0يوم واحد للمعركة الكبرى. خيبة الامل

كل ما يمكنني قوله بعد اليوم الأول من رماد هذا الصيف هو أنني أشعر بخيبة أمل كبيرة. اختبار مثير للاهتمام مباراة الكريكيت في أفضل حالاتها نعم, لكن علامة قوية وضعتها إنجلترا المهيمنة ضد فريق اختبار متوسط, لا.

مسن 33 I am used to Eng­land fold­ing against far super­i­or Aus­sie teams but this time round it was meant to be different.

على الورق ، يجب على إنجلترا أن تمشي بهذا القدر. The bowl­ers are far super­i­or and the bats­men for the most part bet­ter than theirs.

But unfor­tu­nately the Eng­land of old raised it’s ugly head. Peter Siddle bowled pretty well in claim­ing 5 scalps and is a decent bowl­er. ولكن محترم وله, لا أكثر ولا أقل. He has use­ful sup­port but again little more. Time and time again Eng­land threw their wick­ets away and ended up pay­ing the price.

Cap­tain Cook set the tone – he won the toss. Surely with over­cast con­di­tions, the best swing bowl­er chomp­ing at the bit ready to get out there and glor­i­ously sunny weath­er set for the rest of the match it was a no-brained to bowl first. Cook chose the oth­er option. Incred­ible decision.  The way Eng­land bowled once they did finally get the ball in their hand hints at what might have been if they had had a full day at the Aus­sies. Cook set down a mark­er – but it was a poor mark­er – a state­ment of weak­ness. Pretty much all of the Eng­land bats­men did the hard work by get­ting them­selves in and then suc­ceed­ing in get­ting out. Bell fell for yet anoth­er pretty but largely mean­ing­less 20-odd. More of the same from Bell and he must be sweat­ing on his place now. For none of the side to register a half cen­tury is poor at best.

Yet again the top order then relied on the bowl­ers to pull them out of the mire and Ander­son and Finn com­bined nicely to at least make sig­ni­fic­ant in-roads. But Broad’s injury is of ser­i­ous con­cern espe­cially if Eng­land have to play with only three front line bowlers.

Here’s hop­ing his shoulder injury is OK and that Eng­land have got their poor per­form­ance of the sum­mer out of the way.

***

عظيم أن نسمع TMS مرة أخرى على الراديو. Some prop­er com­ment­ary, a few laughs and then utter non­sense from ‘Blowers’ get­ting scores com­pletely wrong, أسماء خاطئة, shar­ing a joke or two with Phil Tufnell about body parts and finally call­ing Aus­sie quick Mitchell Starc “Stark­ers.” Priceless.