(30-11-2010 09:23 )sweetsugar007 Wrote: That's why I think we need the extra seamer.See my earlier post.
The worry for me with the line up you mentioned, is that I don't think Swann or Broad are good enough to bat at seven in a test match against anything but the very weakest opposition, which Australia most certainly aren't. Despite the early hype, I don't think Broad is going to be a genuine all rounder, so much as a number eight in the vein of Wasim Akram, Azhar Mahmood, Anil Kumble or Harbajhan Singh; big scores, or nothing much. Swann, as entertaining as he is to watch, has only one way of playing. Lusty blows towards the boundary, or out. If we were going to play an extra seamer, I think it would have to Bresnan. He seems to have stopped trying to be a fast bowler, which he is quite patently never going to be, and is focusing on going wicket-to-wicket at the top of off stump. Despite all the talk of needing lanky bowlers, reminiscent of fairytale giants when in Oz, Gus Fraser did surprisingly well down there and Fraser may yet be the bowler Bresnan ends up being most similar to. There's also the fact he's a far more composed batsman than the other two mentioned, although his defensive technique is definitely in need of work. An aspect of the game all of our lower middle order need to work on, but I'm not sure an Ashes tour is the place to do that.
Despite only having four bowlers, I do like the balance of our current line up. While getting twenty wickets on that Brisbane pitch looked about as likely as Zimbabwe winning an away series in India, the Aussie groundsmen will
have to deliver some spicier pitches for the upcoming games. A series of drawn matches on lifeless pitches will mean Australia don't get the urn back, an outcome on home soil which is utterly unthinkable for them. They'll have to go for broke, hope their batsmen come through for them and that the extra pace and bounce of a stereotypical Australian pitch unsettles England's very long batting line up. Consistency and a willingness to grind out results, rather than go for the win-or-bust killer blow, is what has gotten England into a position as marginal favourites for an Ashes tour victory. We should stick with being the new South Africa, rather than trying to be the new Australia; at least until our relatively young and inexperienced bowling attack has another twenty or so tests under their belts.
(29-11-2010 18:55 )colino Wrote: ...
I'm more worried about the current state of test pitches than anything else...If this game was played to a finish, we could still have been watching it on christmas morning!! In all seriousness though watching batsmen constantly rack up scores of 500+ will do the game no good at all, there has to be some sort of parity between bat and ball for test cricket to survive.
Trouble is the curators of the game are more interested in appeasing sponsors and television and making sure that the game lasts 5 days by ensuring dead, flat batting tracks rather than entertaining cricket watchers.
I'm with you 100% on that point. Unless a flat pitch is also dusty enough to give a
lot of help to the spinners, cricket rapidly degenerates into a war of stamina and attrition between batting line ups. Give me a bouncy, seam friendly pitch and a few good quicks any day of the week. As magnificent as India and Sri Lanka's batting line ups can be, I'd much rather watch the West Indies of old, any Australian side except this one (providing it wasn't during their biennial bitch slapping of England, of course), or England during that brief period when we had Jones, Harmison, Flintoff and Hoggard all fit and in form. Cricket is rarely more exciting than when watching a really good contest between a top class batsman and bowler, even if it means going back to most matches ending in three to three and a half days, like we got during that golden age in the late 90's and and early 00's when the
worst bowling attack in the world had Heath Streak leading it. Of course, it could be argued that the current trend for dull pitches is a hangover from that period of utter dominance by the bowlers of almost all nations. A pitch
had to be pretty flat, or else Donald, Pollock, Ntini, Wasim, Waqar, Akhtar, Streak, Gough, Caddick, Headley (briefly, until his back was injured so horribly), McGrath, Lee, Gillespie, Srinath, Cairns, Ambrose, Walsh or Vaas would knock you over dirt cheap and make you look silly, not to mention that it was also the time period of Warne, Murali, Saqlain, Mushtaq Ahmed and Kumble when the seamers got tired of hogging the headlines...