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150 all out plays 81-7
It’s lunchtime on the second day of the second Australia v New Zealand test. Yesterday the Kiwis capitulated to 150 all out and so far today, needing just to bat decently to establish a commanding lead, the Australians have slumped to 81-7. It’s an very green wicket, but the batting has been terrible on both sides. No batsman has looked comfortable playing the moving ball and they have just gone after anything with width. It is a technique that is acceptable on a shirtfront, but on a pitch as green as the outfield batsmen have to show more patience. Rahul Dravid showed in England last summer that even against a good attack on a difficult pitch a batsman with proper technique can prosper, but he seems to be one of only a handful of batsmen prepared to grind out an innings.
I don’t have anything against most T20, but batsmen must get out of the mindset that they have to score runs quickly. If you look at the list of the highest run scorers last year only two of the top ten have a strike rate over 55. Amongst those ten the highest strike rate is KP’s 64.12. It is not necessary that all batsmen play like Geoff Boycott, and it’s certainly not a guarantee of runs, but they have to know how to alter their game when the situation demands it. It’s not a skill that is extinct, nor one that will go extinct, but it does seem to be less common than it used to be. The result is the sub 200 scores of which we have seen so many recently.
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Test squad for UAE tour
England have announced the squad for the three test series against Pakistan in the UAE in January. In a sign of not only unusual but almost unprecedented stability there is only one chance from the Ashes squad with Ravi Bopara replacing the retired Paul Collingwood. The selection probably closest to a surprise is that Steve Davies retains his place as reserve keeper for the test matches. There was a strong suggestion that he’d fallen behind Bairstow in the pecking order, but it seems that was only for limited overs matches. Hopefully it won’t be relevant, of course. Matt Prior has a strong case for being the best wicket keeper in the world right now and if England have to field any reserve it will be a huge blow. Monty Panesar retains his place as the second spinner, which is not a huge surprise. It was not so long ago that he was the first choice and the other possible selections don’t look like challenging him at the moment. Samit Patel still has a lot of work to do to get into the test side, even if he is moving in the right direction, and Simon Kerrigan is still unproven, even at county level. There wasn’t any place in the squad for Graham Onions, putting a swift end to my suggestion that he play as a fourth seamer.
The squad announcement doesn’t leave much room for speculation about the starting XI in Dubai. Barring any late injuries, nine of the order are set in stone and a tenth, Eoin Morgan, is almost a certainty given the selectors’ preference for six batsmen. (With which I disagree, given the batting abilities of Prior and Broad, but that cause is long lost.) That leaves Bresnan, Tremlett, Finn and Panesar competing for the last bowling spot. I’ve said before that I’d give it to Bresnan and I still would, despite the lure of playing a second spinner. We saw in the Pakistan v Sri Lanka series that pace can be effective in the UAE, and Bresnan is a better bowler overall than Monty.
Pakistan have been playing very good cricket recently, and if they keep it up (a pretty big ‘if’ I know) they will be a huge challenge for England. It’s a strong squad though, there are no injuries (as much as I hate going six months without any cricket there are fitness advantages) so it should be a stronger side than the one that beat India so comprehensively at Edgbaston and the Oval last summer. It is shaping up to be a fantastic series and I’m starting to wish it too had a fourth test.
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Hobart preview
The second test of the Australia v New Zealand series starts in a few hours. The Aussies are heavy favourites after a convincing win at the Gabba and I don’t see the Kiwis putting up much more of a fight. Although the wicket in Hobart should be more akin to what the Kiwis are used and I think they probably will bat better, to challenge even a weakened Australia they will have to improve almost beyond recognition. They will also have to field far better than they did in the first test, and I doubt they will have had enough time to improve noticeably.
Theoretically the Australians have a strong home field advantage in Hobart having never lost a test there, but there are some considerable caveats to that statistic. The matches there tend to be against weaker sides; in addition to New Zealand only Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the West Indies (in 2005) have played in Tasmania. Also, the Bellerive Oval only started hosting matches in 1989, so most of the previous nine matches were during Australia’s period of dominance. New Zealand’s bowling coach is very familiar with the ground having played in Tasmania for ten years during his first class career, so I don’t think the Aussies will actually have a marked home field advantage. That said, I don’t think they will need any home field advantage to overcome New Zealand.
The most interesting part of the test will probably be the selection battles ahead of the series against India. Two batsmen are going to be dropped when Watson and Marsh return and all of them bar Clarke are candidates to make way. The obvious direct competitions are Warner v Hughes to see who will survive the return of Watson and Khawaja v Ponting v Hussey to see who will make way for Marsh. But since Watson can, and many argue should, bat down the order it will probably not be so straight forward. Right now Hughes and Hussey are probably under the most pressure and will need centuries to ensure they retain their place on Boxing Day. Hughes has a good record in first class matches in Hobart, but the conditions are expected to favour swing and seam and I think he will find the going very difficult.
As far as the result of the match is concerned I’m predicting another heavy victory for Australia, by 250 runs or eight wickets.
