His body literally doesn't work. I'm amazed he even gets through the four overs of a T20 game, and he's not even capable of playing 50-over stuff.Originally Posted by ItalAussie
Was fairly erratic when he did play first class, but that didn't stop everyone wanting to get him in the Test team because of speed alone.
Nope, and similarly Alastair Cook would have had a very hard time getting a game for Australia.
Pakistan is mental, go on their main forum pakpassion and you see how their outlook works. As a bowler, if you're not bowling stump-exploding yorkers at 100mph, ideally left arm, they're not interested. Anyone below 90mph is a 'trundler' and any batsman who isn't Shahid Afridi is 'tuk tuk'.
In two rain affected games in NZ, Pakistan have looked very average. Not as bad as the Windies, but getting there.
Tuk tuk? Like, the car/thing?
Yep, i.e. slow.
Back to this: for me, Clive, his weakness is poking outside off stump against the moving ball and it's never really gone away (except when the ball doesn't move, obviously). If Virat tops 40 over here I'll be amazed. And in this series, going to the HAAAAH FELT next, a similar story.
I don't reckon that's true. Taylor was at the top of the order for ages, and we've trialled a bunch of others.
Cook would be fine to get a game based on weight of shield runs, but if he had a bad patch, the selectors would glance longingly at the panic button. Given Cook's consistency though, I'd imagine he'd have dodged the axe for a while.
Who's this Liam Livingstone chap we've called up?
And do we have a helmet capable of protecting his colossal forehead?
Vince keeping his place ffs
Those balls wide of off stump aren't just going to play beautiful wafts at themselves, mate.
I like Livingstone (he's a balls to the wall kind of player) but not sure where he's going to slot in, unless we move Root up to three, which in the absence of good threes we probably should.
Root 3, Malan 4, Vince/Livingstone 5 (if they insist on persisting with Vince it should be further down the order which he must surely be better suited to), Bairstow 6.
Pakistan 16/6 chasing 257.
That is all.
I'd love to have NZ over for a four-test series. They'd do well here, too.
Boult and Southee are fantastic.
Pakistan 9 and 10 put a fight to be 74 all out. Am I right in saying Pakistan have always travelled poorly?
Glad to see Southee has found some form after being distinctly average for years now. Boult is legitimately going to be NZ's greatest ever if he keeps this up.
I've always thought they have the game to travel well (and it's not like they ever actually play at home) but I don't know if that means they do. Does anyone travel well anymore? I'm sure they've done well enough over here the last few times, although that could be a figment of my imagination.
16/6 suggests a pitch that was doing something, so clearly not a proper cricket result.
I'm sure people in here (probably Jimmy and Ital) have discussed this before and the answer was not really but the BBC did an article about it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/42590656
I've not read the whole thing because there are an awful lot of numbers in there that I just don't care about but basically the away wins percentage has stayed broadly the same basically for ever in test cricket.
Does "travel well" mean "travel well to England"?
They often give us a decent run here, historically. They famously beat us in Oz 1-0 in 1985/86, when Hadlee took basically every wicket to fall in the entire series, including his 9 for. They also drew 0-0 with us in a three-match series here in 2001/02, which is when we were at our strongest - that was a pretty great series, in retrospect. More recently, they got a draw against us last time they were here, in the match that Ross Taylor scored 290, The series in Oz before that, we drew 1-1.
They certainly give us a run when they turn up here.
Pakistan are notoriously good travellers historically. Even got a win at the Oval in their first ever series.
India are terrible. I'm pretty sure there are no more or less away wins now than there ever were. There are probably more humpings though.
I was talking about Pakistan.
Don't New Zealand frequently play Australia at the beginning or end of the summer? And often in Hobart? Perk of always being the bridesmaid, I guess.
