Jump to content

Cricket VI


Stubby

Recommended Posts

I'm not going to pretend they don't care more about the Ashes

It seems that we agree on the central point then.

A lot of the England players also have additional motivations.

Fair comment.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yay! Now we could hypothetically field an all-Queensland bowling attack (Magoffin, Edmondson, Johnson, Noffke)

Even though it's fantastic that we have picked up a high quality player in Noffke, it's a sad indictment on Western Australian cricket that we have to rely on Queensland imports to maintain a potent fast bowling attack. The state that produced greats like Lillee, McKenzie and Alderman can't even supply an attack for its own first-class team. :thumbsdown:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sad indeed. I also note from this morning's paper that Justin Langer is being actively encouraged to make a comeback for WA this year. He, however, will only do so if he is captain.

Linky

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Am I the only one cynical enough to assume that the Super 8's have been structured in the way they have to ensure that India and Pakistan dont end up in the same group? Therefore ensuring a better match-up for the semi-finals?

Otherwise it makes no sense to not carry over the points from the leagues and use seedings according to what happened in the last WC. That happened 2 years ago!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For sure. Pakistan just aren't the international force they once were, and India are increasingly looking like being the ones to take over the cricket Superpower mantle from Australia (if Australia were to relinquish their monopoly on cricket, of course). Them or South Africa, anyway.

Didn't see the Eng-SA match up, but when you read things like "first maiden of the tournament" and "no team has made a lower total in the powerplay", you pretty much get the idea.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Didn't see the Eng-SA match up, but when you read things like "first maiden of the tournament" and "no team has made a lower total in the powerplay", you pretty much get the idea.

You didn't miss much, it was probably the dullest game of the tournament so far. Ireland actually scored more than England today, which should tell you something about England's poor batting performance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Grr. For a while there I actually though Ireland could win. Not long mind you, but a while. Still, it was a more than credible performance. Yes, they are definitely minnows at this. Yes, it'll take a minimum of 10 years before they're likely to be anything but an associate side, but there are definitely sparks coming from this and last years World Cup. If nothing else, in the last 2 weeks I've seen 2 separate groups of ankle-biters playing cricket. With stumps and bats and everything. I can categorically state that I've never seen that before. Anecdotes ftw.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

England knock out defending champions India. Wow. :stunned:

It was an impressive bowling performance by England, they obviously thought they saw that India had a potential weakness against the short ball and executed their plan very well. They kept their nerve well at the end as well, aside from Broad fumbling another easy run-out chance. England's batting was still a bit disappointing, they did manage a better score than against South Africa but didn't really score fast enough in the middle of the innings. I think they're maybe short a batsman, they need an extra specialist batsman in the team rather than one of the all-rounders. I think the lack of a 'proper' batsman at 6 might explain some of Collingwood and Shah's tentativeness in the SA match, they must have been worried about exposing the tail too early in the game and couldn't take risks. In the India game Mascarenhas came up a bit too far up the order, he is usually a useful late-order slogger but shouldn't be coming in so early, and he struggled a bit to score at the required rate.

It's difficult to predict what will happen tomorrow. England have repeatedly beaten West Indies this summer, but the Windies have been more consistent in the tournament so far whereas England have yet to string together two decent performances.

In other matches, I thought Ireland should be very pleased with their performance, they came very close to beating Sri Lanka after a good bowling performance and the start of their innings went well also. In the end, Murali, Mendis and Malinga were just too good for Ireland's lower batting order, but Ireland did enough that Pakistan will be worrying about a repeated of the World Cup in their next match.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If there's one thing you can count on England doing, it's managing to do everything without suprising anyone.

I wouldn't be surprised if they got their arses handed to them in the round robin. Neither would I be surprised if they went on to win the whole damn thing. They have that kind of inconsistency that you just sit back and let whatever is going to happen, just happen.

So I'm not surprised they took India out of the game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dreadful selection. You can't expect to win a 20/20 tournament with a tail that starts at 6, especially when one of the top five is both woefully out of form and the captain. The batsmen can't have a bash, 'cause they know we can't afford to lose wickets and we've got no-one down the order who can score boundaries. I fail to see why we need five frontline bowlers and two allrounders, neither of whom has really bowled. Ridiculous.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I missed him the other night on the replays, but I did catch his stint of commentry for the India match which made for funny listening as he maligned the person in the box with him (I think it was agers) for saying that some people have being saying that an Indian batsmen is the new Sachin Tendulker and then played horribly at a short ball and got out.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dreadful selection. You can't expect to win a 20/20 tournament with a tail that starts at 6, especially when one of the top five is both woefully out of form and the captain. The batsmen can't have a bash, 'cause they know we can't afford to lose wickets and we've got no-one down the order who can score boundaries. I fail to see why we need five frontline bowlers and two allrounders, neither of whom has really bowled. Ridiculous.

Actually, it's three all-rounders - Wright, Bopara and Collingwood. I don't think Bopara bowled any overs at all. Given that Pietersen can also bowl the occasional over (and I think Shah can bowl a bit of spin as well) they shouldn't have too much problem filling in the fifth bowler duties between them even if only four specialists were selected.

The selection did seem a bit muddled. Foster's wicket-keeping may have been very good but his batting didn't look suitable for Twenty20 cricket, especially coming in at number 6. Given that they're happy to live with Matt Prior's keeping mistakes in the other forms of the game I don't see why he was dropped for this tournament, since he can at least play plenty of aggressive shots, or alternatively a more aggressive wicket-keeper/batsman like Phil Mustard.

The long tails do seem to be a trend of recent selections, see the recent Test series where the long tail (albeit one with some decent lower-order batsmen in it) might have been good enough to beat the Windies, but for the Ashes it would very risky to not have another specialist batsman in the team.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Should be a good end to the tournament now with some good match-ups in the semi-finals. Nice combination of teams with the two surprise packages of the competition (Pakistan and Windies) up against two of the early favourites (South Africa and Sri Lanka). I would love to see Pakistan win the trophy, but I think beating South Africa in the next game is a big ask. SA have come a long way since the days when they had four or five right-arm fast medium bowlers in their limited overs attack and no variation at all.

As expected, neither of the Ashes combatants have made it very far into the tournament, and NZ were badly affected by injuries so it is no surprise to see them exit. Ireland played OK (especially in that game against Sri Lanka), so I'm sure they will be happy with their performance. India will be gutted to have lost all of their Super 8s games. Very disappointing tournament in the end - apart from Ohja and Yuvraj, none of their big name players really got going.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...