The Ashes 2013

[St Jim]

Couldn't see another thread on this (apologies if one has already been started) so thought we needed one to discuss all things Ashes.

 

First up, breaking news is that the Aussie coach has just been sacked, just 16 days before the opening test.

 

http://www.espncricinfo.com/the-ashes-2013/content/current/story/644797.html

 

On the face of it, it looks like they are in disarray but if Boof Lehman is installed he'll get the best out of what he's got.

[dinger]

Wowsers! I wasn't expecting that. I mean, they were pretty awful in the Champs Trophy but the timing of this...

 

For me the only way they're going to get anything out of this Ashes series is if they can keep Michael Clarke fit. And even then they'll need a slice of luck. They haven't really got anyone else who can consistently score runs. Is it too early to say 5-0?

[Appy]

Can't see there ever being a 5-0 in England with the weather.

[dinger]

Can't see there ever being a 5-0 in England with the weather.

 

A fair point. Can't really see us losing any though.

[St Jim]

Won't be 5-0.

 

Darren 'Boof' Lehmann will inspire the players and he's supposed to be highly regarded as a coach and he's done a good job for Queensland but he's also got a reputation as a lad and likes a drink which may not be all that appropriate for the Aussie team given their recent off field antics and may be at odds with some players such as Clarke.

[Hatch]

one hell of a collapse by Somerset today. 310-3 to 310-9

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/scorecard/o34776

[St Jim]

one hell of a collapse by Somerset today. 310-3 to 310-9

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/scorecard/o34776

 

They have an excellent bowling attack.

 

If Pattinson and Stark are firing we could be in for a rough ride, that said they lack a world class spinner (Lyon is a very useful spinner and will chip in with the odd wicket or two but he's not a match winner and not in the same class as Swann or even Panesar). Also time will tell whether Pattinson and Stark can adapt to the Duke ball and the English conditions (I expect Stark to natrually go better with the Duke)

 

Australia's weakest part of the team is their batting and their team selection. They are prone to top-order collapses and also prone to knee-jerk reactions resulting in chopping and changing the line up.

 

If our batsmen deal well with Stark and Pattinson (and Harris if he plays - top bowler but always injured) then I think we'll win the series comfortably but if we don't it's going to be close!

[alpine_saint]

England will lose the Ashes on the first morning

[Batman]

Stephen Fry made this speech during the 2009 ashes. a great one at that.

 

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. It is an honour to stand before so many cricketing heroes from England and from Australia and at this, my favourite time of year. The time when that magical summer sound comes to our ears and gladdens our old hearts, the welcome sound of leather on Graham Swann.

I have been asked to say a few words – well more than a few. “You’ve twenty minutes to fill,” I was firmly told by the organisers. 20 minutes. Not sure how I’ll use all that time up. Perhaps in about ten minutes or so Andrew Strauss would be kind enough to send on a a physio, that should kill a bit of time.

 

Now, many of you will be wondering by what right I presume to stand and speak in front of this assembly of all that is high and fine and grand and noble and talented in the world of cricket, and to speak too in this very temple of all that is historic, majestic and ever so slightly preposterous and silly in that world? I certainly can’t lay claim to any great cricketing achievements. I can’t bat, I can’t field, I bowl off the wrong foot. That sounds like a euphemism for something else, doesn’t it? “They say he bowls off the wrong foot, know what I mean? He enters stage left. Let me put it this way, he poles from the Cambridge end of the punt.” Actually as a matter of fact, although it is true in every sense that I have always bowled off the wrong foot. I have decided, since Sunday, to go into the heterosexual breeding business. My first three sons will be called Collingwood Fry, Anderson Fry and Monty Fry. That’s if their mother can ever get them out, of course. But back to the original question you so intelligently, if rhetorically, asked. If I can’t play, what can I do? I can umpire, I suppose, after a fashion. A fashion that went out years ago around the time of those two peerless umpires, perhaps some of you are old enough to remember them, Jack Crapp and Arthur Fagg. I remember them. I remember them every morning, as a matter of fact: Crapp and Fagg. Though now, sadly, the law says we can no longer do it in public places. And I believe that may even apply to smoking too. Anyway. We were on the subject of why I’m speaking to you. I don’t play. I’m not even a cricketing commentator, journalist or writer. I suppose the only right I have to be amongst you, the cricketing élite, might derive from my being said to represent, here in the Long Room, all those who have spent their lives loving the game at a safe distance from the square. It is love for the game that brings me here.

