Slitherine

So Clarke has won his first toss. The question is did he make the right choice by deciding to bat? Would Strauss have done the same?

l would have thought so. Looks rock hard and with a tinge of green. Although, following the first two tests the Australian ground staff have been told to prepare "result" wickets.

I think the pitch will spin later on - but Australia don't have a good spinner, Swann would have had a field day in the last innings.

Of course, the demons inside the Australians head may prove the biggest problem for them batting first. Although it is an Australian theme in that they win the toss and bat, I think Punter only inserted the opponent something like once in his entire career as captain!

Shouldn't you be doing the rankings?

hammy wrote:So Clarke has won his first toss. The question is did he make the right choice by deciding to bat? Would Strauss have done the same?

Nearly all sides opt to bat, it'd need a real green top plus useful conditions like the MCG to tempt them otherwise. I think we'd have batted as well.

dave_r wrote:
Of course, the demons inside the Australians head may prove the biggest problem for them batting first. Although it is an Australian theme in that they win the toss and bat, I think Punter only inserted the opponent something like once in his entire career as captain!

Didn't he do it in the last Ashes series and it back fired badly?

nikgaukroger wrote:

dave_r wrote:
Of course, the demons inside the Australians head may prove the biggest problem for them batting first. Although it is an Australian theme in that they win the toss and bat, I think Punter only inserted the opponent something like once in his entire career as captain!

Didn't he do it in the last Ashes series and it back fired badly?

Not sure if it was the last ashes series - I think it was two series before - Trescothick made hay and England scored 400 on the first day.

dave_r wrote:
Not sure if it was the last ashes series - I think it was two series before - Trescothick made hay and England scored 400 on the first day.

Edgbaston 2005.

IMO this one will be quite tight and the weather may end up winning.

nikgaukroger wrote:

dave_r wrote:
Not sure if it was the last ashes series - I think it was two series before - Trescothick made hay and England scored 400 on the first day.

Edgbaston 2005.

You missed out the "Dave is right" part

IMO this one will be quite tight and the weather may end up winning.

In which case England will end up winning

Well, I was about to say well batted Australia, but once again Phil Hughes proves he isn't an opener.

dave_r wrote:Well, I was about to say well batted Australia, but once again Phil Hughes proves he isn't an opener.

Should that not be once again Phil Hughes proves he isn't a batsmen.

Thanks to the weather we'll only win this series 2-1 instead of 3-1

Suits me, 2-1 id what I thought we'd win it by anyway

nikgaukroger wrote:Suits me, 2-1 id what I thought we'd win it by anyway

Ditto, and I'm doing a rain dance to make sure it ends that way so my bet comes in.

This is a weird one. There has been a lot of time lost to rain, but the Oz strike rate has also been very low. Very low. Six wickets before the second new ball sounds like a decent batting perfomance, but they barely got to 170 runs for that. Unless the tail wags hard, they will be defending a low score when England bat. If they skittle us, they can win. If we bat well into the fourth day they are going to be playing catch up on a deteriorating wicket on the fifth day. Either way, this still looks like a result to me.

It would appear that the Australian Middle and lower order is a collapse waiting to happen.



Let us see if England can get more than 200. Looks like an "interesting" pitch though.

I think England took their foot off the Aussies neck for a little while. The 90 or so runs that they let Siddle and Hilfenhaus put on may come back to bite us

Finally a game with sessions that are not totally one sided.

Well the Aussie bunnies did indeed wag their tail - 280 is possibly competitive unless we can find a century stand tomorrow.

As for the pitch the expert view appears to be that the Aussies have prepared anti-Swann pitches on the ground they don't have a decent spinner for that to inconvenience. However, as our seam attack has bowled better this has still back fired a bit

I think day 3 went well enough

Now to see if we can push the lead up to about 250, bowl 'em out and see if we need to bat again.

nikgaukroger wrote:I think day 3 went well enough

Now to see if we can push the lead up to about 250, bowl 'em out and see if we need to bat again.

Let Prior get his 100, Bresnan can sho us how he can bat, leave them a target of 300 and go for the third innings win in the series

BTW I reckon that if Mitch Johnson concedes another 3 runs he will have contributed as many centuries to England as Cook*


* although to be fair he hasn't managed a double century yet

Cook just went past Gooch, Boycott, Edrich(J) and Hobbs. Of England batsmen, only Hammond has scored more runs in an Ashes series , and Hammond's 905 is a record for the ages

peteratjet wrote:Cook just went past Gooch, Boycott, Edrich(J) and Hobbs. Of England batsmen, only Hammond has scored more runs in an Ashes test , and Hammond's 905 is a record for the ages

I think that the team batting has been even more impressive.

It looks like this will be the fourth 500+ innings in five tests.

Another way of looking at it would be that the Australian bowling has been really rather poor.