Cricket

[Xenophon PCDGS]

India moved on from 346-9 to 433-9, an unbroken last wicket stand of 87, the last time that I looked in.

 

[DownSouth]

All out for 457 now.

India A were on the opposite end of a big partnership yesterday against Australia A in the first four day match in Brisbane. The 371 run partnership between Mitchell Marsh and Sam Whiteman is a new Australian record for the seventh wicket in any first class cricket, and in the world it comes second only to a 460 run stand in the Ranji Trophy.

Whiteman will surely be moving his way up to first place in the ranks of Australian wicketkeepers queuing up to replace Brad Haddin in a couple of years.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

That last wicket stand of 111 for the tenth wicket is a record for India v England in Test Matches.

England 17-1 ( First Innings)

Cook b Shami 5

Is that what you would call a captain's innings that will inspire the rest of the team..

 

[ExRes]

Just quickly looked at the First Class innings that Cook has played this season, 1st and 2nd tests against Sri Lanka in June and before that ?, an innings of 4 against Gloucestershire at the end of April, yes, APRIL !!!!!

What sort of cowboy organisation is the ECB ?, one that expects a batsman to hit top form after a few 20/20 farces and maybe the odd 50 over match or so ?

What an absolute and utter farce cricket has become, the touring side get more practice than the home side, a joke

 

[Whistler40145]

Have the ECB Management stuck their heads in a bucket of sand, because they don't seem to be seeing what we are with Cook's Batting & Leadership.

I can't even think of anyone within the current squad with Captaincy experience who could takeover.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

I am sure that I could manage to achieve a score of 5, so does that qualify me not only to open the batting, but also to captain the team...

Historically, in a second XI match for Middleton in 1961 at the ripe old age of 16 against Castleton Moor in a Central Lancashire League match, standing in as an emergency number three instead of my usual position of number seven, I achieved my highest ever score of 63 not out, facing an Indian pace bowler from their usual second XI...

 

[Cletus]

Where do England go when a front-line spinner is needed?
It seems with Stokes back, one of the batsman must go.
Robson, Ballance, Root, Bell and Ali have been scoring runs. Cook hasn't and if he wasn't captain he would have surely been dropped already.

 

[balne-wonderer]

Robson gets a shocker and as India don't like DRS, he's gone.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

 

[Johnuk123]

England 202-7 will this nightmare that is English cricket ever end.

 

[balne-wonderer]

England 202-7 will this nightmare that is English cricket ever end.

Did you see the Prior dismissal? No wonder India don't want DRS. That was a shocking decision, one of the worst i've ever seen. Funny how none of the Indians were given out like that...

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Following the tried and tested England middle-order collapses that were refined under the guiding hand of Captain Cook in Australia, England serenely progress from 154-2 to 202-7. Perhaps Captain Cook needs to emulate his namesake and go off exploring the South Pacific....

That Indian last wicket stand of 111 by India yesterday took me back to the heady days of 1966, when not only did England register their one and only football World Cup win, but Ken Higgs and John Snow put on 128 for the 10th English wicket against the feared pace attack of the West Indies...

 

[muddythefish]

England 297-8 as I write and heading for another sub-par total.

England will not win Test matches until we make 400 plus totals regularly in the first innings. The batting has been a problem for years.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Must be a match for good 10th wicket stands. Root (115 not out) and Anderson (60 not out) have put on an unbroken 10th wicket stand of 137 and taken England to 435-9.

This is a England Test Match record for the 10th wicket, beating the 130 put on by Foster and Rhodes against Australia in 1903.

 

[DownSouth]

And they got another 60 runs after that. The scores are now tied - India 457 and 39 without loss in the second, England 496.