 

In the forty-five years that I have followed cricket, I have seen it threatened from all sides by the horrors of modern life. The game has been an old-fashioned blushing maiden laid siege by coarse and vulgar suitors. A courtship pattern of defence, acceptance, capitulation and finally absorption has followed. When I started watching, A. R. Lewis played for and captained England as an amateur. The game could never recover surely, from being forced, against the will of many of those who ran this place, being forced to become solely a professional sport? I am just old enough to remember too the Basil D’Oliveira affair in all its unsavoury nastiness: the filth of racism and international politics was beginning to stain the pure white of the flannels. The one-day-game appeared, shyly at first. The balance of bat and ball, essential for cricket to make any sense as a sporting spectacle, became threatened, everyone agreed, by the covering of wickets which would privilege batsman, and then that necessary equipoise was threatened the other way by the arrival of extreme pace and the pitiless bouncer. The look and style of cricketers was apparently forever compromised by helmets and elastic waisted trouserings hideous to behold. Cane and canvas pads were replaced by wipe clean nylon fastened by Velcro. Kerry Packer arrived and sowed his own blend of discord. The continuing rise and mutation of one day cricket caused panic from Windermere to Woking as white balls and coloured pyjamas threatened the sanity of Telegraph readers everywhere. Rogue South African tours caused alarm and frenzy. Pitch invasions marked an end of the days when schoolboys could lie on their tummies by the boundary-rope filling in a green scoring book, until they got bored which they inevitably did, all except the speccy swatty ones who were laughed at and are now running the world. The rest of us were too busy asking the man in the Public Announcement tent to put out a message for our lost friends Ivor Harden, Hugh Janus, Seymour Cox and Mike Hunt. One turbulent decade began with John Snow getting barracked and bombarded with tinnies and ended with batsmen getting bounced and sledged. Cameras and microphones got closer and closer to the action to overhear the insults and demystify the bowling actions. The art of spin had disappeared, for ever, some believed. Cricketers wives wrote books about the overseas tours. Reverse swing seemed to arrive out of nowhere : “Not only does he bowl off the wrong foot. They say he swings it the other way.” Ball tampering became a matter of dinner party chat from Keswick to Canterbury . Clever 3-D images were painted on the grass round about the long stop area advertising power generation companies no one had ever heard of. Advertising was not only to be seen on the grass, but on the clothes, Vodafone and Castlemaine were stitched bigger and brighter on the shirts than the three lions and the wallabies and that mysterious silver feather that Kiwis seem so unaccountably fond of..........

[Batman]

The county game was rent asunder into leagues and divisions that no one really understands; the politics and governance of cricket, with its contracts and coaches, its bloated fixture lists and auctions of broadcasting rights caused hand-wringing too, though many would rather it were neck-wringing.

Meanwhile, drugs, drinking binges, embarrassing text messages and other scandals continued to erupt like acne on a teenager.

South Africa returned to the fold as other countries entered the club of test playing nations. Kenya, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh.

Two of those speccy boys who used to score at the sidelines got their revenge, their names were Mr Lewis and Mr Duckworth.

To the dictionary of acronyms and initials were added ODI, T-20 and IPL. Power plays and baseball style pinch-hitters were swept in. The old lady of cricket was getting a right duffing up.

 

Yet, amazingly, none of these changes, professionalism, the covered wickets, helmets, day-night games, confirmed the dire prognostications of those who believed each one might hammer a stump into cricket’s fragile heart. For this same period of my cricket watching life saw some of the greatest matches in the game’s history. The 1981 and 2005 Ashes series, the Tied Test; a new aggression and boldness of stroke play that no one could disapprove of. Scoring rates went up and great batsmen emerged: Lara, Tendulkar and Ponting amongst many others. And miraculously, to keep the game balanced, Warne and Murali showed that far from being dead, spin bowling was supremely alive; even providing a new ball in the form of the doozra. Huge crowds and rising popularity in fresh territories confirmed cricket’s health. Levels of fitness and standards of fielding rocketed. And all the while, the game’s greatest expression, the 5 Day Test Match, led the way, providing the greatest entertainment, the most excitement and the deepest commitment from the players. All those mournful predictions had come to nothing. The greatest of games had triumphed again.

 

But now, now, in the age of the internet, just as the great, great players of the past ten years have one by one started to play their farewell matches and leave the field for ever, hideous new forces have been at work. The newly emerged South Africa became mired in scandal, intrigue and misery as the new disease of spread-betting lived up to its name and spread, spread like cholera through a slum. Grotesque emails from professional umpires hit the headlines; allegations of systematic cheating and match-fixing have become commonplace, a dismal and lamentably organised Shop Window for international cricket, its 2007 World Cup seemed to lay the game low: an incomprehensible and dreadful tragedy in the death of Bob Woolmer its ghastly and unforgettable legacy. As if that weren’t enough we were more recently treated to the embarrassing spectacle of cricket’s governors cosying up to a Texan fraudster with a helicopter and a bigger mouth than wallet.

