England v Australia -Natwest Final- Lords

[Lemming]

Originally Posted by Leafy Seadragon

Having lived in Birmingham...

Let me guess. Stereotypically you must have worked in a bar whilst you were there?

[Leafy Seadragon]

Sorry to disappoint, but I was doing my masters at Birmingham Uni. My wife worked as a teacher at Holt School and managed to be the only person in her department not to get assaulted by a student in her time there. Although she did have one of her home class students suspended for two weeks for bringin a firearm to school. Lovely place Birmingham...

Apologies to the thread originator - this seems a tad off-topic

[Goatman]

As is customary here at Goat Towers, Real Life is interfering again just as cricket becomes interesting . This is likely to be my last post for a while......

What a game! This is certainly turning into a massive cricketing summer for both teams. I could only listen to it, but it is testament to this ENG team that even on 33-5 I did not turn the radio off as I have done in the past. I had faith in Colly, Jones and Giles. And they paid me back in spades. Leaves a load of questions in the air though:-

1) It was a seamers pitch, but for my money both teams top orders self-destructed. Hayden, Ponting, Gilchrist, Trescothick and Vaughan all got themselves out. The dismissal of Tres seems to have gone down as "same old", but it wasn't. According to the commentary I was listening to, and they went to some pains to point this out, it wasn't his usual dangle the bat, edge to slip that got him but a miscued deliberate dab to third man. He's had his problem for ever, and still averages 44 in tests so I'm not worried. I am worried about Strauss and his inside edging problem though. He needs to fix that. Fortunately, for ENG, even if Lee does play in the tests and takes the new ball, he'll probably get less swing out of it than the white. That seems to be the trend in ENG. But that doesn't matter; Strauss needs to spend some time on the issue. Equally, before the series started Hayden remarked that he needed to take the emotions out of his batting. "Just bat" he said. So has does "I won't forgive, and won't forget" fit into that idea Matty? Its not his fault that the incident happened, but he's a prat to respond to it as he has. If I were an AUS supporter, that would be nagging at me quite a bit....

But the point is that neither teams top order is handling pressure at all well.

2) The AUS top order squandered a good, though somewhat lucky, start and this seems to be something they are becoming serial offenders at. All four games they have got in and made hay against the friendly new-ballers and then been slapped down by Fred and Grievous. If I were an AUS supporter I would be no less concerned by this than I am as an ENG supporter at the exposure of technical flaws in Strauss and Tres. In the tests ENG will open with Harmison who has a nice little partnership going with Hoggard. If GBH keeps getting amongst the AUS top order - and with a new ball in hand and a test field why shouldn't he - then Hoggy and Fred will drive those early wickets home harder than Gough and SP Jones could ever manage.

This could be a bowlers summer! For both teams!

3) As I have noted before in this forum, the AUS ODI team is at least one bowler short. ENG should never have been able to tie that match. Symonds and Hogg will take wickets only when batsmen are getting after them, they don't have the penetration to drive home opening by the new ballers. Being unable to maintain the pressure generated early on left the door ajar for Jones and Colly and, as we saw, they are good enough to make something of that.

4) ENG will come out of this ODI tournament feeling much better than AUS. I was expecting them to be whitewashed. They may be 2 in the world in test rankings, but they are 6 in ODI's! We just aren't any good at the limited overs game! ENG, if they diddn't before, must now be really fancying taking the Ashes this summer. There's 3 more ODI's left. That can all change. And they are technically different games. On top of all that, the personnel will change - AUS will gain Warne and Langer, ENG will gain Hoggard and (probably) Thorpe. But psychologically, the plan put forward by the AUS spokesmen when they first arrived ("hit them early, hit them hard, don't let them get up again") has crashed and burnt.

5) Gillespie's form is still poor. AUS rely on just 4 bowlers in the test side. If one doesn't fire, that leaves you in real trouble. If two don't fire your sunk without trace, and Kasprowicz has hardly had pulses racing either! Do they replace one of them with Lee? On this form, they have to. But even then - what if Kaspa/Dizzy can't pull in round? Or Lee's radar goes wrong again? Or someone gets injured? Or Lee gets himself banned bowling another beamer (deliberate or not (and it probably wasn't), he has form and the umpires will not hesitate to haul him off if they think there is a safety issue)?

6) Oh yes, the issue of nationality. Pietersen is far more English than Keppler "Oh, SA is banned so I'll play for AUS instead - for a while..." Wessels ever was Australian. GO Jones is a British passport holder, and holds no other passport - i.e. he is NOT Australian. My understanding is that his parents were missionaries in PNG and then moved to an inner city parish in AUS. He has never played representative cricket for an AUS age group, has never played first class cricket in AUS and when he decided to try his hand at playing the sport professionally he immediately came "home" to Kent leaving his very, very Welsh father to listen to him on the radio. If he's Aussie, then I'm Dutch! Strauss is as much a Saffer as Symonds is a Brit, having moved to ENG when only a couple of years old.

[Kirsty Harris]

I take the fact that all the Australian posters have been reduced to trying to claim that various members of the English team aren't English really as a very good sign: it's called being worried!!!

Anyway, G O Jones and Simon Jones are indeed not English, they are in fact Welsh!!! So there!!!

It's a good point made by Goatman, that the Aussie's came here looking to blast the oppostion out of the water from the word go, and that has clearly failed rather badly. No matter what people may say about the One Day series not being that important, how losing to Somerset is meaningless, how the defeat against Bangladesh was a one off, it is clear there are more weaknessess in this Australian team than others in the last 20 years. I am more optimistic than ever that England have a chance to win the Ashes this summer. I'm sure Australia will improve, but so will England.