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Winter Meetings
I’ve been vaguely following the Winter Meetings this week, though there hasn’t been a lot going on, at least about which I care. Pretty much all of the discussion has been about whether Albert Pujols will go to Miami and I don’t really care. I hope he stays with the Cardinals, not so much because I want St Louis to do well, but because I like the idea of great players staying with one team for their entire careers. Also, I don’t like the Marlins. I used to, at least to an extent, but I don’t like their naked attempts to buy every free agent they can. Also, their new uniforms are appalling. It’s not a big point, but it does make a small difference. They seem to be just about the only team mentioned on the meeting reports and it just isn’t on. Still, the Pujols stories are all in the National League and unless he shockingly signs for the a team in the AL Central it’s unlikely to really matter to me where he ends up. The move that has interested me the most so far has been Mark Buehrle signing with Miami. Not because of the Marlins so much, see above, but because I hate the White Sox and they are weaker now. It also helps the Royals, of course, since Chicago are in our division.
Speaking of the Royals, we haven’t done much if anything. The biggest even vaguely credible rumours are that we might acquire an established starter for a few top prospects like Wil Myers. It would be an interesting move if we did, but it sounds like it’s unlikely. We certainly need starting pitching, but we acquired Jonathan Sanchez and re-signed Bruce Chen, so it is not as pressing as once it was. Wil Myers is a top outfield prospect and our outfield, Gordon aside, is not as settled as some of the other positions in the long term. It is nice to have a very likely successor to Jeff Francoeur in right field, and I’m not sure that is worth a starter in most instances. (The exception would be a very good starter on a long term deal, but that isn’t going to happen.) There have also been a few suggestions about trading Soria, but those appear to be utterly baseless. And good thing too, I would be dismayed if he were to be dealt away. There is still time during and after the meetings, but it looks like it will be a pretty quiet winter.
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Why Phil Hughes should not be dropped
It has been suggested that Phil Hughes will be ‘rotated’ out of the Australian XI for the second test at Hobart. If there is a change it will almost certainly be either Hughes or the equally out of form Hussey to make way for all-rounder Daniel Christian. Hussey has already expressed unease at the prospect of rotation and has counselled Hughes not to change his game. Hussey appears to be worried he will be the one to miss out in a rotation policy and is trying to make sure it’s Hughes instead.
I hope it isn’t Hughes to go, however, I like having Hughes in the Australian side. A look at his career statistics and history shows why. His first class form is very impressive, but in tests overall he averages 36.13 with three centuries and three fifties. That’s six times he’s gone past fifty in thirty innings. Hughes’ career is based almost entirely on the second test of his career, in which he scored 115 and 160 against South Africa in Durban. It was only a decent series apart from that. He scored nought and 75 in his first test and 33 and 32 in the last test of the series before going to England for the 2009 Ashes. He fared poorly against shorter bowling in England and was dropped for the third test. (And announced it himself, on Twitter.) He was dropped to give him a chance to work on his technique, but he never really improved. He had one-off tests against Pakistan and New Zealand after the 2009 Ashes, but his best score in those two matches was 86* against New Zealand. Regardless of his failure to improve, the injury and subsequent dropping of Katich during the 2010/11 Ashes gave him a more permanent place.
Since his debut tour to South Africa Phil Hughes has scored just 633 runs at an average of 27.52. His lone century in that time was against a Sri Lankan ‘attack’ at Colombo a few months ago and he has passed fifty only three times. The only time he has done so against an international quality attack was his 88 in Jo’burg last month. His technique was lacking against in England in 2009 and he has never fixed those problems. His footwork is non-existent and he can only play the short ball in the sense that he can play it in the air to gully. And this is why I want him to stay in the side. I hope the selectors continue to look at his extremely impressive domestic form and drop Hussey instead because in 2013 I want to see him walk on to the pitch at Lord’s on an overcast July morning and face Jimmy Anderson with the new ball. I really, really want to see that.
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Australia win by nine wickets
To say that New Zealand played poorly in the first Test is an understatement. Australia did play reasonably well, but the Kiwis failed to put up any sustained fight. The scoreline is probably not indicative of the gulf in talent between the two sides, but it was certainly a fair result given how they played.
The New Zealand top order was the most culpable. It can be reasonably said that they bat down to seven with Vettori, but those seven batsmen averaged just 28 in the match. Without the first innings heroics of Vettori and Brownlie it falls to just 16. Of the 13 top order dismissals, no fewer than nine of them were needless. (That’s including Vettori’s suicidal run out in the first innings, though he deserves credit for having played well up until then.) They looked like they had not realised they were no longer playing one day cricket and were allowed to leave balls outside off stump. When they were in the field they let the Australians off the hook multiple times. They dropped catches, took wickets off no-balls and possibly most damningly allowed Mitchell Starc to score 32 not out on debut as Australia put the match out of realistic reach. They will have a lot on which to work before the next Test.
