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Cricket World Cup 2007

#264
Petebass said:
3 runs needed from the last ball, Bopara on strike and.......... HE'S OUT. SL wins by 2 runs.

Finally a cliff-hanger. Well done England. I thought you were going to get beaten easily today but that was a great fight.
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I actually thought this would be out best chance to win a match in the super 8s.

Sodding typical though, whenever there's a tight finish in whatever sport it's England who are on the losing end. Is it written into our genes that we just can't win close matches? :(

And once again we were let down by the top order and 'big hitters'. Nothing from Vaughan, 3 from Freddy and a mighty....forgettable innings from Ed Joyce. Even Ian Bell...he might have scored 47 but look how many balls it took him! This isn't a test match! Again. Get Strauss back in the team, or better still move Bopara up the order. It's so ****ing disappointing to lose such a close game, though from the position we were in early on we should really have won it long before it reached needing 3 from the last ball. Well played Ravi Bopara and Paul Nixon though, at least they gave us a shout.

That pretty much puts England out of the semis. No chance now.
 
#265
Komakino said:
I Even Ian Bell...he might have scored 47 but look how many balls it took him! This isn't a test match!
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Yeah looks like Pieterson took a while to get his runs too. For what it's worth, Eng aren't the only team to strugle against this SL bowling attack. Malinga has been very hard to manage and the remaining SL bowlers have capitalised. This bowling attack is going to be their strength going into the semis and look out any team who underestimates them.........
 
#266
Petebass said:
.....Malinga has been very hard to manage and the remaining SL bowlers have capitalised. This bowling attack is going to be their strength going into the semis and look out any team who underestimates them.........
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Quite right.

In the SL tour of NZ this summer Malinga was more than a handful and the reason why we lost the test series.

He is particularly useful when the white ball is dirty. Many of the batsmen say that his odd out-of-hand delivery angle is just too hard to pick up.

Mo
 
#267
Very tense game - right to the end, last ball it could have gone either way!

I'm glad for Bopara - what an innings! He's one for the future!

Whereas Joyce was yet again a total waste of space!

They should have put Strauss in for him or anybody really!

But it looks like we have the basis of a young developing team ....?

Probably out now though - that was their chance to win - after restricting Sri Lanka to a low target I thought it would be easy - but the first 3 are getting worse!
 
#268
Komakino said:
Sodding typical though, whenever there's a tight finish in whatever sport it's England who are on the losing end. Is it written into our genes that we just can't win close matches? :(
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No - remember us Aussies are predominantly Western Euro - with a huge amount of British stock in there.
Maybe it's the Irish and Greek input that make us such good competitors? And drinkers? And lovers? ...and bass players?

I'm just lookin forward to us Aussies sinkin the slipper into the english team ONE MORE TIME!:smug:
 
#270
It looks like the Bangers have pulled off a major upset by beating South Africa. Wow! This contest throws up yet another surprise. If the upsets keep coming, the English might just scrape back into finals contention.

This has been a very competative world cup and I've been loving that aspect of it.

I've got a gig tonight but I should get home in time to watch the end of the first innings of the Aust V Eng match. Bring it on!
 
#271
Komakino said:
Sodding typical though, whenever there's a tight finish in whatever sport it's England who are on the losing end. Is it written into our genes that we just can't win close matches? :(
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How quickly we forget. I seem to remember England winning a test match against us during the 05 Ashes series by 2 runs. The luck went with you that day because you made it go with you.
 
#272
Petebass said:
How quickly we forget. I seem to remember England winning a test match against us during the 05 Ashes series by 2 runs. The luck went with you that day because you made it go with you.
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That's a one-off. If you were English you'd understand...oh the number of times we've lost penalty shoot outs in football, or tennish matches featuring brits go all 5 sets but it's the brit who loses. We lose more than we win.
 
#274
OK I'll put it out there and see if anyone agrees...... Was Pietersen's century incredibly selfish? To me it seemed like getting dropped by Hayden was a defining moment which somehow got KP thinking about his own personal milestone instead of what's best for the team. His first 70 odd runs went for a run-a-ball, his century came from 120ish balls. That mean his last 30 runs came from a very cautious 50ish balls......

