0ആഷസ് കുടങ്ങളിലെഞാൻ ഒരു ഇതര പ്രപഞ്ചത്തിൽ ആകുന്നുവോ?

ഞങ്ങളുടെ വായനക്കാരുമായി എനിക്ക് രണ്ടുതവണ പരിശോധിക്കാൻ കഴിയുമോ - ഈ വേനൽക്കാലത്ത് ഇംഗ്ലണ്ട് ആഷസ് 3-0 ന് വീട്ടിൽ നേടി?  ഇംഗ്ലണ്ടിനെ തോൽപ്പിച്ച ഒരു ഇതര പ്രപഞ്ചത്തിൽ ഞാൻ കുടുങ്ങിയിട്ടില്ല?  ഞാൻ വാസ്തവത്തിൽ എല്ലാവരേയും പോലെ ഒരേ പ്രപഞ്ചത്തിലാണെന്ന ധാരണയിൽ ഞാൻ തുടരും, ഇംഗ്ലണ്ട് വിജയിച്ചു, ഈ സാഹചര്യത്തിൽ ഒരു വലിയ വിഭാഗം മാധ്യമമാണെന്ന് ഞാൻ അനുമാനിക്കണം, includ­ing the BBC are the ones in an altern­ate universe.

കഴിഞ്ഞ ആഴ്ച, amongst oth­er sim­il­ar examples, I’ve read that Eng­land are “unloved” and I’ve seen a play­er rank­ings which clearly shows that Aus­tralia were by far the bet­ter team. Not long before we had the storm-in-a-tea­cup where ex cap­tain (ഒപ്പം ഐതിഹ്യം) Michael Vaughan and cur­rent top guy Stu­art Broad had a little dis­agree­ment on twit­ter, with neither bring­ing any glory to them­selves. And before that we had some non­sense about Eng­land “los­ing the momentum”. As I’ve men­tioned before, one of the things I try really hard to do when writ­ing about crick­et is to write about the pos­it­ives, because to do so is rep­res­ent­at­ive — most of the things avail­able to write about are very pos­it­ive — crick­et is of course a won­der­ful game. Sadly the same can­not be said about large parts of the press in the UK, but the BBC’s crick­et cov­er­age is usu­ally reas­on­ably pos­it­ive, so the art­icles in ques­tion were par­tic­u­larly dis­ap­point­ing to read. Let’s address them both so we can get back to being pos­it­ive about the game, ഇംഗ്ലണ്ട് കുറിച്ച്!

നന്ന് ഇംഗ്ലണ്ട് (ജോനാഥൻ Agnew പ്രകാരം)

Before I deal with the art­icle in par­tic­u­lar I want to make a pub­lic appeal to Aggers. Gen­er­ally speak­ing Aggers man­ages a good bal­ance of pos­it­ive atti­tude with appro­pri­ate scep­ti­cism. Some­times though, he has a tend­ency to get into a bit of a neg­at­ive rut as he seems to have done this sum­mer. We’ve had all sorts of (unjus­ti­fied) cri­ti­cism of DRS tech­no­logy, cri­ti­cism of both teams being over­done (ഉദാ. Aus­trali­a’s use of DRS and England’s slow bat­ting), and the post-series neg­at­iv­ity about the way Eng­land played. If you did­n’t know the res­ult of the series you’d nev­er know Eng­land had won it, let alone won 3–0. Aggers had a sim­il­ar “neg­at­ive peri­od” like this in the past when Angus Frazer joined the TMS team. Frazer was a very dreary whinger on the radio and Aggers was drawn into it. Thank­fully Frazer moved to pas­tures new and Aggers had until this sum­mer been much more cheery. Let’s hope that the Aus­trali­an sum­mer brings back the hap­pi­er Aggers this winter.

അതുപോലെ, ലേക്കായി the art­icleThe “unloved” label belongs ori­gin­ally to Matt Pri­or, but he meant the team did­n’t care if the oppos­i­tion did­n’t find them friendly. Agnew took it and used it to talk about uncon­vin­cing per­form­ances, slow over rates etc. Eng­land bat­ted very slowly in 1 day of the entire series which seems to have promp­ted much of the neg­at­iv­ity. The irony is, many TMS com­ment­at­ors (eg Geof­frey Boy­cott) have been call­ing for Eng­land to do exactly this for a long time. The play­ers play­ing slowly were out of form and were try­ing to bat them­selves into form, and also to ensure Eng­land could­n’t lose the match. As for slow over rates they’re hardly a prob­lem unique to Eng­land. Agnew also talks up Shane Wat­son and Steve Smith — both play­ers who would­n’t get any­where near the Eng­land start­ing 11. As far as I’m con­cerned the art­icle seems to be writ­ten to fill a space (or a con­tract) — if this is the case, surely a man of so much exper­i­ence could have used it to write about some­thing more pos­it­ive — the suc­cess of the Eng­land women, അഥവാ (ആ സമയത്ത്) upcom­ing game between Eng­land and Ireland.

പ്ലെയർ റേറ്റിംഗുകൾ (അലക് ജിം മാക്സ്വെൽ തക്കവണ്ണം)

Alec Stew­art and Jim Max­well have giv­en their play­er rat­ingsAs you might expect the Eng­lish­man has been under­stated and pess­im­ist­ic, whilst the Aus­sie has been over-con­fid­ent and assert­ive. What they don’t seem to real­ise is that this looks ridicu­lous after a series has been so com­pre­hens­ively won by Eng­land. If these are the rat­ings after Eng­land win 3–0 what would they have been in the 1990’s when Eng­land were thrashed?

Over­all Stew­art has giv­en Eng­land 6.45÷10 whilst Jim Max­well has giv­en Aus­tralia 6.53÷10. That does­n’t sound like a huge dif­fer­ence, but Max­well has rated 13 play­ers, some of whom clearly wont be lin­ing up for Aus­tralia in the test arena for some time. If we drop the low­est 2 (ഫിൽ ഹ്യൂസ് and James Pattin­son) the Aus­sie aver­age jumps up to 6.81. You’d think Aus­tralia had won when you com­pare this to the Eng­land ratings.

ങ്ങള്ക്ക് ചെയ്യുക, at least both have got some intern­al con­sist­ency, and their com­bined “best side” (based on their rat­ings) ഒരു മോശം ഒന്നല്ല, although it includes Smith and Wat­son who would­n’t get any­where near mine.

ഒരു മറുപടി വിടുക