0Australië Boxing Clever

Engels winters is 'n verskriklike ding. Koue en nat, die seisoen beteken ook geen tuiskrieket hoegenaamd nie.

Kersfees is 'n lig wat skyn in die mis van die koue, en om die gedagte aan 'n jaarlikse toetswedstryd wat op Boksdag begin en wat gewoonlik onder blou lug en warm temperatuur gehou word, hierby te voeg, is dit iets wat die verbeelding aanwakker en dat ek 'n koue bier aan.

Daar is sedertdien elke jaar boksietoetse gehou 1980 (behalwe 1989 wanneer 'n eendag-wedstryd teen Sri Lanka in plaas gespeel (boo - ed) en by die Melbourne Cricket Club in Australië - ook die MCG). Hulle is ook oorheers deur 'n massiewe skare (which have approached six fig­ures on occasion).

So with the weath­er out­side truly fright­ful I’ve taken the oppor­tun­ity to have a look back at a few recent(ish) games to see how teams have fared against their Anti­podean hosts.

Sri Lanka were the vis­it­ors last year and were simply blown away. Mitchell John­son was the chief des­troy­er back then (ring enige klokke), tak­ing four wick­ets and hit­ting an unbeaten 92. Clarke hit a ton in what was an excel­lent year for him and Shane Wat­son and Dav­id Warner hit use­ful half cen­tur­ies. eerste beurt totaal van die tuisspan se 460 was heeltemal te veel vir Sri Lanka te hanteer, Kumar Sangakkara com­fort­ably top scor­ing across both their innings with 58. Vic­tory to Aus­tralia by an innings and 201 runs.

Bat­ting col­lapses from both teams (India were the vis­it­ors) dom­in­ated the 2011 spel. Ed Cow­an on debut opened for the Aus­sies and hit a half cen­tury as did Ricky Pont­ing. For the vis­it­ors the erstwhile trio of Sachin Ten­dulkar, Rahul Dravid en Virender Sehwag (oor 450 toetse en meer as 37,000 toets lopies tussen hulle) al behaal oor 50. With hon­ours almost even after the first two innings Australia’s top order col­lapsed but were pulled back from the brink thanks to mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tions from Ricky Pont­ing and in par­tic­u­lar Michael Hus­sey. Second innings res­ist­ance by the Indi­ans was futile; James Pattin­son did the major­ity of the dam­age with a four wick­et haul. Com­fort­able vic­tory for Australia.

Eng­land made a far bet­ter fist of things then they are doing presently when they turned up in 2010. They gave the Aus­sies a crick­et­ing les­son, with Jimmy Ander­son and Chris Trem­lett tear­ing though the host’s in their first innings – who were bowled out for less than 100. Eng­land then turned the screws in uncom­prom­ising style, clob­ber­ing them for over 500 with Jonath­an Trott hit­ting a massive cen­tury and Alastair Cook, Andrew Strauss and Matt Pri­or all mak­ing sig­ni­fic­ant con­tri­bu­tions. Aus­tralia fared little bet­ter second time around (Tim Bresnan the chief des­troy­er) and Eng­land ran out vic­tors by an innings and more.

Before that Aus­tralia gave Pakistan a good old-fash­ioned twonk­ing in 2009 with an all-round team effort with all the bats­men scor­ing runs and all the bowl­ers tak­ing wickets.

Sodat lei my op mooi na ontmoeting vanjaar se. Per­haps fit­tingly for the 26^ste Decem­ber, Eng­land suffered yet anoth­er suck­er punch as the vis­it­ors flattered to deceive. Eng­land actu­ally man­aged to fash­ion a handy lead after the first innings but back came the usu­al frailties to haunt them. Some of the bat­ting was simply idi­ot­ic. Ex-open­er and suc­cess­ful Ashes cap­tain Michael Vaughan had some extremely strong words for his former charges. te reg. It’s not been good enough all series – a lot of play­ers have let a lot of people down this series – will this defeat deliv­er the fatal knock out punch to Eng­land – or will they pull them­selves up from the can­vas and deliv­er a belated Christ­mas present to the much suf­fer­ing fans?