hmm back to leg theory it seems

Aussies were coasting now Herath gets Marsh and its massively game on. Smith though is the key. If hes batting at the end Aussies win.

your optimistic if you thought we were doing it easy on this pitch :shock:

Aussie were definitely getting there with Marsh and Smith. Mathews had taken the pressure off with the part-timer and both batsmen were finding good runs and the easy single too often. Theyre scored 40 or so at a decent pace.

Now with both of them gone Sri Lankas to lose.

And it is done unless the weather saves.

this innings most australians have played a good game plan just finding it too difficult. Hopefully they get out of this one and adjust to sub continent conditions

in england i thought that when we played a good game plan we were good enough here we mostly played a good game plan and weren't good enough. But the 1st test in unfamiliar conditions can be tough lets hope the boys adjust to sri lankan conditions

O'Keefe in at 10 after Lyon.

biggest difference between the teams in this test
1. sri lankan had one centurion - you only need one in a test like this to win
2. sri lanka slow bowlers more effective. Most of our wickets came through pace bowlers. We should look to getting a sub continent bowler to advise lyon how to dominate when conditions are in his favour

I thought that in England, when the wicket didn't do much (Lord's and The Oval), Australia played very well. As soon as there was lateral movement, Australia's batsmen got annihilated (the only genuine exception being Warner in the second innings) and the bowlers lost their heads (Hazelwood tried to swing the ball, rather than seam it, etc). The likes of Root managed to outwit our bowlers.

gotta say neville looks pretty comfortable (watch me put the mocker on him)
wonder if rain will happen

about one unplayable ball every 2 overs or so. Pretty difficult batting

you've got to change your thinking in bowler friendly conditions
all the pressure is on the bowlers, they are expected to take wickets, no one is expecting you to make a century and even a 50 gets applauded

this is kind of how keepers prepare for penalty shootouts

Edited by grazorblade: 30/7/2016 06:18:55 PM

20 consecutive maidens by the world's fastest scoring team



Edited by condemned666: 30/7/2016 07:15:20 PM

if we score 3 runs an over in this partnership we probably hit the winning runs this over :D

the conditions were tough in the 5th match and we improved out game management and did fine
this game has been very very difficult conditions
lyon needs to learn to dominate in favourable conditions (5th day pitches, sub continent pitchses etc)
hopefully our batsmen improve as the tour goes on

10 overs to survive

The stand is broken

178...

Balls for 4 runs

Lowest run rate in test cricket history (minimum 100 balls) 0.13 runs per over

Edited by condemned666: 30/7/2016 07:25:41 PM

shame probably 7 or so overs from a draw

Our batting line up is not close to being good enough. We always look a wicket away from a collapse.

marsh and neville need to improve I think our top 5 are ok but on tough wickets you need your lower middle order to be good enough to cash in when the bowlers tire a little. One century in either innings wins a match like this

Just need to stay calm and remember summer is almost here and we can cash in big on some flat decks. :roll:

Exactly. And first innings scores of 500+ are always heaps of fun :roll: How dare a batsman be made to work for his runs!

I'm not sure these wickets are supposedly tough - more unfamiliar to Aussie players.

Rod Marsh was in the paper yesterday saying Australia couldn't have done any more in preparation.

They could. That is by playing on more spin friendly wickets, more frequently, in the Shield. Against overseas opponents, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan all have similar wickets for Australia to adapt to.

 If one adds Zimbabwe, West Indies, South Africa, England, and New Zealand, 4 out of 9 opponents have similar wickets to each other. This amounts to 44% of wickets prepared being similar in away conditions.

 Also, I think English and West Indian wickets offer more spin  than ours. Others, South Africa and New Zealand swing and seem more.

So we probably need to stop playing on benign drop in wickets, and very bouncy ones for the Shield and Tests. Instead it might be prudent to prepare more wickets conducive to a moving ball and spin, if, we want to perform better in away tests.

For many Aussies, with only about 15 % of Aussies watching overseas cricket, most people think of Australia as a powerful cricket nation when we are not. We often play visiting teams in the first two tests on the two most pace friendly and bouncy wickets, Brisbane and Perth.

With  an early Aussie series  lead, the visitors  start to improve  as the series progresses, but it is too late for them. I'd suggest India plays better against us on our wickets than we do against them on theirs. 

Preparation for different conditions for Test matches has certainly changed and is far more limited. There are far few lead in matches to series and less matches in between tests. This means the home team is more favoured especially when there is a specific effort to prepare home ground pitches.

Back in the 80s into the 90s there was criticism of Australia playing the first two tests in Brisbane and Perth against the West Indies because it was felt it was handing their fast bowlers the chance to put them 2-0 up. However in general you are right, playing on the more fast bowling friendly pitches first works in Australia's favour against a lot of countries, South Africa is the exception.

Agree with every word in your post.


Now we have pay TV and I've become more knowledgeable about countries other than England, from viewing experience, I believe that cricket with spinners operating from both ends is fantastic to watch.

Batters have to play so many more balls per hour than when two pace bowlers operate. The spectator sees more action per minute.

