The Ashes are about to start. God it is wonderful.
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I too thought it was wonderful, until I saw the depressingly familiar score. Perhaps as to be expected, all my Aussie mates are paying me back with interest, for my taunts since our last glorious victory. Still it was fun to have one over them while it lasted!
I can’t believe Ponting and Hussey batted Harmison out of the attack. Flintoff is struggling with the captaincy, wouldn’t be surprised to see Strauss come in as captain in Adelaide, hopefully not to the same effect as when Botham had the captaincy taken off of him in 1981.
Flintoff is obviously a great all rounder – one of the best I have seen – but I think he was a lousy captain in India and Strauss a much better one against Pakistan in England. (Neither is a patch on Vaughan, but the absence of Vaughan is something we all feel sad about). I think Flintoff got appointed captain for this series more on the basis of seniority than on captaincy skill, and England will likely pay for this. I think his use of Harmison was wrong right from the start. Harmison did concede 17 runs off his first two overs, but Flintoff was still wrong to take him off. This is quite simply because if England are to win the Ashes, Harmison (with support from Flintoff himself) is going to have to win the series with the ball. To me, nobody else in the side looks up for it. (Panesar is perhaps a wild card, but he isn’t playing in this match). Not giving Harmison a chance to get his rhythm together early on, and giving him a “captain does not have faith in you” signal that early was foolish.
And I am not so surprised about Ponting and Hussey batting Harmison out of it later. Harmison is the bowler they have to target, and they know it. He was vulnerable today. I am not surprised about the identity of the batsmen doing it. Despite his lacklustre captaincy, Ponting might be the best batsman in the world (although for some reason he gets less publicity than a couple of others) and despite the relatively late start to Hussey’s test career, he is obviously a wonderful player who is going to score many runs for Australia.
Well, let me clarify, I’m not surprised they targeted Harmison, but I am surprised at both Harmison going for so many and Flintoff not having faith in Harmison. How much worse could it be for England than it is now, even if Harmison was out of sorts, but given a chance to find his rythm. There is another (potential) 24 days of cricket to go.
Isn’t there anyone in the Barmy Army who knows how to handle a sniper rifle?
Because outright murder, I fear, is the only way we can win these Ashes 🙂
I didn’t get to see any of this, but the radio commentators made it clear that Harmison’s problem is he hasn’t done enough bowling lately, which means that there is reason to at least hope that he’ll get better as the series progresses. Although, by all accounts he could hardly do much worse.
I think Australia will win this series, but one bad day for England doesn’t make it a foregone conclusion. Day one in 2005 was bad for England also, and it got no better for all of that game. Yet still England won the series.
It ain’t over yet.
Yesterday, Pietersen got his seventh chance to take an Ashes catch, and took his first Ashes catch!
Flintoff is both Englands best bowler and their most committed player. The reason he is captain is that – absent a strategic mastermind in the side – the leader should be the best leader of men, and that is undoubtedly Flintoff, who is a natural leader.
I haven’t seen Strauss captain, so if he is a strategic genius like Fleming then all well and good, but I doubt that is the case.
England’s selectors should have played Panesar and a batsman in place of Anderson. You don’t need 5 specialist bowlers in a side. No other test team has 5 specialist bowlers.
By playing 3 specialist seamers and a specialist spinner, they are completely negating the advantage of having the world’s best all-rounder (Flintoff).
My England side:
-Anderson, Giles, Jones
+Panesar, Read, That Irish Dude (Or whoever can bat in England).
Collingwood to bat at 7 and be the 4th seamer. Put the Irish guy in at #5 and put Read in at 8, Hoggard 9.
That said, as an Aussie it’s good to see that England’s selectors are stuffing up just as badly as ours did in England last time.
Day one in 2005 was bad for England also
I think I will say yes and no on that. Harmison came out of the blocks superbly and bowled out Australia for 190. It is true that England were then reduced to 92/7 by stumps, but both sides were on top at times. Whereas today Australia came out and proceeded to bat into the distance. This looks ominous for England to me, although it is indeed still early days.