With fewer than 130 overs left in the match, it looks like heading towards a tame draw. While India may attack with the bat, for a result to be possible will require both captains to attack in the field, something that might be possible if it was Clarke and Matthews but not a realistic possibility with Cook and Dhoni.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Whosoever would have thought that Anderson as a number 11 batsman would achieve a score of 81, with 17 x 4, in what is a record 10th wicket stand of 198 with Root, 154 not out (15 x 4)

 

[DownSouth]

Whosoever would have thought that Anderson as a number 11 batsman would achieve a score of 81, with 17 x 4, …

He's not exactly the kind of batsman that opposition teams would have spent lots of time working out a plan of attack - just in the last 12 months there was also Ashton Agar getting the #11 world record and almost defeating England, Mitchell Johnson scoring more runs than he conceded with the ball in the Brisbane Test last summer, Ben Stokes' huge scores against the run of play in his debut series against Australia, and both teams' lower orders doing well in this India-England match. My favourite example from a bit further back would be the time Jason Gillespie and Glenn McGrath batted New Zealand out of a Test.

The majority of Test bowlers seem to bowl well and get results when their coaches' plans work, but they fall apart and can't take wickets when the opposition doesn't fall for it. Being able to recalculate and change tactics is one of the keys to defining a great bowler.

In my memory, the last England bowler to be genuinely adaptable was Graeme Swann, and the Tests in this current season just go to show how much better England would be doing if he hadn't been bullied into an early retirement after just one bad series. Australia is doing a lot better in this area because we've got a captain with the winning instinct, and two very adaptable bowlers in Ryan Harris and Nathan Lyon

 

[muddythefish]

Swann wasn't "bullied" into retirement by anyone - he had had a bad long-standing shoulder injury that wasn't improving and was affecting his play and had come to the end of the road. He should never have gone on the tour.

Clarke didn't have a "winning" instinct in 2 successive Ashes series - in fact his demeanour is that of a born loser.

Congratulations to Jimmy and Joe on creating Test history - a classic Lancashire-Yorkshire combination to the rescue again! Anderson has always had the ability to bat but never got the score on the board to reflect it.

Draw the most likely outcome but after today's events you never know.

 

[Cletus]

Anderson has scored more runs than Cook this summer!

 

[Johnuk123]

Anderson has scored more runs than Cook this summer!

My grandmother could score more runs than Cook and she's dead.

 

[EM2]

Anderson has scored more Test runs than Cook this summer!

Edited for accuracy

 

[Arglwydd Golau]

Where do England go when a front-line spinner is needed?

Frankly, I don't believe there is one at the moment, the constant search in the media for a 'new' spinner is becoming farcical, heaven forbid that we get in the mess that Australia were in when they tried to replace Warne (DownSouth will surely know how many they tried before they settled with Lyon - must have been in double figures!) If Swann was the best spinner since Laker in the 1950's, it simply is not possible to pluck a youngster from a county team and expect them to perform to the same standard. (Those of us with some age on our side will remember how difficult it was to replace Underwood)
In my view, I'd persist with Moeen Ali for the moment, give him more opportunity to bowl. Interestingly, there is nothing wrong with his county stats for the last few years, but ..a thought...has he benfited from the presence of Saeed Ajmal at Worcs or has it limited his opportunity? Interestingly, Cook sees him purely as a 'partnership breaker' - which he does well!

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

India stabilising with an unbroken stand of 46 to move on from 184-6 to 230-6.

 

[EM2]

Cook has a wicket!

 

[DownSouth]

Frankly, I don't believe there is one at the moment, the constant search in the media for a 'new' spinner is becoming farcical, heaven forbid that we get in the mess that Australia were in when they tried to replace Warne (DownSouth will surely know how many they tried before they settled with Lyon - must have been in double figures!) If Swann was the best spinner since Laker in the 1950's, it simply is not possible to pluck a youngster from a county team and expect them to perform to the same standard. (Those of us with some age on our side will remember how difficult it was to replace Underwood)
In my view, I'd persist with Moeen Ali for the moment, give him more opportunity to bowl. Interestingly, there is nothing wrong with his county stats for the last few years, but ..a thought...has he benfited from the presence of Saeed Ajmal at Worcs or has it limited his opportunity? Interestingly, Cook sees him purely as a 'partnership breaker' - which he does well!

