I am going to start an Ashes thread.

I like cricket nearly as much as football. My role in the game has been a Tas Cricket Assoc member, with no playing/coaching insights into the game. I eagerly soak up info from the many members who have played grade cricket and higher.

I'm not interested in limited over cricket. I cannot really find a cricket forum as good as 442 is a football forum. There is The Roar, but it takes ages to have a comment posted and one cannot enjoy the immediacy of responses of this forum.

If I find I'm the only one posting, I'll ask one of mods to wind this thread up.


As I get older, I enjoy cricket more and more as I've watched a lot of cricket live in the last few years. I live only a few hundred metres from Blundstone arena where I'm a member. Long form cricket is such a tactical and technical game where stats are very important.

The great thing about long form cricket, is that over four days or five days, the best team nearly always wins. Over this period of time, deficiencies are exposed. There are aberrations, like Haddin dropping the impressive Joe Root for 0. The English batter proceeded to score 130 plus runs. It was decisive in the outcome at Cardiff.

In football 40% of the game is due to chance. Often the best team doesn't win.

One of the great things in Ashes cricket, is that compared to the English football media, where it ranges from some excellent scribes and analysts to mediocrity, the English cricket media is simply the best in the world.=d>

Most Aussie cricket fans, prefer nearly all overseas media to our own insipid commentators, apart from the hilarious Kerry O'Keefe who has retired too early.:cry:

This Ashes series at 1-1 is nicely poised.

Thoughts?

Edited by Decentric: 24/8/2015 05:32:37 PM

Edited by Decentric: 15/9/2015 01:08:39 PM

Edited by Decentric: 29/10/2015 10:27:14 PM

http://www.espncricinfo.com/the-ashes-2015/content/story/903267.html

Theres already cricket thread mate.

http://au.fourfourtwo.com/forums/default.aspx?g=posts&t=42360&p=241

-PB

With a combination of test series, 20/20 and one day cricket.

This is a specific thread for the The Ashes.

With the birth of my new born im up a lot to watch the ashes

If it is true england have prepared a green top in edgebaston this test could be over in 3 or a maximum of 4 days. Our pace attack is just too good for the english batsman when there is bounce. Anderson may worry us a bit with his reverse swing but he cant bowl all day.

Hoping Rogers is healthy enough to continue his great form so far and maybe with the ball coming on a bit more warner may find form.

Should be a good match from an aussie perspective

Congrats mate :) My daughter was born during Euro 2012 so got to watch a lot of that. Son was day before Asian Cup final so that was a good weekend.

Hoping this wicket has a bit of life in it.

thanks mate. Its funny I think England's best chance is on a balanced pitch. Too flat or too grassy hurts them in my opinion

Congrats grazorblade. Very happy for you. It's nice to hear some good news.

Too flat plays into Australia's hands massively (especially since the Australian attack seems to have figured out its lengths). Balanced is good. Very grassy mightn't be bad for England either.

The way I see it, England need to to play Russian Roulette and hope they are luckier. On the basis that there's not a great deal of difference between the batting sides (at least in English conditions), they need to empower their bowlers as much as possible and hope that their bowlers come up trumps over Australia's. If it's green, Anderson and Broad are among the best bowlers in the world. In those circumstances, they can skittle our batsmen. If that happens and we don't skittle their batsmen quite so cheaply, they'll win.

This is why Trevor Bayliss has been asking for a traditional English wicket. I mean Smith hasn't even been tested in English conditions really. Each Ashes Test match he has played in England has involved a wicket magically transported from India.

Been like a smackhead going through withdrawals since the last game. Bring it on.

Good stuff grazorblade. Congrats!

Entertaining read after the last match, if anybody is keen. Here's a cutting from it but please click on the link so the author gets the credit he deserves.



Edited by quickflick: 29/7/2015 04:12:25 PM

Try the Guardian website

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/cricket

The community of people making comments is class. Some of the articles are hit and miss, but some are decent. But the comments have regulars from many years. Some are guys played minor-county/county cricket in England, others are guys who played grade cricket in Australia at a high level (or so they say). Others, myself included, are enthusiastic amateurs. At the minute there are a lot of morons who go on and mudsling England or Australia for the sake of it. Nevertheless there are some outstanding contributors.

Interesting.

There is a player posting in this thread , who has been a high level cricketer.;)

It is a good site.