The majority of TCA members disagree with me, but I believe Aussie  spectators are being denied the best form of cricket. The only times I can remember two Aussie spinners bowling in tandem at Bellerive in Tests was Warne/McGill and Warne/May. It was good stuff.

Decentric:
The wicket was very tough and not just unfamiliar. If this was a dehli pitch that would be easy and unfamiliar. But this pitch turned more than our 5th day wickets. Sri Lanka collapsed in their first innings as well despite it being very familiar conditions for them too. In fact they mostly collapsed in their second innings too apart from one standout innings and a bit of hit and giggle at the end

That's still 3 matches in which we got beaten fairly soundly when the ball has moved. Including one in which we were all out in the first innings for 60.

That, in the context of recent Ashes series, is strongly indicative of some big issues in Australian cricket to do with facing the moving ball (from grassroots to elite level)

A few seasons back in the Sheffield Shield, the pitches were made to be a bit more bowler-friendly. Not unplayable for batsmen, just more difficult. Basically, what is fairly standard in England, I'd imagine.

Anyway, none of the batsmen could buy a run. The only exceptions were Ricky Ponting and Chris Rogers. All other batsmen in the Shield struggled. Ponting is a once-in-a-generation batsman and Rogers has years of experience adapting to bowler-friendly surfaces and conditions in England. So no surprise they could stay at the crease and score runs.

The other batsmen didn't have the technique or the knowledge of where their off-stump is to do anything useful.

Michael Clarke had a massive hissy-fit at the groundsman, on one occasion, for preparing wickets too helpful for bowlers.

This sums it all up.

It's no wonder we do so crap. The attitude of so many in Cricket Australia (admin, cricketers, coaches, fans) is disgraceful. It's not can-do. It's a mixture of laziness and parochialism.

David Warner is an amazingly talented cricketer. He's the measure of what a cricketer, without great technique, can do in various circumstances. On flat tracks, he's dominant. When the ball moves, he can adapt, but he really struggles. He said that, in England, he could barely play at the ball (or something like that). He felt all at sea.

Now, granted, you need an element of luck playing against the moving ball. Allan Border could be bowled out by Wasim Akram. But a cricketer like AB would know how to give himself the best chance of survival by knowing when he (does not) need(s) to play, having the technique and the footwork to play the ball properly and as late as possible, etc.

The current Australian cricketers are diabolically poor in this respect. Chris Rogers (very talented but not quite as talented as Warner) was the exception. And he outscored all the others.

If a cricketer as gifted as Warner doesn't have the savoir-faire as to how to deal with moving ball and he (and he alone) can play reasonably well, that tells you that the lot of them are in big, big trouble.

But idiocy abounds.

Hughes also had a cracking season. :crying:

But apart from that you are spot on. 

This is all incredibly biased. Rogers had plenty of bad series on moving wickets and the ball moved quite a bit in NZ and we did fine. We have just had a generational change since the ashes with burns and khawaja coming in. This is after another generational change where smith and warner came into the side.

For the last 7 or so years very few have averaged over 40 in shield - the same pitches that people are complaining are too easy. If the pitches were the problem rather than the talent of the generation (and possibly the development that lead to this generation) then I would expect to see very good averages at shield level - like the ones the generation that were #1 for 15 years had - with at least a dozen players with 50+ averages yet the same players getting decimated overseas.

Its always more difficult to play in unfamiliar conditions. Foreigners struggle to adjust on aussie wickets because of the bounce, the subcontinent is hard because of the spin, england is hard because of the swing. Typically you see peoples average drop by about 5-10 or so compared to their home and shield average. If you have averages of 35 or so like the previous generation then you are looking to get annihilated away from home. This generation has shield averages barely scraping 40 with smith and warner the exceptions (who both do well) and march is much weaker. They are doing right on what I would expect away from home given their relative talent. Also away wins for any team are becoming less frequent (that doesn't mean they don't happen). We overcame this to some degree during the golden generation with our psychological game and proactive dominant style. At the moment with the talent in the team it is difficult to use those tactics because you need to cash in psychologically on periods of dominance which we aren't getting. But this mediocre to moderately strong team (compared to other oz teams or even teams around the world) is number 1 in the world which suggests we are more dominant at home than our opponents as well as more competitive on average away from home.

But for some reason some here see the technique it takes to adjust to bounce as inferior to the technique it takes to adjust for swing or spin. That's fine its your right to have a favourite way for the game to be played. Personally I think the better place to look is the development system - why are shield averages so low? It could just be a bad generation but it could be a difference in how players are developed

There is no doubt it was a tough wicket by Aussie standards, Grazor.

 Fair point.

The fact Sri Lanka played better on it surely indicates we need more of these wickets at home? One current nameless  Shield bowler I've met recently expressed his frustration at the wickets they have to bowl on across Australia.

Because we have so many wickets where out of four specialist bowlers we sometimes have four pace bowlers playing in a team it surely indicates that there is too much of a pace bias in Australia?

Pace dominates our cricket. This is also to the extent that swing bowlers are not nurtured either, like they probably are in England and NZ.

Bizarrely Australia is the number one ranked Test team at the moment. A few successive tours of the Subcontinent would surely change that scenario?