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The Ashes – Sydney

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Here we are at the final, invariably rain affected fifth and final test in Sydney. Stokes wins the toss.
No spinner for us, we probably think we can get the job done without the less reliable Murphy, but it is the first time since 1898. Foresakes an opportunity to test out a prime candidate to replace Lyon.
Inclusion of Webster puts the heat on Green as the all rounder.

Duckett showing early signs of Guillaume Barre syndrome with his feet movement.

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Comments

    • 😏

      Well I’m happy. Forgot it was on until after the first three wickets went down, so I’ve seen nothing but Stokes and Brook playing what passes for a blinder these days, with only a couple of Brook’s trademark suicide shots. And now bad light stops play…

    • Unbelievable. Especially that as you say it’s an opportunity to further blood Murphy as one of several possible replacements for Lyon, who I’m guessing will be retiring.

      Root and Brook heading for big centuries I reckon.

          • They owe it to the bars and food concessions to drag it out to at least after lunch on day 3. Michael Vaughan’s been suggesting the word has gone out from CA to make this one last five days.

            I do wish England had considered the possibility of playing actual test cricket earlier in the series though

  4. This Ashes has mostly been made bearable by Barney Ronay: “Brook played half the time like a man desperately in need of the toilet, the rest like some kind of hyper-skilled alien princeling.”

  5. If I were Brook I’d buy a lottery ticket pronto.

    Anyway, I’m hoping England win so that I can unveil the statistic that in the last six Ashes Test matches both sides have won three… Australia the three that mattered and England the three that haven’t. Maybe I should have said ‘spoiler alert’ before the above!

    ‘Nuther one… in the last two series, with both ending in the Aussies retaining the Ashes, England have won the toss on eight (that’s E.I.G.H.T.) occasions.
    All the luck and all the defeat.

    • He played pretty well, lucky to last that long actually, being caught off a no ball, and then edged the next ball between keeper and first slip and neither seemed to see it.

      • Good article that.

        “Sports teams like to talk about having a DNA and a culture. The shot was simply its visible face…. England’s meek concession of this Ashes series isn’t a lack of talent. It’s a waste of talent.”

  10. Yes, not sure that he doesn’t fidget ever.
    Neser scored incredibly slowly. I wonder whether the advice was let Trav do the work or a bit of Chiz’s comment that the test has to go full length to salvage some of the lost revenue.

  13. The one positive of us being comprehensively outplayed is we can’t fall back on a “3-2 there wasn’t much in it” narrative. So hopefully there’ll be some changes in the management. Please.

  14. I, for one, stand with our brave sportsmen, who are apparently a bit tired after playing [checks notes] thirteen days’ cricket over the course of two months.

    ‘Bethell admits ‘tired’ England need to ‘graft’ after hitting Ashes wall in Sydney’

    • And he didn’t disappoint.

      “He’s the Mercedes- Benz SL convertible. He’s an entire wheel of cave-aged yak milk super cheese. He’s a third-innings 142 not out at the SCG in bleached-out afternoon sunshine.”

  19. Well my 4-0 predictions wasn’t far out. It turns out that telling players it doesn’t matter if they get out, that they can hit bowlers out of the game if they just believe they can, that their place in the side is secure, that they don’t need to practice fielding drills or have acclimatisation matches, that the bodies that have let them down repeatedly in recent years will somehow survive 25 days of bowling anywhere but on the stumps, and that a boozy break is what’s needed after surrendering the urn in 10 days, doesn’t work.

    The Aussies used to talk about ‘mental disintegration’ of opponents but what McCullum and Stokes have achieved, uniquely in sport perhaps, is to do the same thing to their own players.

  20. There’s no denying the effect Stokes and Mccullum had at the beginning. They took a group of decent but massively underperforming players and turned basically the same group into decent but massively overperforming players almost overnight. That lasted about 18 months.

    Then most of the experience on the bowling side retired or was retired or dropped. The replacements aren’t as good, undercooked or just not good enough. None of the young batsmen have kicked on and some have gone backwards. Only Root seems to have been allowed to be above it all, because hes’s too good. It’s a shitshow and they’re in dissaray. Funny how these coaching regimes always seem to end that way.

    Think it was Shane Warne who talked about playing the same test 30 times rather than 30 different tests. That feels like the perfect criticism of England over the last 18 months. They were treading water rather than swimming and and now they’ve run out of puff and are sinking.

    Like I said earlier, the only positive to take from this is it’s been so bad there have to be changes. It would be quite funny if they now had to deal with the sergeant-major like Alec Stewart. That way they may learn to have less trouble with human bouncers (see Harry Brook) and be less inclined to endlessly hook the cricketing kind.

  22. Barney Ronay on a podcast down here compared the size of the administration of English cricket versus Australia. So much bigger here. He cited the difficulty in getting change to foster Test cricket competence due to the obstinance of the counties. It was someone else who said our State and other comps have finals as deciders whereas as the head of table at seasons who wins. That absence of a pressurised finals environment doesn’t help when it comes to The Ashes. I dont know whether any of this is true.

    • “Representing England is the greatest honour of all, which I take seriously and I am deeply sorry for letting down my team-mates, coaches and supporters.”

      Is he talking about nightclub altercations or cricket?

  24. The thing perhaps understated is Carey at the stumps. Almost revolutionary and completely undermined England’s strategy of charging the bowlers to get them off their line. As Boland said it meant he knew exactly where the batters were going to be.

    Oh and cheers for all the congrats on our series win.

    • You’re right – Australia played better cricket and deserved to win the series. They deserve congratulations because they kept their nerve during the tight moments, while the English lost theirs.

      I expressed a worry back in November that the visiting English cricketers had just lost a brief ODI series 3-0 here in NZ but seemed to be having a right old laugh on-field as if they were the Harlem Globetrotters. I wanted to see a bit more sorrow and attrition, if I am being honest.

    • I was thinking about this. Australia played like a team. For it to work, every one of them had to do their piece well.

      Carey was immaculate. But if Boland bowls like Carse, it’s meaningless.

      The Aussies were hard nosed and professional, and it showed.

  26. Probably too much info for you lot but Jonathan Agnew popped up on a Facebook clip. Words to the effect of “poor old Carse has worked himself into the ground bowling in the heat and where does Stokes put him to field – out there in the full sun at extra cover having to chase balls. Meanwhile Ben Duckett who has done nothing is just standing there in the shade. You really wonder how much Stokes thinks about these things”.

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