The only problem is that posts are not immediate like here.

Anderson and Broad are excellent bowlers on green tops.

I'm not sure what it is like for HAL members, but TCA members get access to players' public presentations.

One was where Ed Cowan, Test batter at the time, said that Mitch Johnson was not only fast, but due to his action harder to pick up for batters than other bowlers. Cowan only saw Johnson's delivery late.

He still found him very difficult to face in Shield cricket when Johnson was overlooked for Test cricket.

Another phenomenon I don't understand is fast fast bowlers ostensibly often have loop in their bowling. I'm assuming that most of our current pace bowlers have it.

Apparently Brett Lee, didn't have loop and was considered a flat bowler. This evidently made him easier to pick up for batters.

For Lee to be successful he had to bowl in the 150s. Late in his career, when he was still bowling in the early 140s, he was less effective than most other bowlers of that speed.

Lee is equal as one of the four fastest bowlers of all time - Shoaib Aktar, Shaun Tait, Jeff Thomson, all bowled balls at 160 kph. Although Thomson was only recorded once whilst at his peak.

Lee was able to sustain his lightning pace over an extended career, whereas Aktar and Tait could only bowl a few balls before running out of gas.

Johnson has been recorded at 155-6kph. He hasn't been much over 146 kph this series. I think there may be variations of up to 10 kph in speed guns.

Can anyone explain the loop in fast bowling trajectory?





Edited by Decentric: 29/7/2015 05:39:33 PM

Cricinfo is the best site for cricket I know.

The English Guardian is also good if Australia is playing England.

thanks for the congrats guys :)

One interesting phenomenon is Ian Bell. He has flogged us in previous Ashes.

With cricket being so highly technical, he has a few current technique issues and has been innocuous.

Conversely, Joe Root now looks world class in quality.

This is the crux of why Johnson is so difficult to face. He has (or can have) express pace, but it's the angle that really throws batsmen. He doesn't have the beautiful action or seam position of somebody like Ryan Harris (which is more conducive to highly accurate bowling, getting seam and swing than Johnson's action). But Johnson's pace and the difficult in reading his action play merry hell for batsmen.

Poor Ian Bell is in shocking form at the minute. But the way he dealt with Johnson's express pace two years ago was a masterclass in how to deal with that kind of hostile bowling. I wasn't alive during the glory days of the West Indies, but I'm told that Bell's work last Ashes was the best against express pace since Steve Waugh took on the West Indies, or (going further back) since Sunil Gavaskar took on the West Indies quicks (without a helmet) or Viv Richards took on Thommo (also without a helmet).



There are a bunch of other names you can add to that list. Mikey Holding, aka 'Whispering Death', was up there. Richie Benaud believes Frank Tyson was the fastest bowler he ever saw (obviously no speed guns, but Richie may well have been right). Harold Larwood was probably one of the quickest in history too. And you're right about Jeff Thomson. He was before my time. But I've heard tell that if you gloved it off Thommo there was every chance the ball would fly over the wicketkeeper's head for six.

Also, I should point out that Lee didn't need to bowl at 155km/h to be effective. If the wicket had a bit of life in it and he pitched it up at over 140km/h, he'd cause real problems for the batsman. True that Lee hadn't the action to get as much out of the wicket as others, but it was good enough to do damage.




Pace isn't everything. Accurate line and length, and the ability to use seam/swing, are considerably more important than having express pace.

The three best fast bowlers in Test history are Sir Richard Hadlee, Malcolm Marshall and Glenn McGrath.

Aside from Marshall, none of them had express pace. They relied on pinpoint accuracy with beautiful lengths. They knew how to extract what they could from the wicket. They could get the ball to swing late, they could get movement off the wicket. They could make runways look like minefields.

Express pace is handy in combination with those kind of bowlers. Yesterday I wrote of the importance of a football team having both excellent athletes (with great technique and game awareness) and fellas who are less athletically gifted but can read the game brilliantly. So in a great football side, you may have a winger and a striker who are incredibly fast and agile and capable of dominating in 1 vs 1 situations. Then you may have that holding midfielder who hasn't got oodles of pace but can read play immaculately and just seems to weight the ball perfectly to that highly athletic winger or striker, all the while drawing opposition players as they try to shut him down. Think of Thierry Henry playing in the same side as Patrick Viera and Dennis Bergkamp. The cricket (bowling) equivalent is when you have a guy with express pace (Johnson), in addition to a guy with very good pace and the ability to swing the ball late (Starc) and a guy with pinpoint accuracy (Hazlewood). That leaves the batsmen with few places to hide. They're constantly being tested. Throw in a good spinner and then maybe an all-rounder or a some good part time bowlers, and you have a proper attack.

