England “win the second test”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/england/8159247.stm (the first time they’ve beaten the Australians at Lords since 1934), thanks to some awesome bowling from Flintoff, and some very dodgy umpiring. Open thread below.
{ 26 comments }
mart 07.20.09 at 12:42 pm
Congrats to England, and Flintoff was amazing in his last Lords Test. Wonder if Oz will keep Johnson in the team for his batting rather than his bowling now?
I really think some umpires aren’t good enough to be adjudicating over Tests – some of those decisions were seriously WTF? and the inconsistency over low catches is unforgivable.
Paul 07.20.09 at 2:17 pm
Blighty have done well !
michael e sullivan 07.20.09 at 2:54 pm
So here’s a question for those who follow test match cricket: why wouldn’t england have enforced a follow-on here? It seems as if Australia was batting last in the second innings even though they lost the first by >200. Do the Ashes require a larger margin for followon? or not allow for it at all?
And england had to close their second innings as well in order to get the match done in time (that’s what the “-6” in the “311-6″score means, correct? that only 6 wickets were taken?).
dsquared 07.20.09 at 3:37 pm
why wouldn’t england have enforced a follow-on here?
They wouldn’t have been able to bowl Flintoff nearly as much if they hadn’t been able to give him a rest.
ejh 07.20.09 at 3:52 pm
England actually won because I didn’t follow it on the internet this morning. I spent most of yesterday flicking between Cricinfo, the Guardian OBO and the BBC website service – and Clarke and Haddin just kept on and on. So I got on with some actual work, and so apparently did Flintoff.
Ewan 07.20.09 at 4:02 pm
The other reason for not enforcing the follow-on is that the pitch was believed to be deteriorating. So Strauss wanted to get a second innings in before giving the Australians another crack. I would bet that the psychology of being able to set a daunting (as in, never-before-achieved) target for the Australians also helped.
And yes, the England second innings was declared.
mart 07.20.09 at 4:04 pm
England actually won because I didn’t follow it on the internet this morning.
Nah, it’s because I jinxed the Aussies in the last Ashes thread, to atone for having accidentally done so to England.
MES@3:
follow-onall rules are the same in the Ashes as in regular Tests, but Strauss chose not to enforce it (as is now common practice) for various reasons, one of which dsquared pointed to above. And you’re correct about the six wickets bit – it’s called a declaration.Tim Wilkinson 07.20.09 at 4:20 pm
Not sure the poor umpiring (granted it was that alright – Koertzen isn’t too great generally) had that much effect, really – of the two disputed low catches, they should both have been given out – so the error resulted in Bopara getting a few more overs at the crease and a handful of runs – if anything probably reducing England’s total.
Other than that, a dodgy caught shout for Ponting that was lbw anyway, and a just-over-the-line no ball to get Katich – OK, if we’re talking bare counterfactuals that may have had some chance of changing the match (though who knows) – but as grounds for complaint it’s pretty thin. It’s not as if the result was terribly close in the end, or Katich wasn’t caught in the slips, no-ball or not. And IIRC it looked as though Flintoff had Haddin caught off the glove when he was scarcely off the mark.
#3 There’s some stuff about the follow on at the end of ‘Ashes open thread’
– and about replays for low catches
dsquared 07.20.09 at 4:29 pm
btw, did anyone else think that SuperFreddie’s thundering performance and seeming lack of any twinges of pain signalled not so much “determination and grit” as “massive cortisone injections”? I’ll have to ask my brother about how long you can keep a crocked knee going with medical trickery, but going by the way in which baseball teams treat their star pitchers, I think it suggests that if Flintoff has agreed with the coaches that he’s more or less prepared to sacrifice his long term health for the sake of the Ashes, he will end up bowling a lot more in the remaining Tests.
Gerry 07.20.09 at 4:31 pm
Uh… how about Hussey’s second innings dismissal, when he clearly didn’t touch it. Australia were certainly unlucky, but England did deserve to win.
ejh 07.20.09 at 5:35 pm
People in sport have been having their joints knackered with cortisone injections for a very long time indeed. I wince every time I see the word.
Tom 07.20.09 at 5:57 pm
Funny, when Steve Waugh doesn’t enforce a follow on its mental disintegration, when Strauss doesn’t it’s vascillation.
I don’t think the umpiring decisions were that bad, really. Ponting was out – Anderson was appealing for lbw, not caught behind. Out off a no ball is unlucky, but hardly the most eggregious umpiring error – I’m amazed on field umpires are still asked to try and spot no balls. The Strauss catch looked good to the on field umpires, so you have to go with that, it was out – TV slow mo’s add nothing to close catching decisons. Hussey was very unlucky, but 99 umpires in 100 would have given it out. As with the last series, the good and bad decisions will even themselves out over the series.
JoB 07.20.09 at 6:35 pm
Judging by this, England can’t win. If they draw, they played poorly. If they win, they do so because of umpiring, cortisones and one person exceeding himself.
It’s funny, really, in a very sad kind of way.
dsquared 07.20.09 at 6:44 pm
I certainly wasn’t trying to suggest that England didn’t win! In any case, cortisone’s not a banned substance and Flintoff’s decision about the medical risks versus how much he wants to win the Ashes is his to make and not mine to gainsay.
