0Day One of the Big Battle. Disappointment

All I can say after the first day of this summer’s Ashes is that I’m hugely dis­ap­poin­ted. Intriguing test match crick­et at its best yes, but a strong mark­er put down by a dom­in­ant Eng­land against an aver­age test team, no.

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

On paper Eng­land should wal­lop this lot. 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. But decent he his, no more no less. 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.

***

Great to hear TMS back on the radio. Some prop­er com­ment­ary, a few laughs and then utter non­sense from ‘Blowers’ get­ting scores com­pletely wrong, names wrong, shar­ing a joke or two with Phil Tufnell about body parts and finally call­ing Aus­sie quick Mitchell Starc “Stark­ers.” Priceless.