Most teams travel well enough to England because the conditions are pretty variable on a day-by-day basis, meaning calamitous days/sessions are never far away for anyone. I still think the most prototypical (maybe that should be proteatypical) example of that was when Sought Africa absolutely mullered us at Headingly after putting us in under leaden skies, rolling us, batting for two days in the sunshine, and then rolling us again after the two days of sunshine allocated for Yorkshire expired.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/42590656
What I would say is the general standard of Test cricket, especially bowling, is very poor. Apart from England and New Zealand and maybe India, every Test team of today would be thrashed by their counterparts from 20 years ago.
That is because boards have weakened domestic cricket in order to chase dollar.
1998 Ashes touring team : Butcher, Atherton, Hussain, Stewart, Thorpe, Ramprakash, Cork, Croft, Gough, Mullaly, Fraser (Crawley, Hick, Healdey, Tudor, Such, Hegg).
I reckon an XI from that would beat the current lot with ease.
Anderson and Broad are a lot better than any of those bowlers. 90s batting was better though.
You don't need to have good bowlers to get through the current side though. Mullaly would wreak havoc. He was a left-armer in the wrong era. The difference in batting is stark, but that's mostly down to the current lot being largely useless in that department.
I think you underestimate Gough. He was a very good bowler and was just short of the abilities of Broad and Anderson. Mullally was decent but didn't swing the ball both ways, which counted against him.
England's current best players - Cook, Root, Anderson and Broad are better than any of those players from 20 years ago. Moeen Ali and Croft offered very different abilities but current player has the edge. The rremainder of the older generation have the edge over today's players. It would be a very close contest. If Stokes was available, then he might be the difference between the two teams.
Can't find the full Australian squad from 1998/99, but the team lined up for the first test:
Taylor, Slater, Langer, Waugh, Waugh, Ponting, Healy, Kasprowicz, Fleming, MacGill, McGrath.
Let's assume that Warne would be the main spinner, Gillespie would start ahead of Kasper when fit, and that Hayden, Lehmann, Martyn, and Gilchrist were all broadly in the frame. Out of the current lot, Smith would get in ahead of M. Waugh, and Starc & Hazelwood over Gillespie & Fleming. Warner/Slater is much of a muchness. Those are the only four who'd get near the squad though, and given the state of the team at the time, I imagine that only Cummins would get near the corresponding Australia A side.
EDIT: We played three spinners at the SCG that year. Good old Funky Miller.
It took 20 overs for the 'Give Jason Roy a go in tests' comment to appear on the BBC live text.
Aggressive brand.
We'll probably collapse in a heap now I've said this, but I thought it was pretty lol that the stats men gave Australia something like a 70% chance of winning this having posted 300. Erm.
When you think Atherton averaged 39 or whatever whilst running into McGrath, Ambrose, Donald and the two Ws in respective series with the new ball, 50% in swinging English conditions, he'd probably average 50 today.
Roy.
Shame he completely forgot how to play cricket for he duration of the Champions Trophy.
I see Joe Root busy failing to convert again.
What a chump.
So, having now been charged, Stokes is free to play for England because
"given the potential length of the trial", it would not be "fair, reasonable or proportionate for Ben Stokes to remain unavailable for a further indeterminate period"
If that was going to be the reasoning, why on earth was he suspended in the first place?
They are making it up as they go along. The initial 'banning' was in the expectation he'd be charged or not within days, which of course is not how Avon & Somerset Police or whichever Hot Fuzz-esque mongs are in charge of this will function. Christ knows why they developed that expectation, presumably it's because the only previous time they've come into contact with the police was when Lt Col Tufty Bufty-Lumley came across a bit squiffy after a few too many G&Ts at the Hurlingham Club and a quick call from Uncle Charlie sorted plod out that time.
ECB literally don't have a clue what they're talking about on any subject and most of their staff need to be fired right now.
Meanwhile I see the Windies are up to their disgraceful old tricks again in the U19 world cup, having someone dismissed for picking up the (stationary) ball and throwing it to their 'keeper. It was them last time as well wasn't it doing something highly nefarious? Mankading?
Yes, Keemo Paul. I'm cool with mankading though, batsmen need persecuting.
