Based on how easily my friends and I get drunk since lockdown, I predict this crowd is going to be rowdy AF this afternoon. Gonna be a great atmosphere today with a lot of headaches tomorrow.
Have to feel for Bracey a little here, this is the very opposite of grabbing the opportunity with both hands. England 194/6 after winning the toss and batting. Bloody awful, frankly.
Even with six, (six!) changes the Kiwis are still a bloody good cricket team.
So the old adage of “How good is 7-258? You don’t know until they have batted.” applies.
Win toss. Bat. Score 300.
The most reliably successful cricket strategy since Test cricket was begun.
Starting on day 3, NZ are 249/3, and will be looking at a 200 run lead if they get their way. England will be hoping they can keep that lead to below 50 and with a new ball, who knows? To win, England are going to have to bat properly in the seconds innings and I’m not sure they’ve got it in them.
There’s a game going on in the West Indies as well. I see Jason Holder has been relieved of Captaincy, I don’t know the story behind that. But they aren’t doing very well, they are 84/4 in their second innings and need another 143 to avoid an innings defeat.
England’s bowling has been pretty decent but the New Zealand batsmen just know how to hang on. Had England been batting against these deliveries they’d have collapsed long ago.
England’s catching has been poor, too. They keep showing the Bracey wicketkeeper catch, but there’s been a few over the innings - simple catches that should be taken.
After a miserable second innings England 9 down with a slender lead. Only Wood and Stone showing any resiliency.
It was a despairingly awful display of batting, really. We don’t have that much to come back in - Bairstow, Buttler and Stokes can all be great on their days, but the first two have been hot and cold for a while and Stokes can’t do everything.
Talking of despairingly awful batting displays, WI never got the runs required to make SA bat again and have lost by an innings.
Can somebody with the appropriate level of irony inform me how Roy Burns gets the gong as player of the series?
Irony?
They had to give it to someone. He scored the most runs at the best average. The only other candidate was Oliver Robinson and I think other factors disqualified him.
I do feel they could have given it to one of the bowlers, but yeah. Burns was the best of a bad lot for batters.
I’ll give you none out of three for that:
How about Devon Conway 306 runs @ 76.5, (Burns 238 @ 59.5) or aren’t the team which won the series eligible?
Burns won the ENGLAND player of the series. There were probably three people from the NZ side that outperformed anyone on the England side, but it is not customary to give the award for England player of the series to an opposition player, not matter how badly the best English player had performed.
You could make a case for Broad actually, but we are really poring through the dregs here.
Yeah, don’t know if this is a new departure, but each team’s coach nominated an opposition player for that team’s POTS. NZ picked Burns, England picked Conway.
There you go.
When my cricinfo news feed first came through I saw “Man of Series” and “Rory Burns” and I didn’t pick up the duality.
Man of the Series ENG vs NZ Test series
They could have at least used the plural if there had to be two recipients.
It’s something that’s happened in England for a while, and I quite like it. It’s harder in longer series, but I like that the opposition coach costs the player.
World Test Championship game is delayed by rain. The only thing even more disappointing is the Southampton weather forecast for the next 5 days. Even the extra 6th day might not be enough, but I guess there’s a chance the weather can change. I wonder how much this changes the starting 11’s.
Having a reserve day for rain is an idea I’ve been banging on about for some time on here, so in some ways it’s fantastic to see it being implemented, but frustrating/grimly hilarious that it might be, as it were, a drop in the ocean.
In other news, England Women are playing India Women in a test - both sides have managed to start well before having quite spectacular collapses. (England going from 230-3 to 270-7, and India from 167-1 to 197-8). India now on 230-9 but as England recovered to 396 all out they are a long way behind.
Non international cricket news. Apparently trying to relieve a batters neck of the burden of carrying his or her head is no longer a fast bowlers job, but something they are supposed to apologise for?