Ashes 2015 - Australia tour of England July/September 2015

I just logged on and I thought "someone on the last page will be defending Bell and Dave will pointing to his terrible form". I was not disappointed!

Huge toss, as usual. Weather looks a bit dodgy. I reckon I'd bowl first, but I said this last time and was massively mistaken. Big game for Nevil with the gloves. That slope at Lords can be a pain in the arse, especially when you have people bowling at 90mph under cloud cover with the duke swinging after the stumps.

Anyone else not give a flying fudge about this post match beer thing? I can't believe there is going to be one of those "Vote" things on BBC about it![DOUBLEPOST=1437039144][/DOUBLEPOST]

How cool was this?! a 15 year old Tendulkar!

To be honest, I've been a massive fan of English cricket since ten years now. I love British humour and have a few British friends who are just very normal nice guys. I think, England and specially their media sometimes get very cute with themselves. I was massively disappointed with the 'pissing' episode at the Oval after the Ashes in 2013 and I fell out of love with English cricket. To add to that, there was this whole KP saga and that's water under the bridge now, but he was one of my favorite cricketers. Anyway, I've said it before on this board and I'll say it again- Brendon McCullum is the best ambassador for cricket in the world at the moment. NZ are my favorite team. I was lucky enough to meet him during the IPL, and he genuinely cares for the game and believes in this way of playing.

I'm not sure, but I'll bet what it's worth that England have been won over by the McCullum way. It's hard not to. And, good on them for inviting the Aussies. But, as blessed with talent as the Aussie cricketers are, they see malice and political moves everywhere. It's not their fault. They themselves are like that.

I criticize Cook a lot, but he's someone a kid would look up to. A lot of English lads are like that - Stuart Broad. How many Aussies are that way? A genuinely nice bloke, regular guy you could have a pint with without any massive ego's or air- I can't think of anyone apart from Michael Hussey.

About the Tendulkar thing? His dad is very powerful in the cricketing fraternity. His kid is bound to get some perks.
 
Any Aussie fans about unhappy at seeing Watson dropped? I'm very unhappy, but I'm an England fan!

If you're an England fan, you should be disappointed. It's pretty much criminal to have M Marsh out of the side. It's like leaving Ben Stokes out. I've said it before and I'll say it again- These two guys are the modern generation. They will achieve massive things if they keep their head down. Watson is more a case of what might have been. I don't think he has much test cricket left in him. I would have kept him in the side at the expense of Voges, not Marsh.
 
To be honest, I've been a massive fan of English cricket since ten years now. I love British humour and have a few British friends who are just very normal nice guys. I think, England and specially their media sometimes get very cute with themselves. I was massively disappointed with the 'pissing' episode at the Oval after the Ashes in 2013 and I fell out of love with English cricket. To add to that, there was this whole KP saga and that's water under the bridge now, but he was one of my favorite cricketers. Anyway, I've said it before on this board and I'll say it again- Brendon McCullum is the best ambassador for cricket in the world at the moment. NZ are my favorite team. I was lucky enough to meet him during the IPL, and he genuinely cares for the game and believes in this way of playing.

I'm not sure, but I'll bet what it's worth that England have been won over by the McCullum way. It's hard not to. And, good on them for inviting the Aussies. But, as blessed with talent as the Aussie cricketers are, they see malice and political moves everywhere. It's not their fault. They themselves are like that.

I criticize Cook a lot, but he's someone a kid would look up to. A lot of English lads are like that - Stuart Broad. How many Aussies are that way? A genuinely nice bloke, regular guy you could have a pint with without any massive ego's or air- I can't think of anyone apart from Michael Hussey.

About the Tendulkar thing? His dad is very powerful in the cricketing fraternity. His kid is bound to get some perks.

Cooky seems like a nice chap, and Joe Root is a lovely Yorkshire gent! I really dislike the media in general, but especially when it comes to stories that are non-stories. The pissing incident was curious, very un-English! I just enjoy cricket and I don't generally mind who wins a match (its different in the Ashes!), as long as the cricket is good and entertaining, but the Aussies under Ponting were horrid, and as such our players weren't much better.

Edit:- Very un-English in terms of the MCC type of English! Any English city on a Friday or Saturday night, English men and women pissing everywhere!
 
I just logged on and I thought "someone on the last page will be defending Bell and Dave will pointing to his terrible form". I was not disappointed!

Huge toss, as usual. Weather looks a bit dodgy. I reckon I'd bowl first, but I said this last time and was massively mistaken. Big game for Nevil with the gloves. That slope at Lords can be a pain in the arse, especially when you have people bowling at 90mph under cloud cover with the duke swinging after the stumps.