As an Aussie that was a worrying win. Our bowling attack really doesn't look all that strong. Tait did well but he's so darn hot/cold, we can't rely on him to perform like that every game. Same goes for our aging McGrath. When I found out Watson was injured, I was actually a little pleased because the obvious replacement would be S. Clarke, a bowler for which I have a lot of enthusiasm. Instead we bring in a batsman and leave it for part-timers like M.Clarke to be the 5th bowler. We even had to get Symonds bowling medium pace for the first time in several years despite his tender arm injury. Not good Mr. Selectors...........
 
#275
I think what the selectors were looking at was the fact that, this game doesn't really matter - Australia are almost guaraunteed a place in the final four - so a dropped game doesn't really matter.
Also - how do you bowl to Peitersen?
There's the other point, that ViV's ground is a sandy deck with no variation. Kinda makes any kind of spin easy to hit. I'm sure Symonds would've been bowling spin elsewhere.

But - good win.
 
#276
I think you're right , Peiterson is a selfish player and doesn't seem to be a team player at all sometimes, and this was one of them, being dropped always seems gee up a batsman and quite often the go on to tear the attack appart, but as you pointed out in this case he went on the defensive and cost the team runs. The 50 over game is a funny equasion of runs Vs wickets and it seems that if you don't get a pretty good start you can suffer from a desperate finnish. To be honest I though England would have played better than that.
 
#277
smo said:
I think what the selectors were looking at was the fact that, this game doesn't really matter - Australia are almost guaraunteed a place in the final four - so a dropped game doesn't really matter.
Also - how do you bowl to Peitersen?
There's the other point, that ViV's ground is a sandy deck with no variation. Kinda makes any kind of spin easy to hit. I'm sure Symonds would've been bowling spin elsewhere.

But - good win.
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What? If the chappel Hadlee series has taught me anything, it's that team selection has absolutely nothing to do with the psychology of the game. The world is still crowing about our loss in NZ there and they never ever mention that we sent a second string team. The assumption is always that you field your best team for every game, and therefore we should - if for no other reason than to stop teams gaining confidence from beating us. They don't care about our selection process, they just want to win. If our selectors keep up with the "it's ok to lose certain games" mentality, we're headed for disaster IMO.

Personally I think the selectors did try and pick what they thought was out best team. Unfortunately, they don't see things the way I do for the first time in many years, and it's not me who's changed his views on selections............

How do you bowl to Pietersen? With a helmet on :) Seriously you don't bowl on his pads. At one point they showed stats which pointed out what was obvious to me but not the bowlers at the time - he's scored 80% of his runs on the leg side. Have a look at McGraths first spell where he went for 25 runs in 3 overs. He was unlike himself, straying on to middle & leg stump way too often and he was punished for it. Once we started bowling to the "corridor of uncertainty" just outside off stump, KP lost control of the game.
 
#279
Hey Pete,..or anyone else for that matter...if you have a chance to get hold dof John Wright's book "Indian Summers", you should buy it!

John Wright was an opener for NZ ( one of our better ones! ) and he wnet on to coach the Indian Team.

I would have considered John Wright a fairly dry character and not all that humourous but I was so wrong about him.

His book will have you in stitches laughing at odd points and it's a great insight into Indian Cricket.

I was wanting a present for one of the detectives who sucessfully worked on solving a case for a family member of ours who was murdered last year and knowing the detective was a cricket nut, I made a presentation of Indian Summers to him. He was over the moon and reckoned it was one of the best reads he's had for some time.

Mo
 
#280
Lara falls on sword.

Brian Lara will retire from one-day internationals when West Indies are knocked out of the World Cup. Lara is likely to have only two matches left following the loss to South Africa at Grenada on Tuesday.

Note the word isn't if, it's when.

So sad to see this happen to the Windies when the ICC cup was in their back yard and the team nowadays seems and empty echo compared to the great Windies teams in the 70s/80s.

Still, they didn't show any mercy when they were knocking everyones' blocks off with relentless fast short paced bowling way back then.

My impression about Lara is that he did not make all that good of a captain. Then again, it's difficult for the Windies ( how they are set up ) for them to pick the right captain.

Mo
 

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