Right, and then what?Originally Posted by ItalAussie
It's more the idea of mentioning corporate governance and extracting value from the TV rights cycle as a counterbalance to being shit at cricket.
Right, and then what?
It's more the idea of mentioning corporate governance and extracting value from the TV rights cycle as a counterbalance to being shit at cricket.
"We’ve had a successful entry into the broadcast rights market out of which we have secured the financial future of the game until 2024.”
Well I know that's the reason I watch sports.
Better than being competitive in the Ashes, that.
I didn't say it was worth much. It's certainly not worth an Ashes.
This is how I felt during peak "net spend". As if watching Benitez carefully manage money was comparable to actually winning things. It pops up a lot from Indian commenters on Cricinfo, a decent number of whom cheer the BCI bottom line as much as any test victory.
I mean if it's not really his job to directly effect the on-field stuff (I've no idea how these hierarchies work) that's fine, but even the usual "we'll have to see what the failings were once the dust has settled" corporate bobbins is better than trying to go "yeah but the ECB are going to rake in some coin so that's got to be good for everybody, eh?"
The problem with him is he has no ideas to try and improve the game, he has no interest in changing structures/getting in different people to see how we can do things differently whether it be at elite level or development level. His entire raison d'etre is 'how much can we rake in from TV rights' and according to my mole at the ECB, the entire organisation runs on the basis that once the city T20 start in 2020, the streets will be paved with gold.
Thing is it's not having money that counts, it's what you do with it.
I hadn't realised Vince had coated Hayden off after the first innings in Brisbane.
Joe Root severely dehydrated in hospital. A fitting end to the tour.
It's quite hot out there, sure. Brings back memories of Sharjah in 2002, and Hayden facing down Akhtar in 50 degrees.
Needless to say, England weren't involved, so we didn't need to "have a conversation" about maximum allowable heat for play to occur.
The way Aussies these days are allowed to shapeshift between BOONY DID FIFTY TWO TINNIES, OOOAAAGH MERV THE SWERVE, SPIDERS? THAT'S NOT A KNIFE on the one hand and Awwww now look mate, Stuart Broad should have walked, our CURATORS are FAIR and we bless this land on the other hand is a real disgrace.
Nobody actually thinks Stuart Broad should have walked though. That's certifiable.
I do think our grounds are basically fair though, although some of them have become roads in recent years. Don't forget that we spent two decades losing to rampant West Indies sides at the WACA, because it suited them far more than it ever suited us. The lack of swing is more the ball than the grounds, isn't it? At any rate, good sides can give us a run here - India, South Africa, and your lot have all drawn or won series here in the last decade and change.
Just for the record, Root is being an absolute hero out there today. I honestly can't remember meeting anyone - Australian or otherwise - who dislikes Root. He just seems like a really good guy.
Allan Border would probably be giving him a serve right now, of course. But the rest of us can see he's giving everything and then some.
EDIT: Apparently Root's thing is viral, incidentally, and nothing to do with the heat.
Very interesting considering the timing. You just know he is coming back out to have another go once the next wicket falls too.
Dean Jones has been on twitter saying that cricket should be stopped at certain heat temps. I think they should look at it however I think longer breaks and more frequent drinks would be a better option. Maybe even split the day into 6 sessions with 15 minutes in the middle of the current sessions.
Edit: This should also be Jimmy's last innings in Aus. Last chance for that broken fucking arm then?
In fairness, Dean Jones played the best hot weather innings ever, so if anyone can comment.
Root and Cook were inches away from having identical stats in almost every category.
JE Root
9 innings
1 not out
378 runs
771 balls
39 fours
0 sixes
AN Cook
9 innings
1 not out
376 runs
748 balls
39 fours
0 sixes
Combined XI, in my opinion:
Warner
Root (it's my team, and I'll do this if I want)
Smith
Malan
Marsh
Marsh
Bairstow
Cummins
Starc
Hazelwood
Lyon
Moeen
Jimmy averaging under 28 with no swing, on roads, with that dross support cast must be one of the great fruitless efforts in cricket history.