 

A new kind of bitterness has entered some quarters of the game as ex-players become commentators, columnists and journalists and begin to turn on their erstwhile teammates, dispraising the current players, pouring scorn on their technique and deprecating their tactical nous. We have video of course and can see that these pundits know what they were talking about: historical archive reveals that Boycott, Botham, Gower, Atherton, Willis, and Hussein were never out playing a false shot, never shuffled across, never missed a captaincy trick, never dropped a catch, never posted a fielder in the wrong place and never bowled off line or off length in the entire course of their careers.

 

The benefits and the drawbacks of broadcast technology bewilder us. Hotspots and Hawkeye, referrals and replays, umpires have never been more pressured and exposed and greater more seismically structural questions have never been asked about the meaning and spirit of the game. The rewards are greater, the stakes are higher, the price of failure more public and humiliating.

 

So a hundred years on from cricket’s Golden Age of C. B. Fry here is another Fry, searching for a way to toast a game that appears to have become … well, toast.

 

We could choose to believe that and retreat into memories of an apparently innocent and gilded past. We could wash our hands of it all, or we could choose to continue to believe in the game. Not necessarily in its administrators, nor even its players, though most of them in all divisions of the game are proud and gifted. We could choose to have faith in cricket. I for one do truly believe that the game itself, as first played by shepherds in the south of England, the game that spread to every corner of the world, the supreme bat and ball competition, the greatest game ever devised, will continue to provide unimagined pleasures, that true drama will once more come centre stage, booting into the wings the tragedy and farce we have witnessed over the past decade in particular. There will be new scandals of course: that you can depend upon. Undreamt of debacles, imbroglios, furores, brouhahas, crimes, rows, walk-outs and embarrassments are waiting around the corner, quietly slipping the horseshoe into the boxing-glove and preparing to give the goddess Cricketina a sock in the jaw. But new geniuses, new historic last ball climaxes, new unimaginable heights of athletic, tactical and aesthetic pleasure await us too. It is up to the players to believe in the game and the cricketing administrators to believe in the players. But most of all it is up to us to keep the faith and be unashamed, be proud of our love of cricket. Here, in the very place that is so often called cricket’s Mecca, cathedral and temple, is the place for us all to pledge that faith.

 

I do so happily as I raise a glass in toast, on behalf of cricket lovers everywhere to Andrew Strauss in his Benefit Year and his wonderful Team, to Ricky Ponting and his fine tourists and to cricket itself. For, to misappropriate Benjamin Franklin, Cricket is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. So then: raise your glasses, to Strauss, England, Australia and cricket.

[SO5 4BW]

Wow - great sppech - thanks for posting that

 

Re this year - I think Lehmann's appointment is bad from our point of view. He always talks sense whenever I've seen him interviewed, knows England from his time with Yorks and will instill some discipline - as you wouldn't want to argue with him

 

That said we'll still win

[dinger]

Wow - great sppech - thanks for posting that

 

Re this year - I think Lehmann's appointment is bad from our point of view. He always talks sense whenever I've seen him interviewed, knows England from his time with Yorks and will instill some discipline - as you wouldn't want to argue with him

 

That said we'll still win

 

He's still got the same players though, and they're a poor bunch. But you're right, he might make a little difference to fighting spirit. I'm not sure about bringing discipline though; that was hardly his strongest asset...

[Batman]

one thing they have is a good set of bowlers. they will cause us problems there.

what we have though. is Cook, Root, Trott and....KP

not to forget jimmy anderson, who is incredible

[JustMike]

one thing they have is a good set of bowlers. they will cause us problems there.

what we have though. is Cook, Root, Trott and....KP

not to forget jimmy anderson, who is incredible

 

To be honest I still think they are OK (Siddle aside who is decent) but our top order should have enough about them.

 

Cant wait for this to start!

[SO16_Saint]

Just seen that the ECB youtube channel is showing live coverage of the Ashes series at http://www.youtube.com/ecbcricket

[Hatch]

Just seen that the ECB youtube channel is showing live coverage of the Ashes series at http://www.youtube.com/ecbcricket

 

top find. Well Done that man.

[Hatch]

England win toss and will bat.

 

Cookie 1 Clarkie 0

[dubai_phil]

England win toss and will bat.

 

Cookie 1 Clarkie 0

 

Hmm Overcast Conditions, Trent Bridge wicket been under covers for two days....

 

vs Hmm would not fancy batting last on a trent bridge wicket that has been under covers for two days in case it starts to deteriorate too soon.

 

Bloody work Websense, You Tube banned, gonna have to rely on Cricinfo until my big boss from Europe deems it time to go home.......

[Hatch]

top find. Well Done that man.

 

Not Available in the UK!

 

You Git.

[dubai_phil]

Well, here we go. Can we get through to lunch without a disaster?

[SO16_Saint]

Not Available in the UK!

 

You Git.

Just seen that... what an arse! very selective advertisement of that fact

[warsash saint]

Just seen that the ECB youtube channel is showing live coverage of the Ashes series at http://www.youtube.com/ecbcricket

 

Getting 'video not playable' on Iphone?

