Cricket: Random Discussion Thread

Very pleased about our batting and especially giving Starc a rest - looking good if we can hold this heading towards Adelaide

Waiting on England's inevitable collapse. Hopefully I'm wrong.

Well thank Christ Australia’s best two bowlers aren’t playing

This is pathetic. Maybe England are playing the long game by ensuring Cricket Australia loses another $10m this year due to lack of day threes and beyond

The batter, Extras, may turn out as one of our top scorers this test.

I posted this 6 months ago on reddit

Can see Baz getting fired if he doesn't turn this around this series - nothing short of a 3-2 loss will save him

England playing better today and guess what it is when they aren't playing bazball

Hmm 64. Not feeling confident our bowlers will manage this.

Imagine my shock as we've upended our entire test team in preparation for this tour. Told our GOAT bowler to retire, dragged the clearly below standard Crawley and Bashir (remember him?) around just for this tour because they were gonna be really good and win the ashes down under! All this was for this one tour that was the focus for years... only to be whitewashed again. This is my shocked face. I'm so shocked.

Joke of a team.

Overall England should be happy with their first 2 sessions - looks to be a very flat wicket and the first two days are really hot when you want to be batting. To have 5 wickets is a good effort.

Australia’s Day. That drop of Khawaja was the difference. Aus 30+ in front right now

Archer bowled very well this morning

England are absolutely getting outplayed in every part of the game. Even snicko is trolling them

I expect so little from England now, but still seem to be disappointed.

Agreed, I've set all sorts of alarms for various times of the night to watch. I really expected some kind of response yesterday. I officially gave up when we were 42-3 and was, sadly, not surprised when I had to get up for work and we were 180odd - 8.

It's the hope that kills you, at least that's now gone too!

I hope England supporters out here are still enjoying themselves - I think they are by the sound of it. It is something that every English supporter needs to experience an Ashes tour

Im at my dads so i actually can watch the cricket. Stokes and archer are having a great partnership so i think ill just watch for a minute. First ball i see stokes gets bowled. Dont think im gonna be watching any more.

I think so - in stark contrast to the Oval when I visited in July and surprised by the very tasty beer options which to be fair compared with inner city London prices wasn't all that expensive and sometimes cheaper - you don't get that in Australia. Beer prices at grounds always at least 20% higher

Yeah I’m a members guest at Adelaide. $56 for 4 schooners in plastic cups.

For the few fans who haven't got drunk and fried themselves to a purple crisp, I'm sure summer in Oz beats winter in England.

very good by Gideon Haigh

A Simple Game
GH remembers the basics
GIDEON HAIGH

DEC 19 ∙

The first morning of this Adelaide Test, the ground staff had allocated a single pitch on the western extremity of the square for the bowlers warm ups. Onlookers were treated to the incongruous sight of English and Australian bowlers politely alternating, as though involved in a casual bowl off with the same set of plastic stumps.
Except it was no real contest. When he wasn’t unobtrusively smashing the top of off, Scott Boland never strayed wider than a fourth stump line or deviated from a length of between three and five metres. Brydon Carse and Josh Tongue, meanwhile, bounced the ball one way or another, as though the stumps were not there, or in use purely for morale purposes. Just practice, of course. But England have invested a lot in practice on this tour, on the earnest inconsequentiality of nets, and you are urged always to train as you mean to play. Here we go, then….
Flash forward an hour, and Carse was bowling an opening spell featuring four no-balls and four four balls, while Tongue would fade after a promising start; flash forward a day and Boland was bowling with such precision meanness that Alex Carey could stand up to the stumps, and, in due course, take a quicksilver rebound catch. To paraphrase Bill Woodfull in the corresponding Test of Bodyline: both teams are out there are trying to play cricket, but one of them seems rather more serious about the skills necessary to succeed than the other.
Basics - they sound like rudiments but are actually fundamentals, preconditions for everything else. To make runs, you must be able to endure - in Australia, it’s usually advisable to defend straight and score square. To bowl to a plan, you must have a reliable stock ball - in Australia, the ideal comes through around bail height, compelling a stroke.
It’s not as vibey as strike rates and speed guns; still, cricket here is won not by ‘style’ but by substance, by batters outlasting bowlers, by bowlers harrying batters, by consistency, discipline and fitness generally. It hardly matters whether Carse is an ‘absolute warrior’ when he struggles to bowl consecutive deliveries in the same place; Tongue may have a taste for ‘rabbit pie’, but execution proverbially eats strategy for breakfast. Will Jacks, meanwhile, indicts an entire system - a placeholder for nobody. That’s before we even start on the batters…..
This third day of the Third Test at Adelaide Oval, theoretically the mid-point of the series, again concerned basics. Though frustrated for an hour and a half by Ben Stokes and Jofra Archer before lunch, Australia’s bowlers never allowed them free rein; though checked every so often, Australia’s top order went methodically about building partnerships and turning the strike over through the afternoon. The home team was in no hurry but hardly had to be. The visitors were not ragged so much as fraying, contriving only three maidens in 66 overs. There was a touch of shadow boxing about it. Archer, England’s swiftest bowler, was rationed to sixty balls; Stokes, England’s most successful bowler of the year, did not bowl. But at the close, Australia’s lead had swelled inexorably to 356, with two days stretching ahead.

Splitting Head ache
Homecoming hero Travis Head took advantage of England’s third-innings blues to peel off a chanceless hundred, his fourth in consecutive Test matches here. It had all the ease of a Sunday stroll - he even performatively walked singles to the far-flung field, as if about to start flicking the heads off daisies with a walking stick. Stokes lurched from plan to plan against him, without his bowlers suggesting the perseverance or potency to make them count. Tongue bowled with a 7-2 field, which Head still pierced when gifted a wide half-volley; Carse bowled with a 3-6 field, which Head cleared with a 6 to long leg; Jacks bowled with a long-off, so Head lofted for 6 over long-on.
The advent of Carey, patriotic heartthrob of the first innings, doubled the local fun. One lost count of the number of runs scored through the unpopulated gully, even as the pace bowlers hit a length to cut and slash. When Brook was finally posted in this vicinity, he dropped a straightforward chance, unaccountably moving out and in. An attempt to court popularity perhaps - Head was 99. He advanced to his eleventh hundred next over in the grand manner, with a 6 back over bowler Joe Root’s head.
There were further capers with the DRS, after two days in which Snicko, presented as Cray supercomputer, has turned out to be a Mechanical Turk. This time it was Jake Weatherald electing not to use it when adjudged lbw, perhaps for fear of being given out hit wicket. Turned out he should have - the system is in players’ heads now, and not in a good way. The big screen was turned to other purposes, throwing forward by listing highest fourth innings to win at Adelaide Oval, by England, by anyone, in the western spiral arm of the galaxy etc. Not so long ago, in Bazball’s palmiest days, this would have been regarded as a challenge. Yet even as they have preened as lions at home, England have become lambs away - defeat here would be their eleventh in their last fifteen on the road. It's not time to get bitter, but it might be to at least try getting better.

Any England supporters staying up to watch it?

lmao what a showing. Maybe go the long way home and drop Baz back off in NZ

Australia better in all 3 facets of the game.

England showed some ticker the past few days but…just imagine if Brook and Smith hadn’t played ridiculous shots. Probably still a loss but just too often England give critical gifts