite, who was also James Anderson’s 500th Test Match wicket a couple of years ago. He’s been good since being dropped - hopefully, he’s going to keep that in mind when he inevitably gets sat down at some point in the Pakistan series to protect his body. The more he thinks the selectors are out to get him, the better, probably.
Chris Woakes, if he ever cracks bowling abroad, will be a mainstay of the attack. His record in England is ridiculous and he wrapped up the Windies with ease today. In the long run, I wonder whether he’s the replacement for Anderson and you funnel Wood and Archer into bowling first and second change until Broad retires.
Good win in the finish, the Windies never really in the game in either of the final two tests.
Nice to have a bit of confidence in our openers again, although I’m not sure we’ve found a good number 3. Having one or two spots open for contention is normal though, and healthy for the team. Presumably once Stokes is bowling they will drop poor old Woakes and Crawley will come back in.
Some one day stuff against Ireland this week - none of the test match players will be involved, so it’ll be a chance for some of those in Stokes’ shadow to shine a little, and Ireland may well see their chance of snatching a series win! Then it’s a test match against Pakistan next week! It’s all coming thick and fast!
Here we go again.
Pakistan are, I believe, substantially more dangerous for England than the West Indies are. Their record against England in recent times is pretty good and sort of backs this belief up. Even still, on the merits of the sides, Pakistan have better batting than WI by some distance, so should be able to put up better scores than WI managed. Their pace bowling is maybe not quite as strong as the WI attack but they’re no mugs. In Abbas, they have a bowler, broadly like Anderson, who concentrates on skilfully moving the ball off the seam - his record in county cricket is excellent and I expect he’ll do well in the conditions - and Shaheen Shah Afridi looks the goods to me. Naseem Shah also, for a young player, looks more than handy. Both have something to prove over Gabriel, Roach, Holder but they will be pretty good nevertheless, you’d assume. Then there is the spin bowling - after the performances against Roston Chase in the WI series, I assume Yasir Shah is going to fit England for clown shoes.
Test 1 has started. England lost the toss and are fielding. Stokes still not fit to bowl apparently, so England unchanged from Test 3 v WI. The team looks a batter light in this formulation but I wouldn’t fancy dropping a bowler if Stokes can’t bowl, as then there’s probably not enough bowling. As ever, the all rounder key for balancing our side.
In other news, England beat Ireland 2-1 in the ODI series just played. England, I thought, were largely awful with the bat in all three games, yet still had enough to win the series, which doesn’t say much for Ireland. In the one game where Ireland managed to get on top of England’s bowlers, they won. It was a good series for Stokes, Root, Buttler, Archer and Woakes (i.e. all the guys who didn’t play as they’re in the Test bubble) and should probably signal to England that the strength in depth for ODI cricket that they think they have needs to be supported by actual performances. In particular, Plunkett’s strength in taking wickets in the middle overs needs replacing by someone. David Willey, whilst good with the new ball, doesn’t appear to be it.
The Bob Willis Trophy (a regionalised County Championship, as a one off in Covid-land) has started and the opening round of matches saw three or four thrillers. Derbyshire-Notts went to the last ball for instance and a couple of the other matches saw decent chases on day 4. If you’re at all interested, the counties, in lieu of not being able to get fans into the grounds, are streaming their games online (Surrey for instance, doing so on their website or on their Facebook page). Some of the streams are actually pretty decent, with multiple cameras, replays and so on - only last year most of these streams were just of a fixed camera on the cut strip - and come with commentary from the local radio teams. Surrey are even saying that they’ll be using their stream for their T20 fixtures, even if fans are allowed in the grounds, for all games where they’re not on live broadcast TV. I think this is the future for county cricket to be honest and look forward to the day when all the streams are collected in one app, so you can jump from one to the other easily (much like MLB.tv); I’d probably even pay for such a thing - and frankly cricket needs all the money it can get at the moment.