His issues are more mental than technical. And the mental side is affecting the technical side too.

When in form, Bell has textbook technique in a way that few others do. But he's in shabby form. England went to Lords with this emphasis on positive, aggressive cricket. This meant that when Bell faced that beautiful delivery from Hazlewood, rather than try to get his feet moving forward and play it with a straight bat, he seemed to be playing across the line. Thus the mental approach undid Bell's beautiful technical game.

But technique isn't everything in cricket. Some of the best batsmen have been technically unorthodox (Bradman, Chanderpaul, Pietersen, these days Smith) and others have been technically limited (Steve Waugh). It's a question of a batsman not being fatally technically flawed and having good shot selection. So if a batsman has a solid forward defensive stroke with his bodyweight going forward and can deal with the short ball (both of which, Smith, for example can do very well) then it's fine for him to have unusual technique (providing he doesn't have a bad habit of playing shots he's not good at).

Edited by quickflick: 29/7/2015 06:10:08 PM

Decentric

can you explain a bit more about what you mean with respect to this loop in the bowlers' trajectories? Perhaps an article or even paraphrasing somebody who said it?

I think I know what you mean (albeit I don't know much about the biomechanics of fast bowling).

I think it means the leap they get when they arrive at the crease and the angle of release.

Love cricinfo and Zaltzman is class.

I read an article years ago, or saw it on Inside Cricket on pay TV.

I was hoping you, or someone else could enlighten me.

I don't know.:?

We have a high quality former player participating in this thread. I hope he can shed some light.:)

Interesting.

Thanks for the insights.



Edited by Decentric: 29/7/2015 09:19:59 PM

Okay, I'll go by what Mike Selvey said on the Guardian a while back. Mike played a handful of Tests for England (and dimissed Viv Richards once). His writing of the technical and tactical elements of cricket (especially fast bowling) is second to few cricket writers in the world. Unfortunately, he has become too political in recent years, imo. He is basically embedded with the England cricket team and is very defensive about selections and altering bowling actions and so on.

But Mike says if you want to see the best possible leap to the crease, look no further than the statue of Dennis Lillee outside the MCG. It gives an idea of what I think is the loop to which you allude. It enables a bowler to use all his levers properly. He is using his height properly. He is propelling himself really well. He can have a really high, straight arm and have his wrist cocked so that he has every chance of swinging the ball. That leap (like that of Dennis Lillee) leads to landing on a straightened leg and best enables the body to deal with the rigour of arriving at the crease at top speed.

Compare that with Shaun Tait whose body was mightily low. Tait also landed with a bent knee which isn't the best thing. He was a walking injury.

Brett Lee had a kind of slingy action (maybe that's what's meant by a flatter action)? But I think Jeff Thompson had a slingy action too (haven't seen much footage of him, mind) and a few experts think he had the best action ever. If memory serves Mikey Holding said he thought Jeff Thompson had the best action ever.

Mike Selvey was working (or consulting?) with David Saker (old England bowling coach and current Victoria bowling coach) a few years ago and was saying they were encouraging Steve Finn to shorten his run up ever so much and really get that leap into the crease. It would also afford him that extra yard of pace. The shame is they seem to have tinkered with Finn's actions so much they may have done more harm than good.

Edited by quickflick: 29/7/2015 07:13:55 PM

Edited by quickflick: 29/7/2015 07:14:43 PM

Edited by quickflick: 29/7/2015 09:16:26 PM

That's a good point. The loop could mean wrist position. Hazlewood's wrist is cocked. You've put that well 'with the ball tailing away and seeming to "pop" out at release'.

I interpreted "loop" to mean the leap to crease on account of the fact that using your height and having a high, straightened arm could be what it alludes to, especially by way of contrast with the flatter, skiddier action of somebody like Shaun Tait.

Yes!!!!!!!!!! Won the toss. I have an inkling that that's crucial at Edgbaston. Didn't stop Ponting from making the mistake of the century a decade ago.