[Hatch]

tykestv.eu for streaming

[The Cat]

this one's decent

 

http://www.hqsportz.com/index.html

[Zurichsaint]

Just seen that the ECB youtube channel is showing live coverage of the Ashes series at http://www.youtube.com/ecbcricket

 

Fantastic! I am so glad you posted that. Many thanks ?

[OttawaSaint]

Trott gone on 48! 124/4

 

C'mon Alpine, where the **** are you?

[alpine_saint]

Oh, did they start today ? Usually Thursdays, isnt it ?

 

FWIW, I thought the press were sounding far too arrogant this morning. Like this series would be a walkover. Australia may not be the best side to hail from their land, but they are NEVER walkovers.

[alpine_saint]

Another one gone.

 

Lets pray Anderson is smokin' today...

[dubai_phil]

Very good day to lose the toss with that cloud cover methinks

 

But too many loose shots by England batsmen.

[Minty]

As someone said on Twitter (and was reposted on BBC TMS live text):

 

This feels rather reminiscent of the first day of the last series... Siddle on fire, captain out early, middle order wobbling..

We all know what happened next...

[dubai_phil]

Australia's openers will emerge in a few minutes. Still 29 overs left today. Meanwhile, here's a stat from Andy Zaltzman. "England fold like a self-origamiing paper pigeon. Last 4 wkts fall for 2: first time their last 4 have fallen for 2 or less since 1998-99.

 

http://www.espncricinfo.com/the-ashes-2013/engine/current/match/566932.html

[ericofarabia]

this one's decent

 

http://www.hqsportz.com/index.html

 

My ESET didn't like that one little bit - Trojan Warning.

 

Beware.

[saint_jas]

Kind of glad I have day 2 tickets now. Will be interesting on how many aussies are down. And what a delivery from Jimmy.

 

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

[dubai_phil]

Never in doubt

[angelman]

I like the rev counter for the spinners

[saints_is_the_south]

Right back in it now. Must capatalise tomorrow morning and not allow them a lead, and if we can keep it then even better. Can see a result inside 4 days at this rate.

[Junction 9]

I can still see this being a close game, but I think we''ll just edge it. Our batting attack looked nervous today with some crazy shot selections. I can't see us being as bad in the second innnings. Our bowling options are so much better than theirs and that's what will see us through. A decent second innings score and then we'll bowl them out no problem on Saturday.

[dubai_phil]

I can still see this being a close game, but I think we''ll just edge it. Our batting attack looked nervous today with some crazy shot selections. I can't see us being as bad in the second innnings. Our bowling options are so much better than theirs and that's what will see us through. A decent second innings score and then we'll bowl them out no problem on Saturday.

 

A lot will depend on Chris Broad's shoulder tomorrow. Without him and the sun shining could be a problem, with him and the sun shining we should get to bat later in the day in good conditions and won't make such bad shot selection again. Chasing 150/180 on that pitch in the 4th innings could be REALLY hard work if the match goes to 4 days.

[dinger]

Is it too early to say 5-0?

 

Still on.

[saint_jas]

I agree poor shot selection from our batsman today. Not entirely sure we should have batted first, hey ho though.

Tomorrow should be cloudy up here again till mid afternoon, hopefully skittle them out 150 (wishful thinking) 200 - 250 and game on.

Looking forward to it, even though I am in Fox Road stand, would have preferred Radcliffe Road. But 3 hours of queuing I will take anything. So glad not 4th day like my mates did, eek, reckon might be over in 3 days, half a 4th day.

[Lets B Avenue]

A lot will depend on Chris Broad's shoulder tomorrow. Without him and the sun shining could be a problem, with him and the sun shining we should get to bat later in the day in good conditions and won't make such bad shot selection again. Chasing 150/180 on that pitch in the 4th innings could be REALLY hard work if the match goes to 4 days.

 

I'm more concerned about the state of health of his son.

[alpine_saint]

I'm more concerned about the state of health of his son.

 

Very sharp..

[alpine_saint]

Aus 113-6.

 

What a stonking game. One batsman's innings is going to win this.

[alpine_saint]

114-7. Blimey...

[Hatch]

Jimmy is smashing them apart

[Minty]

I am honestly not surprised in the slightest by this morning session... expected us to have a first innings lead of some kind, and it looks like it'll actually be quite healthy.

[alpine_saint]

England have let Australia off the hook

[Lets B Avenue]

Last wicket partnerships? No. 11 getting career best? Just like watching Hampshire bowl and I'm waiting for the Glamorgan revival at Cardiff to follow.

[alpine_saint]

Finn should be dropped for what hes done here. Line and length - schoolboy stuff.

[Hatch]

Finn should be Shot for what hes done here. Line and length - schoolboy stuff.

 

amended it for you