Tim Wilkinson 07.20.09 at 6:49 pm
Gerry @10 – forgot about that. It does make the umpiring look a more significant influence, though FWIW and in line with your general remark, he can’t really complain it was undeserved. And Doctrove turned down what looked like two good lbw shouts against Clarke from Anderson in the 1st over today. False negatives are less high profile but obviously can be just as influential. I’ll swap my two Clarkes for your one Hussey.
dsquared @9 – yep, undoubtedly – and announcing his retirement was a commitment to giving his left leg for a second ashes win. At that moment (cue corny freeze-frame) he became not just selectable but undroppable. Then the IPL calls, if he still manage 4 over spells by then (and perhaps even if not?). I can’t see him playing much of the 50 over stuff.
Incidentally, someone on TMS yesterday suggested something similar to an idea I’ve occasionally propounded – the 1 day game moving to 25/25/25/25 format, though I came at it from the pov of 20/20 being doubled up to reduce the luck and dead-innings components. I think T20 is going to become pretty old pretty quickly once a formula is settled on, so maybe both reforms would meet in the middle. Of course that would mean longer games which reduces the newfound appeal – though coming along for the second innings alone might still be a draw? Matches could even be split over two days/evenings.
And BTW Swann bowled some real corkers, eh, even off the flat.
Tom 07.20.09 at 9:14 pm
Slightly miffed that Swann’s delivery to Clarke didn’t get a better write up. Loop, drift and spin, it had everything. Totally did Clarke in the flight, dropping like a stone, I thought it was a cracker, but friends seem to think Clarke missed a full toss.
mart 07.20.09 at 10:00 pm
Judging by this, England can’t win. If they draw, they played poorly. If they win, they do so because of umpiring, cortisones and one person exceeding himself.
It’s funny, really, in a very sad kind of way.
Oh Jeebus, the Tall Poppy thingie again. I think everyone on this thread is happy that we won. We’ve done that bit. Now we’re doing the analysis bit, where people comment on what the strengths and weaknesses are on both sides and we make predictions about how the rest of the series will pan out, capiche? We won this Test because we played better by far, the umpiring decisions probably wouldn’t have changed the result, but they were worth noting for being appalling. And yes, Flintoff playing to the standard he was last at back in 2005 made a big difference. And in that Cardiff draw, we did in fact play poorly.
nick s 07.20.09 at 10:06 pm
The other pro for making Australia bat last was that it forced Ponting to watch another somewhat inept display from his bowlers, as opposed to allowing immediate redemption with the bat.
As for Flintoff, he may well be looking at Vaughan and thinking that knackered Test players no longer have to eke out the remainder of their careers in county cricket, thanks to the IPL and/or Sky.
alanb 07.20.09 at 10:11 pm
#16 I agree – it was a corker. A Hawkeye replay actually did it justice – Swann dropped the pace by about five miles an hour from the previous ball, which made Clarke mistake the length, expecting to reach it on the full toss but playing over it. And the drift made him play down the wrong line to boot. One of the world’s best players of spin, well set, totally deceived. Terrific delivery.
Anselmo Quemot 07.21.09 at 2:04 am
I can’t help chuckling at some of these claims that the umpiring didn’t make too much difference to the match. Remember that Australia required only a rate of 3 runs per over to win on the final day. They needed only to survive to draw, so they had a real chance to remain competitive up until the end. It’s also too early and a rather ahistorical assumption to make that the bad decisions will all “even out in the end”. A case could also be made that the regular “resting”/subbing of England’s key players while a match is in progress is not really consistent with the spirit of “Test” cricket, insofar as fitness is part of the test of endurance that should be played out on the field (as opposed to behind the scenes with a physiotherapist or whatever).
JoB 07.21.09 at 11:00 am
17 – I don’t have the benefit of coverage of the Ashes, but I do have the benefit of stats and posts. The abyss between both is wide. This match clearly the 1st innings did it. It could only be lost for England after that. Most games are predictably unexciting – like this one in the 2nd innings. As Tverski has shown we forget all the unexciting bits, and cling on to the last exciting bit as if nothing else happened. Talking about Flintoff, just as in the previous thread about Pietersen.
What I’m saying is: I wasn’t on about Tall Poppies but merely about bad analysis.
From the stats, the only relevant prediction is that when England puts Australia batting under pressure they stand a good chance to come away with their relatively mediocre bowling (taking 5 wickets from a team under pressure to score is maybe more exciting, but, on analysis, less of an achievement than taking more than one on a side that starts batting). It’s kind of sad really to attack in one thread a batting performance and praise in the second a bolwing performance when it should have been the other way around.
Capiche ;-)
Chris Bertram 07.21.09 at 11:05 am
#21 Wow, you can tell that the 2nd innings was unexciting just by reading the stats! All that nervous tension I was building up during Clarke’s partnership with Haddin was merely an illusion.
dsquared 07.21.09 at 11:49 am
I suppose that to a lot of people, the Ashes would be the epitome of boredom – it’s always the same two teams in the final.
ajay 07.21.09 at 3:40 pm
23: so true. And don’t even mention the Calcutta Cup…
mart 07.21.09 at 4:03 pm
This has got to be the longest family feud in history, what with this guy having been cremated in 1882 and all… Why didn’t he leave a Will saying who got to keep them?
JoB 07.21.09 at 6:55 pm
22 – not really, but it’s the only alternative for some. But yes, I think it was probably an illusion to think that Australia would hold on after that 1st innings. That being said – I’d have loved to be able to trade the Tour de France for the Ashes this week-end.
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