[flanflinger]

Thanks for getting us back on Track Goaty...

For me there is one major thing that England can take out of the game. Over the past 15 years I have watched England teams rattle Australia and then see Healy and Gilchrist take the game away from us.

The strength of Australia was that in big games (not dead rubbers) they did not collapse soemone always put their hand up. The same happened again on Saturday with Symonds and Hussey.

The difference was that England didn't do the same, on Saturday they did.

The difference is not the level of talent but the level of Character. This team has strong Characters, and they are all match winners. Giles for example - many people would have disgarderd him years ago, but the England managment saw more than just a spin bowler, they saw a talented crickets, with Character.

I was much more confident with Giles at the crease than I would have been with Ramps or Crawley.

Read is also a guy with Character, but sadly he does not also have the same level of talent with the bat as Jones. But isn't it great that we have strength in depth, but if something was to happen to Jones, we have someone like Read in the wings. (Don't need to even mention Prior, Wallace or Foster)

Last year there was a big debate about what would happen if Harmy, Hoggy or Flintoff (we can now add Jones) broke down, who would replace them and the lack of depth, now we can look towards Anderson, Tremlett, Lewis and Ali - all could do a job

and in the batting we have a major battle for the No 5 slot between Thorpe and Pieterson, and if we lose a top order player Key can come in, while Collingwood could still do a job in the Test line up - and in years gone by would have found himself in the middle order.

Sadly in spin we are limited - Batty and Swann are the only real options and neither has ever shown the sae promise as the other names I mentioned.

Things are looking good, lets stop knocking the team, and get behind them, you never know with this strength we may sneak the Ashes back...

[Notts Exile]

That's a fair round up FF. GO Jones really stuck two fingers up at some of us on Saturday! I was laughing a litle when he barely laid a bat on any of his first twenty or so balls faced but once he got his eye in he proved what he can do. I'm still not going to get excited by the keeping, although the catch to remove Ponting was useful, the rest were regulation. Hopefully he can go on from here and score those runs consistently because that's what we need him to do. As you say, it's good to have Read there as back up, and I'm sure he would do a better job now (if required) than he did before - his batting has improved.

Worried about Vaughan and Strauss batting wise. I wouldn't pick the captain for the next three matches, I'd see if Solanki can do a better job. Same with Gough, even when he came back at the end it was obvious that Hussey fancied getting after him. What's Kabir Ali done wrong since the South African tour??

[Collyisamackem]

Nothing Notts, just been harshly treated by the selectors. Lewis isn 't better than him at taking wickets from what I've seen.

[Richard Jenkins]

Cricket Discipline

Watching the recent one day internaltionals between England Bangladesh and Australia I was struck by the competition and fight between all three but in particular between England and Australia. The Final at lords and the last match before this were both matches which had particular incidents in them which I feel the modern game has no real place for.
When Simon Jones threw the ball at Mathew Hayden and hit him ,he apologised and it was a genuine mistake. But it clearly rattled Hayden and really the Umpire should have spoken to the England captain, the Australian captain and Simon Jones either at the time of the incident or soon after the match and explained that there was really no need to try to throw down the stumps . It was a potentially dangerous move and could have injured hayden.
Then In the final I saw Brett Lee bowl an inswinging beamer, aimed at Trescothics head. This ball was starlingly dangerous . Umpire david shepard, in his last international fixture, rightly had a few words to say to Lee about that delivery. However it certainlty mentally affected Trescothic (and perhaps others), who was out just afterwards. Shephard should have either spoken to the other umpire and asked if 5 penalty runs was appropriate at that moment or radioed the 3rd umpire or match referee and asked what sanctions were appropriate.. If Lee bowls that ball in the tests then we’ll know it was deliberate. Lee made no attempt to apologise from what I saw, nor any remose.

[Lemming]

Originally Posted by Richard Jenkins

Lee made no attempt to apologise from what I saw, nor any remose [for bowling Trescothick a beamer].

I'm pretty sure he apologised straight away, as soon as the ball left his hand and he knew what was going to happen he started to apologise. It was obviously a genuine mistake, the ball slipping out of his hand. You can imagine the fear of Trescothick when Lee was running in to bowl the next ball, how it affected him mentally I've no idea.

[Leafy Seadragon]

Richard, there was a small wave of apology offered by Lee. From the camera angle I have no idea whether (or not) Tresco registered or acknowledged it. The problem Lee and administrators have is that he does appear to occasionally bowl these accidentally and occasionally there appears to be a bit of planning. Two in an over (or possibly over a couple of overs this summer in Oz I think from memory under circumstances when he was similarly fired up). I agree that he's worn out his benefit of the doubt. Even if these are remarkably all accidental (a dubious but plausible argument given he's striving for that extra yard on his inswinging yorker), then he's got a responsibility to sort out the problem so that it doesn't happen again.

Bottom line is your statement that its startlingly dangerous. No matter how accidental, this really is a ball that could kill someone and cannot be allowed. If he's bowling in a manner that even accidentally has so little control he's dangerous, he should be removed from the attack. Unfortunately if its the first time in a match and unless the umpire is absolutely convinced that it was deliberate (a very brave call) then I thought that the bowler received a warning. If that's the csae, then maybe there needs to be an exception ruling. My secondary issue was that Ponting didn't take him out of the attack - just give him a minute or two to reflect and regain control