They changed 37.1 quite recently (I'm a laws nerd these days as qualifying as an umpire) to move such instances over from Handled the Ball to Obstructing the Field, and I can kind of see the logic in that in theory, his non-striking partner could (unbeknown to him) be dashing for a run and by handling the ball he will have denied the fielding side the chance to run him out.
It is however a case where the fielding side have to actively be cunts and 'deny permission' though and I bet none of them knew 33 or 37 anyway, so the cuntery charge is fair.
The real laws nightmare recently was the game-ending run in the women's Big Bash, now that was a minefield and a half.
Bloody Harrison manages to get his marketing shite even into the Ben Stokes thing.
God bless those families, especially the right sort.Perhaps the best clue we have, in fact, is a letter that chief executive Tom Harrison wrote to England’s Ashes squad shortly before Christmas, reminding them of their off-field duties in the wake of the incidents featuring Jonny Bairstow and Ben Duckett. We don’t know what was in the letter for certain, and perhaps it is purely coincidence that over the subsequent days, England player after England player strode out in front of the press and started talking about how the team had a duty to project the best possible image to “sponsors” and “families”.
So why is Stokes available now that he's definitely been charged with something, when we all had video evidence of exactly what he'd done and knew he hadn't secretly murdered anybody, but when it was all up in the air he couldn't be picked?
Because the ECB are retards.
Our under 19s are playing Bangladesh on Sky soon/now.
Looks like we've got a shit leggy who fires it down with no turn. Future of English white ball cricket secure.
I assumed that, just checking there wasn't a sensible reason I hadn't thought of.
Maybe they thought the New Zealand crowds would be ravenous for more after his turn for the Wellington Wellingtons or whoever it was.
This under 19 side of ours is wank, full of plummy cunts. The last one, with Lawrence and Saqib and Curran, Burnham and Garton, was ace. Pity Burnham's since been done for recreational drugs but whatever.
This Will Jacks from Surrey is meant to be good but he's clearly a shitcunt.
With a name like Will Jacks he was doomed from the start.
I never understood why Stokes wasn't selected for the Ashes in the first place. He hadn't been charged with anything and its not the ECB's job to presume that he is guilty. They seem to have got this the wrong way round.
I just realised that Joe Denly is playing in the Big Bash. Took me by surprise!
Have you seen the Big Bash lately? That's the future of cricket in a nutshell.
I was being serious/lamenting.
Someone needs to fire up first class cricket worldwide, because T20 is fucking awful cricket and at the moment you get financial rewards for being shit and not for being good. The standard of the Big Bash is absolutely woeful.
So I'm totally with you on this. I meant it as an agreement/acknowledgement that this is definitely the future.
But it does pain me to admit that it's a fun thing to have on in the evenings. Most nights I'll flick it on the TV and have it going in the background of whatever I'm doing. I feel bad about it, but I still do it anyway. I'm still not sure what that makes me.
Oh it's fun to watch, but if that is what cricket now is then it's like roller hockey or darts.
I genuinely get nothing from T20.
Given a proper context, good pitches and a proper array of cricketers I do enjoy the tactics and strategy of T20. If you played it with representative sides rather than franchise guff, and played it on bigger grounds where boundaries mean something, it would be a much better game.
Unfortunately our friends the marketing moguls seem to think the cricket isn't a product and instead you need rubbish crowd competitions, Bollywood stars, and loads of shit banter.
The World T20 is an enjoyable tournament.
The reduction of boundary sizes annoys me more than any other aspect of T20 cricket. And cricket in general.
They should do a straight switch on the Australian commentary teams though. Ponting is genuinely fantastic, and Gilchrist is very thoughtful. The real dark horse is Andrew Symonds though - he's not the most eloquent of commentators, but he'll provides incredible insight within his key areas (fielding, mostly) and doesn't venture too far beyond what he knows. I'd love to see them do the real cricket, and the clown posse (Mark Taylor notwithstanding) be bumped into the T20 where they belong.
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