The Ashes and Cricket World Cup Discussion Thread

With the exception of Siddel Australia's attack looks toothless. Their fielding was atrocious something you dont associate with Australia. Unfortunately with the introduction Of Bollinger they will possess a far more dangerous attack for the rest of the series

(29-11-2010 15:38 )setter1000 Wrote:  With the exception of Siddel Australia's attack looks toothless. Their fielding was atrocious something you dont associate with Australia. Unfortunately with the introduction Of Bollinger they will possess a far more dangerous attack for the rest of the series

Siddle just had a lucky patch. He's not quality
And Bollinger is just a fast medium pacer.
They need their quickest bowler back. TATE

I had seen nothing of it apart from small clips on the news until last night.
I had been wondering why there was nothing on terrestial tv.
Then I found it on ITV4 at 10pm last night. It was not listed in my weekly tv mag.
Very good picture quality as well. Will watch the last day tonight.

I would give serious thought to bringing in the extra seamer in Tremlett and leaving out pietersen my team for second test:

Strauss
Cook
Trott
Bell
Collingwood
Prior
Swann
Broad
Tremlett
Anderson
Finn

We still got six good batters with prior and extra pace and bounce with tremlett

(29-11-2010 15:53 )Charlemagne Wrote:  

(29-11-2010 15:38 )setter1000 Wrote:  With the exception of Siddel Australia's attack looks toothless. Their fielding was atrocious something you dont associate with Australia. Unfortunately with the introduction Of Bollinger they will possess a far more dangerous attack for the rest of the series

Siddle just had a lucky patch. He's not quality
And Bollinger is just a fast medium pacer.
They need their quickest bowler back. TATE

I doubt Tait will play any part in this series, he's officially retired from test cricket. According to him, he's now only available for ODI'S and chasing the cash in T/20 games. They could persuade him to come back of course, but i'm not sure that would benefit the Aussies too much as although he's lightning quick, he can be wildly inaccurate.

They've already got "wildly inaccurate" with Mitchell Johnson!!

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.

Was great to see England get that many runs and sent a real message to the Aussies. With the draw result, look at it this way we avoided defeat and if it could be classed as a winning draw it was, so lets hope from here on we can build and go on to win the two games we need to retain the Ashes.

I don't see England making any changes at all inless there is an injury or dramatic lose of form (Collingwood being the nearest right now). Down in Adelaide have the four bowlers with back up from Pietersen and Colly (plus Trott) should be enough in this heat they are having down there (so the total reverse of here).

Your right over the pitches colino, I would say that in this country we produce the better pitches for Test cricket. This pitch seem to become the most stupid road of a wicket you could imagine and with the average bowling at times on show and luck of batsman it only could mean one thing. The tests in the second half of the summer (ignoring the fact of some fixing in places) was entertaining, I believe if we had got all those runs in the 1st innings then we would of won the game, a minor complaint going forward is the lack of runs in any first innings, not sure what the success rate is but I think I heard 2 out of the last 10 1st innings we have got past 400.

About Siddle, with him out of the side since Jan this year, they have struggled and when he comes back he makes this impact. I would say he is there best bowler but no way is he a world beater. Tait's retired from first class cricket simply because his body couldn't handle bowling the way he does and he wants to play over the world as a T20 player (for the money) and play the shorter forms for his country, not too bad I wouldn't be complaining if I was in his position. But he is just pace with so-so accuracy.

England's batting was phenomenal today it nots very often you see a team reaching 500 runs or more for just losing 1 wicket but on the other hand Australia's bowling was just shambolic.

Australia have some serious difficulties with their bowling attack. Other than Bollinger, Johnson, Hilfenhaus and Siddle they barely have a seam bowler worth mentioning in terms of test cricket (and Hilfenhaus is pushing things, for my money). Even taking into consideration how benevolent that track was in Brisbane, other than Siddle's brief spell of mesmerising brilliance they honestly looked like bringing back McGrath and Lee - as old and as knackered as they are - would be a better option than the bowlers they went with.

It barely seems worth mentioning the spinners. When Hauritz and Doherty are the best you can muster, you might as well give up on spin entirely and go with four and a half seamers, plus North as a part time twirly man. O'Keefe and Smith, who are both on the fringes of the team, can both swing a bat and may yet end up as genuine test all rounders, but the little of them I've seen makes me think both have some serious problems with accuracy. That can be a bonus in a lightning fast seamer, but in form test batsmen will smear an inaccurate spinner all over the park. If a spinner is going to give away three scoring balls an over, then the other three had better be potentially deadly rippers; these lads aren't Stuart MacGills, though. Sadly for Australia (and I do feel so sad for them! ) the two young spinners aren't accurate or experienced enough to worry test batsmen with subtle variations of flight and length if the pitch isn't turning square.

None of this means that Australia should be discounted, mind you. While England are vastly superior with the ball, Australia certainly have the edge so far as batsmen go, especially when they're on home soil. England simply don't have a batsman of the quality of Ponting or Hussey when they're in good form. If you bat first, bat well and give even a mediocre bowling attack a big enough first innings score to bowl at, sooner or later they'll come up with something. Anyone who watched Srinath and Prasad steadily accumulating wickets for India in the nineties can attest to that. Things do look promising for England, but a hell of a lot depends on us being able to win a few tosses, wrack up some totals and put the Australian batsmen under pressure.

That's why I think we need the extra seamer.See my earlier post.

(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...