Cricket in Manchester?
It rained on the first Twenty20 in Manchester on Sunday and there was no result.
And guess what?
It looks like it’s going to rain in Manchester again today.
No wonder they decided not to hold a test match at Old Trafford in the City of Rain.
The Ashes!!
Yippee!!
The only problem was all of the dodgy decisions by the umpires.
Technology! Technology! Technology!
But in cricket’s case it’s all there. And look at how exciting the replays are in tennis and how they have made the game much less aggressive and bad-tempered.
My Money’s on a Draw
Well it isn’t as I’m not betting. But it’s raining in Birmingham now and it looks like it will rain most of the day today and then again on Monday.
No wonder the Draw is now 10/3 on with Paddy Power.
Onions Does the Business
England’s revival in the Edgbaston test after their poor showing yesterday, would seem to owe a lot to the first two balls of the day, where Graham Onions took two wickets.
Now Onions is from Gateshead and plays for Durham, so like Sir Bobby Robson he is a born-and-bred Geordie. It is also well known that Sir Bobby loved his cricket, was often seen at Test matches and helped fellow Durham player, Steve Harmison, with his attitude to the game. According to Mickey Stewart he was no mean cricketer himself.
So were those first two balls for Sir Bobby?
What Would WG Grace Have Done?
Yesterday, Andrew Strauss had a chance to reduce the Australian team to ten men before a ball was bowled. But in the spirit of fair play, he allowed them to change their wicket-keeper.
What would all those hard and legendary England captains of the past have done?
Two Freddies
Freddie Flintoft’s exploits on Monday morning as he bowled out the Australians to win the Second Test were awesome and he deserved the Man of the Match award. There was fire, accuracy and variation in one of the best displays of fast bowling by an England fast bowler in recent years.
I’m also reminded of another display of awesome fast bowling, by another Freddie, that I was lucky enough to see on television in 1961. It was at Headingley and the bowler was the legendary Fred Trueman. This paragraph comes from his obituary in The Times.
Trueman stored away in his memory his ideas of every batsman’s weakness, whether it be a lowly undergraduate or one of the great players of the day, and he expected to take a wicket with every ball he bowled. He had such a wonderful range that at Headingley in the Third Test match in 1961 he was able to take 11 Australian wickets for 88 runs bowling quickish off cutters (including a spell of five wickets for no run in Australia’s second innings), and two years later, in the Third Test match against West Indies at Edgbaston, to take 12 for 119 with pace and swing (the last of six of them coming in 24 balls at the cost of one scoring stroke).
Sadly, England lost that 1961 series by two matches to one.
I hope that’s not an omen for this series.
I Was There!
There is an old Max Boyce song or tale about Llanelli beating the All Blacks, 9-3 in 1972. Upwards of 50,000 Welshmen claim that they were in Stradey Park that day, when the figure was probably around 20,000.
My only real “I was there” moment was that I was in Trafalgar Square on July 6th, 2005, when London won the right to hold the 2012 Olympics. I was on the steps of St. Martins-in-the-Fields and I have the pictures to prove it.
So how many fervent Welshmen will claim that they were in Cardiff, when England played their “Get Out of Jail Free” card yesterday. Read Tom Fordyce for an excellent piece on how the bowlers batted out a draw. I couldn’t possibly claim it was a well-deserved draw could I? But then it is always worthwhile to rub an Aussie’s nose in it.
I listened to the story unfolding in the car between Dunkirk and Rotterdam, not on the BBC’s Test Match Special on Long Wave, but the regular Five Live broadcast, with Mark Pougatch, Alex Stewart, Jason Gillespie and Pat Murphy. It was nail-biting stuff. Not that I do that anymore.
At one point, I went through a tunnel and there was cheering on the other side. Had England lost a wicket? No they’d scored a four. Everything was cheered and even after a dot ball, you’d think that England had won.
So it was all great fun! But I can’t agree more with Jason Gillespie, when he suggested that a bit of pace, rather than two spinners might have blasted one of Anderson and Panesar out. But then that is just a what if!
Panesar, like all good Sikhs, showed his honourable fighting qualities and has given the selectors a real dilemma. They probably need to drop one of the spinners, and he would have been the most likely, as although they both bowled badly in Cardiff, he is the lesser batsman.
But can they drop one of the heroes of Cardiff?
The Anonymous Widower 