I Kevin Keegan love how chippy this series has made Ital. It's been a real highlight.
Already noted how Anderson got his average down, but he was certainly economical, and the best of the England bowlers. Great control, as usual, but little penetration.
He'll murder us when he's on pitches that take wickets for him.
Also easier for your batsmen to just see him off when there are runs aplenty down the other end.
Mason Crane 1/193. I'm really not sure that was a good idea. In fact, I know it wasn't.
I'm also disappointed because my main hope for the series, once it had become clear that we'd get battered, was that Steve Smith would get to 333* and declare the innings or leave a straight one.
I don't think they have to do that anymore, post-Hayden. Which is fair.
Crane's got a lot of potential, but he's obviously not there yet. If he has any backbone, he'll learn from this.
208 for India to win, ball doing all sorts. Should be fun.
I'm sweating bullets. There is no way we should be losing, or even get close, on a pitch like this. Yet, here we are. I'm bleak at our own batting efforts, we were playing balls that really should be left alone when the ball moves around like it does.
You'll piss it, no one lives with this attack, not even the Bestest Player Ever and his increasingly merry men.
Going better now.
The nerves were more out of frustration than anything.
It's over, not even the great number six batsman Ravi Trashwin (Test batting average just less than that of Rikki Clarke) could save them.
Philander.
A veritable tsunami of Indians on cricket twitter in the last two hours declaring the great Vernon to be a green top bully. A joyous sight to behold.
Vern is 18 at home and 27 away, nothing at all like their own hero pie dispenser who is 23 at home and 31 away (34 in England, 55 in Australia, and 66 in South Africa). Of course Vernon has played 23/23 home/away, where for Rav it's 35/21.
Twitter India also loves to bring up Kohli's home ODI record to prove that he is the GOAT. In all the formats.
Even though we won, our batting was dodgy, you'd expect them to handle these conditions better. I thought the Indians bowled nicely though.
I remember back when Vern made his debut, everyone was like, wtf,, who is this? He then proceeded to dismantle Australia. I'll be honest, for a decent part of his career I couldn't imagine him keeping it up. Here we are, 48 tests later, averaging just a shade under 22. Graeme Smith has given him some criticism regarding his fitness and injury proneness, which I agree with. Other than that, you gotta wonder how he didn't make the team earlier.
Probably because he's a chubby lad who bowls 82mph (or 'mid 130s' as they seem to say in the colonies).
Cricket is terrible for selecting based on irrelevant attributes like 'pace', 'height', 'strokeplay' etc rather than results. You were going through idiots like Charl Langeveldt, Andre Nel et al in that period as well. I reckon somewhere deep in the bowels of CSA there are still people who think Wayne Parnell is a good bowler. Idiots.
My biggest fear is Parnell getting into our test team again. And I honestly think he is actually in our ODI squad. He must be close to the worst Protea we've ever had on the hype to actual performance scale. I think Nels personality helped keep him in the side. He was a huge crowd favourite. But again, that doesn't win you matches.
I read the beginning an argument on twitter where one guy said he prefers a beautiful 25 from Vince, than a ugly 80 from Ballance. That's insane. I didn't stay for the rest, was scared for my health.
Love Big Vern.
What;s Kohli series average gonna be friends? And his series average in England this summer?
How did Crane do if you make the obvious comparison against Kerrigan then? I'm sure I asked beforehand whether we thought he'd be that level. And to be fair, me and @Cord CONCLUSIVELY proved that statistically he did better with our unquestionable analysis.
Isn't this basically every sport that isn't predominantly American, where stats are the be all and end all once you get to the pros? There are Premier League players earning the better part of seven figures simply for being fast, for example.
I dont get it.
Crane managed to not soil himself on the pitch, which is likely more than I could have managed as a 20-year old.
Indeed.
Albeit from a bigger sample size Crane's stats were better and also in much worse conditions / situation than Simple Simon's.
Was there a proper Verdict on Sky or is it basically gone now? I forgot to even check. High Justice Bob would have been excellent value.
