Roar Rookie
Joined October 2014
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On here to have an informed discussion about some of my favourite sports, mainly cricket
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For me, blame is one of the great peculiarities of modern sport. While players are chock full of media-trained platitudes, it is instead left…
There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and controversy in Test series between Australia and India. While disciplined batting performances from Ajinkya Rahane…
Poor KP. Legitimately. Love him or hate him, you have to sympathise with him in some way. He's arguably England's greatest batsman of the…
Test match cricket is one of the very few sports that does not reward mediocrity. It's not good enough to just be better than…
Do we want to beat anyone with sledging though? I know I didn’t enjoy being called an “ugly Australian” by anyone. The teams under Taylor, Waugh, and Ponting (at the start) had some of the greatest cricketers ever to grace a cricket ground at their disposal, and did not use sledging as a primary tactic. The later years of Ponting and then Clarke had occasional outbursts that led to a loss of reputation. But I have never seen a team come into a series with such an up front sledging tactic that borders on abusive as this team of Kohli’s. Why not win the Tests the right way then?
The unAustralian move Australia must use to beat India
Completely agree with the premise of your article. The correctness of a decision should not become a tactic as it has. DRS should be in the hands of the umpires though I really doubt it’s going to happen.
DRS: It should be the umpire's call
Exemplary. Which it most definitely was not.
The unAustralian move Australia must use to beat India
I really like the tongue in cheek take on the actual point of DRS. The system in its current form really does not work and adds that tactical aspect that really shouldn’t surround an umpires decision. The right to review should be with the umpires and third umpires only
Why not let the dressing room have their say?
I was thinking more 3 little pigs letting India huff and puff but struggling to blow down the house of bricks.
The unAustralian move Australia must use to beat India
Glad to hear this opinion. For mine, Burns was unlucky to miss out on the tours to the Windies and England coming up in favour of Voges, especially seeing as he impressed (me at least) in his first couple of Tests last summer.
Nevill is clearly the front runner in the keeping stakes for mine, as he has been the most consistent of all of them in the Shield over the last couple of seasons. Sam Whiteman a bolter though?
Burns and Nevill the best options to replace retiring stars
Okay, so if the no ****head policy started in Australia, explain to me how so many of these players, reviled the world over for being “aggressive” etc were allowed to have such long and storied careers. When you get to professional sport, you get big egos, and the Australian cricket team of the 90’s and 00’s had some of the biggest going around. But they made it work.
Is Kevin Pietersen a symptom or the cause of England's issues?
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head that nearly all parties involved in this saga lose. All except the Australians that is. It leaves England without arguably their best batsman of the modern era, and just casts doubt onto the ECB and the team itself’s abilities to handle complex players. At this level of sport there are always going to be egos, but at one point Australia had the Waugh twins, Ponting, Hayden, McGrath, and Warne all in the same side. Their egos were able to be harnessed because they were playing to a common goal, rather than what appears to be happening in England at the moment.
The Pietersen execution: Kevin, England and the fans all lose
I think you’re definitely right on that. Faulkner is one of the most underrated first class cricketers in Australia I think, and if he can transfer some of that batting confidence he has in ODI games to his white clothes cricket it will definitely see him grow exponentially.
Maxwell and Faulkner will push Test claims in county cricket
Sorry Andy, I think you’re missing my point a bit.
a) I never said Steve Waugh’s teams didn’t sledge, but they could always back it up with the quality of the cricket they played. Also, they used it as a secondary tactic when they weren’t able to flat out beat the opposition, whereas Kohli and his team have undoubtedly used it as a primary tactic when they have been way behind in the 2 Tests so far.
b) Being called an “ugly Australian” never got through my skin. It was more relating to the internal conflict all Australians felt during the Ponting and Clarke years trying to support your team but then having to acknowledge how poor their behaviour on field was.
c) There is definitely a difference between trying to put someone off their game with a sledge as Waugh’s teams did, compared to something like Ishant Sharma’s idiotic impersonation of Steve Smith. Kohli is probably the only Test captain over the last 15 years who has given such blatant send-offs to opposing batsmen. Telling said batsmen to “F… off” after they’ve gotten out is abuse. And no Australian team has ever brought such conflicts into a press-conference a la Kohli, or into a board-approved video mocking the opposition such as the recent one involving Ashwin and Pujara
The unAustralian move Australia must use to beat India