Must admit Vaughan & Strauss looking very confident this morning. Playing with belief that they can win.
Boring Andrew Strauss reaches his 3rd fifty in row... 118-1.
Isn't Test Match cricket, especially England's way of playing it, just SO DULL?
Sarky twat. When I originally posted the thread, Michael Vaughan had just spent 133 balls getting a meagre 30, Pietersen had tossed around for 80 balls getting the scratchiest 26 I have ever witnessed and Bell and Collingwood had faced several balls for f*** all. All this in a test match AT HOME to a team ranked SEVENTH in the ICC Test Championship. The run rate was UNDER 1.50 and the game was tedious as shit. This was on a pitch where batting aggressively was an absolute must, given the unpredictable nature of the pitch. Look at how New Zealand batted in the first innings, idiot.
Since then, England (well, Panesar) have bowled very well and they have come out and batted with a little more positivity, thank f***. None of this changes my view that English cricket has been coma-inducingly boring for the last couple of years. The batsmen have played with fear and have bored me to tears. We won the Ashes in 2005 by batting aggressively. Why we have reversed that policy I will never know.
The only reason we are in a position to win this match is because Monty bowled beautifully, not because of anything the batsmen did. He dragged us out of this mess and if New Zealand had got anywhere near their first innings total we would be dead and buried. I was criticising the batsmen, not the bowlers.
but didn`t England and Monty attack with their bowling............... its a team game Chesney.