The problem with picking new spinners is that they take a while to mature before peaking around the age of 30-32, all too often it's much longer than a national selection panel is willing to wait. Picking a young spinner and then discarding them after a couple of games' worth of getting hacked to pieces by the world's elite batsmen is more likely to kill their growth than encourage it.

Shane Warne got dropped twice early in his career after a string of poor early performances against India (1/228 from two matches against some 16 year old kid called Sachin) and Sri Lanka, and then only brought back in after Allan Border took on the selectors in public after failing to bowl out the West Indies on a last day turner. He made a match-winning performance in his first game back and then stayed in the team, but if he hadn't been brought back into the team at that time he probably would have gone back to his first sport of football for the upcoming winter - instead of going to rout the English in the 1993 Ashes.

Graeme Swann is a once in a generation player for England, and finding a long-term replacement for his slot in the team (leaving aside the issue of substituting for the lost quality, which depends purely on luck) will probably take a few years. Between the retirement of Stuart MacGill and finally settling on Nathan Lyon, Australia tried out seven others (Nathan Hauritz, Beau Casson, Jason Krezja, Bryce McGain, Xavier Doherty, Michael Beer, Ashton Agar) and it's easily possible that England could go through even more players than that before finding a long-term specialist spinner.

I agree that Moeen Ali should be given the proper backing to succeed, even if it's only buying time before a long-term specialist spinner comes along in the future. Working on Joe Root's part-time bowling at the same time shouldn't go ignored – he was the most economical of the England bowlers against Australia, and a winning captain who understands the concept of bowling partnerships (i.e. not Alistair Cook) would be able to make good use of that.

 

[Arglwydd Golau]

DownSouth - I think that's the first time I agree wholeheartedly with your post! yes, by and large spinners do take longer to mature - remember Swann was initially picked to tour South Africa as a youngster, failed as a tourist and then came back with success in his late twenties.

 

[Cletus]

Cook may have got a lucky wicket, but I sure that powers that be noticed the quality of Ballance's over.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

DownSouth - I think that's the first time I agree wholeheartedly with your post! yes, by and large spinners do take longer to mature - remember Swann was initially picked to tour South Africa as a youngster, failed as a tourist and then came back with success in his late twenties.

Simon Kerrigan has been recalled to the England squad in the hope that he may fare better this time on the English wickets. He has taken a quite a number of wickets this season for Lancashire.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---

Cook may have got a lucky wicket, but I sure that powers that be noticed the quality of Ballance's over.

Does that mean Cook will head the England bowling averages.....instead of the England batting averages...
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
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I see that Lancashire are playing at the Liverpool base at Aigburth in the latest County Championship match against Nottinghamshire.

Lancashire 225 all out (Ist innings) (69.4 overs)
Buttler 52
Adams 4-43

Nottinghamshire 261 all out (1st innings) (82.5 overs)
Mullaney 82
Chapple 4-79

However bad light is likely to cause a break in the play, just as this match is becoming interesting.

 

[Arglwydd Golau]

The curse of the last wicket partnership has even affected Australia - Yadav and Bumrah put on 82 for India A to overtake Australia A's score and reach 501 (Lyon 0-147)...the two unofficial tests have produced some high scores - so far - what kind of pitch has Brisbane provided for these games, DownSouth?

 

[bnm]

Currently cheering on Lancashire, hoping they can beat Notts and peg back the points they get, which will be a great boost to my team, Somerset.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Currently cheering on Lancashire, hoping they can beat Notts and peg back the points they get, which will be a great boost to my team, Somerset.

What a close finish. Lancashire had taken nine of the ten Nottinghamshire second innings wickets, but Nottinghamshire just managed to get the required runs to win.