Yeah I've seen absolutely nothing to suggest he's a capable batsman. He basically missed a full toss today trying to swipe across the line. If he is batting at number 8 then you've picked the wrong balance of side.
Cricket
- Thread starter summerisle
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Yeah I've seen absolutely nothing to suggest he's a capable batsman. He basically missed a full toss today trying to swipe across the line. If he is batting at number 8 then you've picked the wrong balance of side.
tHeY GoT 49 DeAd EaSy ThErE WoZ nUfFinK WrOnG WiTh tHe PiTcH
Dire performance by England. The pitch irrelevant when you bat like that.
The selection a good laugh too. Who looked at the wicket and thought we need 4 quicks and to drop a spinner lol
The selection a good laugh too. Who looked at the wicket and thought we need 4 quicks and to drop a spinner lol
Done in a day and a half.
That’s a disgrace. The pitch 100% to blame.
That’s a disgrace. The pitch 100% to blame.
Cool_Blue
Player Valuation: £35m
Some serious soul searching required here.
Bairstow is allegedly a top player of spin. Well that’s put that assessment to bed.
Pope lunging forward at everything with an angled bat. Awful.
And Archer at no.8? India have better batsmen than him coming in at no.10. He is literally a no.11 bunny.
Bairstow is allegedly a top player of spin. Well that’s put that assessment to bed.
Pope lunging forward at everything with an angled bat. Awful.
And Archer at no.8? India have better batsmen than him coming in at no.10. He is literally a no.11 bunny.
The binman chronicles
Player Valuation: £80m
Pathetic. The whole team needs to do the walk of shame. Get bowled out once for silly money is one thing, twice is another. They know the pitch is bad so shot decisions should have been adjusted accordingly.
Mildredblues
Player Valuation: £2.5m
The selection was a disgrace. 4 quicks plus Stokes? In the sub continent? I reckon the best time to bat on that pitch was in the night when conditions supposedly favoured the quicks.
I do get what you're saying, and there's certainly some of the stuff from Kohli I don't agree with, but I'm also with Greame Swann on this (which is a bit of a surprise I have to say) that I hope England don't look at the pitch as an excuse.
There's no doubt to me it was a challenging pitch, but thats 5 consecutive low scoring innings for England. Even if you discount the 1st test, which was a unique situation, the last 4 innings for me haven't been good enough. First with the toss, the with the pitch, it seems like excuses were being readied far too early.
There wasn't an awful lot of smart cricket for me. Not a lot of pro-active play, mixed in with the occasional slog for 6. Players like Pope don't seem to know where his off stump is. Foakes seems to have reasonable technique, but goes into a bunker mentality with tailenders who are getting out left right and centre, Sibley is just a walking wicket at the top etc.
I remember Nasser Hussein said years ago, that just saying the ball is swinging I got out is not enough. It's your job as a batsman to deal with the swinging ball, and I think the same with the spinning ball. You know it's going to spin in India. Average on day 2 is 3.4 degree and today was 4.9 so it's probably about 50% worse. But you would have expected to be playing on similar tracks on days 3/4 never mind day 5 normally. As a batsman, what is your plan to make runs?
I don't think Axar or Ashwin are prodigious turners of the ball, fine bowlers though they are. We seemed to get stuck playing from the crease, and playing for the spin. I would have thought adjusting to being more offensive and light on your feet, and also paying the straight line on your stumps an if the ball goes past the edge, thats a chance you take.
So it's a real learning curve. Bairstow looked like a guy who's just got off a plane with no practice, so again that was really poor planning. In the next match, personally I'd bring Lawrence back for Sibley, shunt Bairstow to opener (with the instruction of playing like it's a one day match) at one end. At the other bit, drastic though this sounds, I would not play any of the quicks today. Bess would come back in and Parkinson if he's out there, and I'd go with Chris Woakes. If you only need a bowler to bowl a few with the new ball, for me, I'd have the guy who bats the best back in. Sort of the reverse Ashley Giles. Lawrence also bowls a bit of spin, so we should have plenty of options.
I mean Root did get 5 for 8, but it's worth saying he did mainly mop up the tail, which are mainly left handers. I'm not sure Root would have had such joy against the top 4 or 5 of India.
I think you're missing the point of what i'm saying really. I'm not saying England batted really well or anything, just that the pitch was a joke. India play spin better than we do, and they bowl it better than we do. If that's a surprise to anybody, I'm not really sure what to say.
The point is, there should at least be a reasonable level of competition between bat and ball, and this pitch just took that out of the equation completely. It was a shocker, it was turning square in the first hour yesterday, that's just not how a test match pitch should be playing. I think the point about Root mopping up the table is clutching at straws really. 5-8 is all you need to know. It wouldn't matter if it was me and you batting out there, a part time bowler shouldn't be able to take 5 wickets and only have 3 scoring shots off him on the second morning of a test match.
We can all moan about England's batting, but really that's not important in the grand scheme of things. Pitches like that will kill test cricket, which is a much bigger issue for me.
You've never my batting mate!
But no the pitches have not been a competition of bat against ball. I mean strangely I said this after the last match where people were on about the toss, and I was trying to say, on such a low scoring match the toss becomes less important, as it's pretty much a spinning track from ball 1, so to some degree it negates the toss.
I'd rather see games that go 4-5 days, even if it means the toss becomes more important as a result. I think have 1-2 days of what we have seen today is more than enough, as opposed to 5 days. I know thats not for everyone, but I've always felt there was something quite magical about the pattern of a proper 5 day test match in the sub continent, where the game is like a slow chess match for 3 days and then builds to a crescendo of action in the latter phases.
On a slight aside, playing 4 quicks on that track is probably going to go down as a misread akin to Nasser Hussein bowling first in Brisbaine! A track as you say where Joe Root can some of the best figures in recent times, and we went in with a 4 pronged pace attack!
It was a horrific team selection, as bad as any i've seen. They somehow ended up both a batsman and a bowler light, which is no mean feat. There's no excuses from me about the selection or the poor batting, both are true. That doesn't take away from the fact the pitch was an abomination though. It annoys me when you get people saying 'everyone got out to straight balls' as if that makes it ok. If they were unfathomably playing for spin that would make sense as an argument, but they weren't. They were playing for spin because there was spin. Loads of it. I mean Pope played an awful shot to get bowled (again) by a straight one but literally the ball before had turned past everything and gone for 4 byes. You can't expect people to play as if the balls going to go straight when every other ball is gripping and turning. You then get people saying 'well it didn't seem to bother them' as if chasing 48 against a team opening the bowling with Joe Root wouldn't be a stroll in the park on day 9 of a normal pitch. One of his first balls turned a mile and went for another 4 byes and they were 10% of the way there already, it wasn't quite the same situation.
BlueStevie35
Player Valuation: £70m
The stats make grim reading for how poor the game was, 4 innings, 387 runs, 30 wickets
Compare that to the other two tests, 913 runs and 40 wickets in the second and 1285 runs and 40 wickets in the first test
Compare that to the other two tests, 913 runs and 40 wickets in the second and 1285 runs and 40 wickets in the first test
I think both points are true. It was a bad pitch, with some pretty shoddy batting.
Both points can and should be raised.
In honesty, the only way to score on the pitch would be to tea off, and hope you get lucky. If you can get 6-8 boundaries before you inevitably get out, happy days. But you could be out 1st big shot.
As has been stated, there is probably some entertainment value in that, mainly due to the novelty, but its not really the essence of test cricket.