Chicken Runner61
We stand where we want!
- May 20, 2007
- 4,609
And there we go - right thats me out, I going to sleep and like when I go to bed and we are doing ok and wake up to find out we've collapsed perhaps the reverse will happen!
Scrub that. Two remaining batsmen and 200 leg byes.
C'mon Monty! You can do it.
Can we turn this around and draw the series with 2 wins and a draw in the remaining 3 tests?
Telling statistic - not one of the deliveries that dismissed English batsmen in their 2nd innings would have hit the stumps. None.
I've been saying it throughout this thread, especially to those extolling the bowling of Johnson like he is some kind of unplayable paceman. He's still very playable, but you have to be selective in your shots. In the 2 test matches, of our top 6 batsmen, Johnson has 8 wickets. 1 clean bowled (Cook), 1 LBW (Stokes), 1 caught Keeper (Trott), and I think 2 caught at slip. Out of 24 wickets of our top order, he has 8, to my mind 4 or so of which were gifted to him.
He is not this miraculously transformed speed menace that has terrorised England. We've just been awful, pure and simple.
I'd like to know what Gooch and the team are actually doing out there. Why does there seem to be a mental plan to go after anything short? Did we lose 4 or 5 wickets that last innings hooking or pulling down the leg side? This match was savable on that pitch, no doubt about it, but you can't afford to lose 1 wicket caught on the fine leg boundary let alone 4 or 5.
Our bowling is insipid as well. I'd like to see Monty retained, Swann dropped and Finn in for Perth. I'm not sure what else we can do to the batting. Root did enough to stay at 3, but if anything I'd like to see Bell come in before KP who remains the one player I'd consider dropping for Ballance at this point - to make a point.
Prior has perhaps done just a whisker of enough to keep his place ahead of Bairstow with that last knock, but still, after playing a controlled scoring innings he plays an inexplicable shot to get out.
Perhaps going to Perth we should be blooding the likes of Finn, Ballance, Bairstow to what the Ashes is all about. The positive might be toughening them up for future battles as this series is gone away, as has most of our team.
I also wish Cook could have come out and been a bit more forthright and not the typical, oh we've got to take the positives, we have to learn from this, we're still in the series blah blah blah. There were no positives Alistair mate, it was a total shower of shite from start to finish. You've given us barely a moment where we could feel we were in this series, perhaps the first morning when they were 150-6 or whatever, but you managed to f*ck that up as well.