India tour of Eng, June 20 - Aug 4

[sussexpob]

How's that going?

Nowadays to get a decent rest, England need to score 700

[sussexpob]

Siraj drops him on 0, but return catches are always tough. Atkinson gets a life, he needs to make it pay

[Arthur Crabtree]

England could do with bowling tonight.

[Arthur Crabtree]

Brook is out. Need some top order wickets tonight.

But not much down time for the bowlers.

[mikesiva]

India 224 all out

Nair 57
Sudharsan 38

Atkinson 5-33
Tongue 3-57

England 247 all out

Crawley 64
Brook 53
Duckett 43

Prasidh 4-62
Siraj 4-86

One innings match?

[Arthur Crabtree]

Jaiswal dropped twice now. Just what a depleted pace attack doesn't want.

Off Atkinson and Tongue.


Now Crawley drops Sudharsan off Overton.

Dark?

[sussexpob]

ARGHHHH!!!

Twice in consecutive overs FFS lads, get your head in the game! These are simple chances!!

[sussexpob]

2nd drop ends up being not so costly, as Atkinson gets through Sai ....

I think Sai will be disappointed with his series. Hes a big IPL stroke maker, but at no stage has he done anything but bunker in and fail to survive. Maybe needs to watch Duckett bat more.

[sussexpob]

17 minutes is a long time for a nightwatchman, especially one who has looked to slog every ball this series.

[Arthur Crabtree]

All over though. Good day for India, but not much in it. Though Woakes' injury gives the tourists a massive advantage.

[sussexpob]

All in all, today is another one of those days where you are left with the bittersweet taste of bazball in your mouth. England got themselves into a commanding position, and then totally threw it away with immature cricket. I have no problems with Duckett or Crawley going out and putting the hammer down, but where is the situational awareness? Your a bowler down and have to bat some time to give the others a rest, you have splattered India all over to the point Gill is having a full on panic attack not knowing where to put his fielders or who to bowl, and the Indian bowlers are in full retreat with their lines and lengths just trying not to get smashed.... and then Duckett plays "I dont know what the **** you want to call that" and gets himself out, Crawley attempts to pull a ball at knee height and sand wedges it into the stratosphere like hes trying to get out the 13th hole side bunker at St Andrews, and then India are back in the game, back finding their line and length, and back doing damage. There must be somewhere between normal defensive, watchful cricket and hyper warpspeed. Duckett telegraphed his pre-meditated shot so much, he had his foot 1 meter outside legstump before Krishna had released the ball, and he clearly reacted to it and fired it wider.

Atkinson won the prize for dunce of the day though. With the world best batter on about 50 at the other end, and a batter at that who can easily turn a 50 into a 100 in 15-20 balls when in the groove, he steps into a baseball shot and spooned it to mid on. I just dont get it - your job is to hold up an end and let Brook do his stuff, don't leave him stranded with the 11 who can't hold a bat trying to pretend you are Barry Bonds. Just immature, idiotic cricket. These should be really easy common sense stuff, but 40-45 tests into the Bazball era we keep making these mistakes.

Other stuff rankles you too. The whole macho team persona maybe going to their heads; I have never seen Root lose his cool, and what happens? He tries to get chatty like he's He-man, and then next ball he's walking back because he missed one on middle stump losing his concentration. You've been an excellent batter for the best part of 15 years Joe, don't engage is this hero rubbish, do you talking with your bat like you always have.

And then the squad selection. They stupidly went for 4 injury prone bowlers, a bowler got injured. They picked a guy who has barely played FC in years, he has taken no wickets and scored no runs in the first innings. They picked another kid who has barely played and also doesn't seemingly want to either, could of been out first ball, ends up missing one coming back into him by a bat width and being out lbw for almost nothing. What did we expect? As Michael Vaughan said on comms, its damn well hard enough to play test cricket anyway - not bothering to even play FC, or picking people who can't perform in it? What did we expect? Well, I expected exactly that - 6 runs and no wickets combined from two apparent all rounders. Could have put two names in the hat and picked out people at random from CC, they'd probably have done better.

It feels like England are continually putting all their chips on Red, and rolling the dice. If we want to be remotely competitive in Australia we need to make far better decisions across the board, from the Director down to the players.

Some of these things are small and not difficult, but this is now the 4th summer of bazball, you'd expect some of these lessons to have been learned by now.

[Arthur Crabtree]

Maybe 'evolved bazball' is a tautology and if it were to be responsive and adaptive, it would have failed! Though they seem to have rowed back a bit on the 'don't be a d*ck part of the manifesto.So they were flexible in that! I accept both sides have played a part in that aspect of the series.

I maintain that you can't approve of the approach when it works (92-0) and then condemn it when it fails (247ao). As Cook seeks to be doing. They were right to take chances when it worked but wrong when it didn't. The Boycott Paradox.

They either play this way or they don't. Putting their chips on red is their raison d'etre. They accept it won't always win. Maybe after the Ashes they will reassess.

[sussexpob]

Maybe 'evolved bazball' is a tautology and if it were to be responsive and adaptive, it would have failed!

This argument just does not work in any context whatsoever. Even assuming the pre-determined strategy you set off with is perfectly optimal, the idea that the circumstance and actual events that follow have no impact whatsoever on that calculation is, in my opinion, so wrong it does not even need any detailed explanation to completely dismiss.

I mean, take a football side. If 20th place in the PL goes to Anfield, and the manager decides parking 11 men in his own box is the most effective strategy to maximize their points scored from the game, a strategy that can be argued objectively as sensible, what happens if Liverpool score after 15 seconds and at 1-0 down your team never leaves its own box for the nex 89.45 minutes? Well, aside from a totally freak event in the millions to 1 range of probability, your odds for losing would be 99.999999% recurring. Circumstance rendered whatever value you had in your strategic approach null and void. At that point, if you want a point, you have to score - you have to adapt. At this point we could go through every sport, go through every example. I just don't think there is a single sport where you can say sticking to a pre-ordained tactic when confronted with reality works.

Even in this example, Bazball is not about hitting EVERY ball for a 6. They do play defensive shots, many times an innings. So that in itself proves that there is choice even in aggression, and an acknowledgement that some risks are not worth taking.

[mikesiva]

2nd drop ends up being not so costly, as Atkinson gets through Sai ....

I think Sai will be disappointed with his series. Hes a big IPL stroke maker, but at no stage has he done anything but bunker in and fail to survive. Maybe needs to watch Duckett bat more.

I know I've said this before, but Sarfaraz should have been picked to bat one down.

Sudharsan averaged 23 this tour. He averages 39 in FC cricket. There's no way Sudharsan should be picked to play Test cricket ahead of Sarfaraz.

I'm tired of this nonsense of picking Test cricketers based on their T20s stats.

[Arthur Crabtree]

England lose an lbw review on Deep on umpire's call, and then Crawley drops him next ball.

Nothing worse than the nightwatcher hanging around. Apart from maybe a big last wicket stand.