Australia do deserve some credit. They bowled well enough to induce the brainless errors by the Kiwis and batted with discipline for the most part. (With the exception of Phil Hughes, who is probably nearing the end of his career.) It’s a bit difficult to determine how effective the new Australian bowlers really were; with New Zealand batting poorly and only Peter Siddle against whom to compare them there is an element of guesswork. I think Pattinson looked like a genuinely good find though. He bowled with proper pace and hostility and did pick up a couple of wickets that were not the direct result of poor batting. Lyon looks like he will be the first choice spinner for the foreseeable future, which would finally bring some stability to the role. I don’t think Mitchell Starc had much of a debut though, his unbeaten 32 notwithstanding. He took only two wickets in the match, both off poor shots by Kiwis in the first innings (McCullum and Ryder). He’s the most likely to go when Cummins returns, unless Clarke wants to play a very inexperienced attack against India.
I can’t really see New Zealand winning the second Test, or any Test against a side better than Bangladesh at the moment. They need to improve all facets of their game in the longest format, as right now they are fielding an XI who don’t seem to know how the game is supposed to be played.
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FA Cup draw
The draw for the third round (AKA the first round about which anyone cares) of the FA Cup was today. Last year, as everyone will probably remember, Liverpool were drawn away to Manchester United and lost due a dodgy penalty. Our draw is a lot more favourable this year, as we’ll host the winner of the Oldham Athletic v Southend United replay. United, meanwhile, will travel to Eastlands in the first round, so there’s a good chance they’ll go out in the first round this year. The matches will take place during the first (full) weekend in January. I would imagine it will be on the seventh, as the first leg of our League Cup semi-final is on the eleventh.
Given our form in the League Cup this year I am cautiously optimistic. We already have one more home tie than we have had in the League Cup and I think an average draw will see us go deep in the competition.
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New comment moderation
I was away from the blog for 10 hours last night and this morning. In that time there were 67 comments here, all of them spam and all of them accompanied by an individual notification email. I don’t usually have 70 unread messages in my inbox in the morning, so one can imagine my surprise. None of the comments actually appeared here, I manually moderate most comments, but it was still a right royal pain. In response I’ve had to download some filtering software, but I don’t know how it will affect legitimate comments. It shouldn’t be a big problem, but if anyone has any problems commenting let me know via twitter, facebook or G+. (I assume everyone reading this has an account with at least one of those services.)
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Saturday review – 3 Dec
Far and away the best article I read this week, or any of the last several weeks, was Jarrod Kimber’s ‘Occupy Lord’s‘. I can’t really do it justice with a description; it’s absolutely brilliant and you should go read it immediately. (Hopefully then coming back and reading the rest of this!)
Mukul Kesavan has a great article in Cricinfo today about the fallacy of ‘international hundreds’. It’s very cleverly written, and of course it is nice to see a reasonably high profile writer agree with me.
Also in Cricinfo, Sriram Dayanand has an essay on John Arlott, how he affected Harold Larwood and the role he played in getting Basil D’Oliveira to England. Whilst the events described are fairly well known, the extent of Arlott’s involvement is seldom mentioned.
At the Cricketer, Mark Baldwin writes about the County Championship fixtures and the half-baked Morgan Review. It’s an excellent dissection of the confusion the ECB exhibit with respect to the domestic game.
Lastly, on the Guardian Sport Blog Max Benson wrote about the rise of British sport and the new found edge that we see in cricket and elsewhere.
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Imprecision
It’s only the third day of the first Test between Australia and New Zealand, but I have been struck by how imprecise New Zealand have been. They have talented players. Vettori is the obvious example, but Jesse Ryder, Chris Martin and Brendan McCullum are all legitimately of international quality as well. They don’t look like they are playing as well as they ought to however. I use the word ‘imprecise’ because they seem to be sharp enough, just missing slightly.
On the first day they won the toss and batted first in conditions that were not ideal for batting, but neither were they unduly tricky. They are conditions with which opening batsmen ought to be familiar, it is their job to see them off after all, but they played foolishly. Both of their openers threw their wickets away playing rash shots away from the body. Whilst there are times in which such shots are acceptable, the first morning of a Test match is certainly not amongst them. All of New Zealand’s top order except Williamson got themselves out in the same way, all of them needlessly. There were some demons in the pitch, yes, but the fact that Brownlie made 77 not out shows that it was not a minefield. The Australian attack is inexperienced and sensible batting would have brought rewards, but they collectively lost their heads.
Their shortcomings are also visible in the field, albeit not as spectacularly. They have had a couple of excellent chances to put a fragile Australian batting order under pressure, but they have let the opportunities slip away. Their bowling has been just a bit too erratic. Ponting in particular looked very shaky early on in his innings, but New Zealand could not get the ball and the fieldsmen in the right places to take advantage. At other times they have dropped catches, including a fairly straightforward one off Clarke when a wicket would have put them almost on level terms. It went begging and now the match is starting to slip away.
The dropped catches aside, New Zealand’s errors appear to be more mental than physical, the rushes of blood leading to collapses especially. It might be tempting for them to say that even good sides sometimes suffer collapses and even good sides sometimes fail to convert pressure with the ball into wickets and even good sides sometimes drop catches and all that would be true. But the best sides are the sides that do so rarely. New Zealand are doing so for the second Test in a row after almost losing to Zimbabwe. It is something at which their coach must work. They aren’t going to become world beaters with the talent they have, but the talent they have ought to do better than what we are seeing.
Defensive Indifference 