334 was Don Bradman's highest score which he achieved at Headingley I think in 1930, and that stood as the highest Australian score for decades. Because of the Don's legendary status in Australian culture, for a long time there was a really bizarre unspoken convention where no one was allowed to score more than that because it's the Don's legendary record. Mark Taylor was famously on 334* overnight and then declared the innings (even though the world record was on the table) in order not to pass Bradman's score. More recently Michael Clarke declared the innings when he was on 329* for the same reason.I dont get it.
In between times, Matthew Hayden had blown through the record with a 380 against Zimbabwe, but because it's Bradman the 334 is still seen as some ghostly untouchable score (apparently).
Yeah but football isn't really a statistical game: big pitch, lots of open space, liberal rules, few scores, and it's very freeform - so the intangibles and possibles and maybes are valuable to a team. You can have excellent players whose contributions are hard to measure using scores. N'golo Kanté comes to mind.
Cricket is purely a statistical game and if you don't produce some form of good scores, at least some of the time, then you are rubbish.
Crane is a better bowler than Kerrigan, whose action is very yippy and susceptible to go to pieces under pressure (left arm spinners are very prone to this, for some reason).
It wasn't fair on him to make him play an Ashes Test at the SCG at this point. Looking at the pitch map and reading the reports, he probably got away with a lot of shite. Leg spin is the most difficult thing in cricket and no one has learned it by 20. Even Warne's spell at the very top of his game (he lost the flipper after about 2001) was relatively brief when you compare it to finger spinners who can go on for donkey's years.
The story is a little overblown, to be honest. I was watching the Clarke match, and the declaration was fair enough so that we could get India out. The 334 genuinely had nothing to do with it. We were getting a bit antsy that he should have declared earlier to be honest (as you would with a 400+ first innings lead), but apparently they wanted to let Hussey get his 150, and declared immediately after he got it.
Mark Taylor swears blind that he was always planning to declare overnight, but I can't offer anything other than his word on that.
I agree, but I do think we're just less inclined towards statistics in that way at the same time. There is an MLS Combine, for example, and combines are basically an attempt to get the things that are normally "gut feel" into a spreadsheet. I imagine it has the Wonderlic test (or something similar) for players invited to the combine, even though there have been some amazing, best-in-the-world type footballers who can barely string a coherent sentence together.
If they didn't already have baseball Americans would probably fucking love cricket. Although if the NFL is anything to go by they're also not keen on players who are statistically good but have crap technique because they fear the technique will cost them in the professional leagues. I wonder who the best player is that an American-run cricket elite would shun because of weird technique that they didn't understand why it worked.
Baseball does that as well, although with them rather than technique it's weird stuff like 'body', and 'makeup' i.e. is he a cunt.
What we do a lot in cricket, because the sample sizes are generally too small, is explain away stats if it suits us to do so - an example is me just upthread working the numbers to dismiss a statistically very good bowler (Ashwin) as a pie thrower because a) it amuses me to do so, and b) he's a fucking pie thrower.
See also: 'It's only county cricket', 'He plays at the Oval', 'GREENTOPS', 'Ah but what did he do when it really counted?' and so on.
Then you have countries doing things differently. In England we are obsessed with orthodox technique. In Australia, they are obsessed with aggression. In Pakistan, they love extremes almost to the point where orthodox players are shunned. And so on.
I do love that cricket has managed to maintain some vestige of 'national styles'.
Reckon S P D Smith would get a game for England?
I was going to say no because he's probably too short to ever make it as a proper batsman but then I learned on Wikipedia that he has an English mother and we do love a player who's only sort of (if that) English so we'd have probably given him a go by default rather than any belief that he was an actual good player.
Tymal Mills is playing in the Big Bash here, and he's doing alright. Quick, too. Was he ever in the frame for England?
Smith would have got a chance as a leggie, failed and never made it back. Hai Scottie Borthwick
He has a back problem which means he can’t bowl more than the 4 overs.
aka the greatest long term injury in sporting history.
Only franchise cricket you say? Well, you're the doctor . . .
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