One issue is that English people in general have no conception of just how upset people in Australia were when the Ashes were lost. Ponting and the team have been unable to walk down the street for the last year without the fact that they are responsible for Australia’s great loss of national virility being brought up. They will be highly motivated simply in order that this stops, if nothing else. It may well be that now that Australia are on top, they will just play phenomenally hard for the rest of the series. If they do, it is going to be very hard for England to stop them.
So, trying probably unsuccessfully to not sound like an idiot here– could someone explain The Ashes to an American? I get that it’s Cricket, but who are the teams, and how many teams are there, and how often does all this happen?
Both you Samizdata folks and Tim Blair are so *excited* by this that I’m feeling terribly dim getting it all. Or… getting any of it, really.
Truly, I’d love to know. 🙂
The teams are Australia and England. It happens every 2 years, and they alternate between playing it in Australia and England.
Laura, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/cricket
You will be able to see highlights of the play.
It is infinately more subtle and exciting than Baseball.
I have played them both.
I don’t think Ponting et al copped as much flack as what England will if they lose these Ashes. I personally feel Australia played below par last year, but over all, it was a great series played with a great competitive spirit. Australia wasn’t robbed or humiliated, we were out played, I just hope that England can hold there heads up once this is over because victory for Australia is only sweeter when it is against a competitive England.
Laura, not being funny, but cricket would take much more than a few blog posts to explain. There is little to compare it to in the USA, because unfortunately there aren’t many sports that the USA compete in internationally which have the power to unite the nation. One of the reasons being that all your best athletes are involved in professional club or amateur college team sports rather than provincial or national teams.
In some ways it is strange that the US has never taken to cricket. Americans are famed for their love of statistics in sport – and no sport is more conducive to a plethora of statistics than cricket.
I think what I love about test cricket is the way certain events just lodge in the memory. Everyone surely will always remember Harmison’s sublime last ball of the day in the second test in 2005 against Michael Clark? Having bowled the previous three balls at 95mph, that perfectly placed slower ball completely deceived the batsman. That surely was the turning point of the whole series.
England are definitely suffering this time from missing key players, especially Vaughan. However, well though Australia have played so far in the first test, their best move was winning the toss – any side batting first was likely to hold the advantage on that pitch.
England are definitely suffering this time from missing key players, especially Vaughan.
Vaughan may well be a big loss, but that is no excuse for selecting under-prepared players like Harmison and not selecting Panesar. Clearly Flintoff is hesitant in bowling Harmison and it was only towards the end of Australia’s innings that he even approached anything like his 2005 form. England should never have agreed to such an abrupt tour, they only played one first class match in preparation. Australia at various times over the past 5 years been without McGrath and Warne, but we’ve rarely been uncompetitive without these two bastions of the gamre.
Day two is still early, we shall see.
In some ways it is strange that the US has never taken to cricket. Americans are famed for their love of statistics in sport – and no sport is more conducive to a plethora of statistics than cricket.
A war of independance that occured prior to English sports becoming popular will tend to do that to a country.
Sorry Laura, I should have read the site more carefully.
The BBC site is, most ungenerously, British Broadband users only.
There was never a Panesar-Harmison choice. It was a Giles-Panesar choice. On this pitch, it wasn’t expected that spinners would have anything other than a holding role, hence Giles was chosen due to his better batting.
Harmison is definitely under-cooked, but he’s vital to England and will hardly get more practice if he’s left out.
I think that independence before the game became popular is not the whole story. Football (soccer) spread worldwide and American football is derived from Rugby. I suppose it’s just because cricket is not easy to understand and because rounders/softball became popular as baseball, so this became the prevailing bat and ball game.
I’m pretty sure that Shane Warne will play more than a holding role.
What it looks like is Cricket was in the US from the beginning but the Cricket clubs in the states remained elitist while the clubs in England were becoming professionalized. Baseball gained popularity throughout the rest of society and had replaced Cricket in the US by the 20th century.
information gleaned from wikipedia(Link)
I think you lot are being a bit hard on Laura. If you go to this Wikipedia article you’ll find a good piece on cricket.
Cricket (and the various forms of Rugby) have to be two of England’s great gifts to western civilisation.
Heard a great quote on the TV coverage yesterday; “It’s not a good day to be an Englishman”. (But it sure is a great one to be an Aussie).