I thought when they were doing the toss the pitch looked green too but actually it's not - just the very edges.

Very glad to have lived down to your expectations ;)
 
Last time I saw him play, I didn't rate Chris Rogers, but he's looked pretty tidy so far this series.[DOUBLEPOST=1437042271][/DOUBLEPOST]
I thought when they were doing the toss the pitch looked green too but actually it's not - just the very edges.

Very glad to have lived down to your expectations ;)

Yeah I thought it looked green and also with the cloud clover, I would have had a bowl. But it actually looks a good batting pitch and now the Sun is out, I think Australia will make a big score.

Live up buddy, lived up! Don't do yourself a disservice!
 
Well this is thoroughly depressing! Warner playing a defensive shot and getting a four!

Anderson has been average so far, unfortunately.
 
England need to remove Warner and fast. If Rogers makes 150+, you'll have ample opportunity to save the test at worst. If Warner makes 150+ it's over. Moeen Ali needs to be introduced. I feel Warner will fancy him. It's a chance Cook should take.

Haha. Right on cue.
 
England need to remove Warner and fast. If Rogers makes 150+, you'll have ample opportunity to save the test at worst. If Warner makes 150+ it's over. Moeen Ali needs to be introduced. I feel Warner will fancy him. It's a chance Cook should take.

Haha. Right on cue.

Here we have our next coach ladies and gents!

I forgot to say in reply to your last post, Mitch Marsh is superb and I am disgusted with the Australian selectors for picking him so early! I'm not as confident in Stokes as you are, but he is undoubtedly a good player. I'd actually pick Chris Woakes over Stokes as my favourite young English player. His injury woes have been a real shame. I think he will eventually take over from Anderson.

Time to take Moeen off now and let Stokes have a bowl!
 
I personally dont like this. It seems like this guy will be pushed through the ranks no matter how well he plays...

To be fair all reports are he is rather good, but lets wait and see.[DOUBLEPOST=1437049051][/DOUBLEPOST]Okay first session clearly goes to Aus, could have been even worse had Warner not made up his mind that Moen Ali deliveries where like a pinata, and must swing his bat every time as hard as he could.
 
To be fair all reports are he is rather good, but lets wait and see.[DOUBLEPOST=1437049051][/DOUBLEPOST]Okay first session clearly goes to Aus, could have been even worse had Warner not made up his mind that Moen Ali deliveries where like a pinata, and must swing his bat every time as hard as he could.

First session goes massively against the Lords ground staff who have produced an appallingly dull pitch.

I think England have done well to keep bowling a good line and length. Unless the old ball starts to do something, 500+ for Australia. Smith is not one for the purists, in terms of stance, but he sees the ball so well.
 
Cooky seems like a nice chap

He does?

This is the guy who set up a confidential, speaking-freely team meeting and then reported KP's comments back to Flower. This is the guy who called on journalists to stop criticising his frequently awful captaincy at a press conference. This is the guy who is reported to have demanded that the best batsman in the team and an all-time level England cricketer be kept out of the side because he was too weak a captain to handle him and couldn't stomach the threat to his authority posed by the awkward silences.

This is the guy who lead a massively underperforming ODI team with astonishingly outdated captaincy and who couldn't personally buy a run for 2 years, then announced at after the world cup that the ECB had been wrong to "take the captaincy away from him" like he had some kind of divine right to the job.

This suggests he is a schmuck of a leader and a weasel of a man.
 
He does?

This is the guy who set up a confidential, speaking-freely team meeting and then reported KP's comments back to Flower. This is the guy who called on journalists to stop criticising his frequently awful captaincy at a press conference. This is the guy who is reported to have demanded that the best batsman in the team and an all-time level England cricketer be kept out of the side because he was too weak a captain to handle him and couldn't stomach the threat to his authority posed by the awkward silences.

This is the guy who lead a massively underperforming ODI team with astonishingly outdated captaincy and who couldn't personally buy a run for 2 years, then announced at after the world cup that the ECB had been wrong to "take the captaincy away from him" like he had some kind of divine right to the job.

This suggests he is a schmuck of a leader and a weasel of a man.

In your opinion awful captaincy. It actually one I tend to agree with, but this does not stop him being a nice guy. He genuinely seems to love his family and in the main has always seemed to be a decent human being. Maybe the KP thing wasn't great, but please don't pretend to think you know everything that went on because you read it in a newspaper.

I don't think he is a good captain and he has lost the ability to make big runs, but that wasn't the conversation. The conversation was about the decency of the players, which had caused a PC member to fall out of love with the English team.

You have almost instantly reverted to name calling because you don't rate him as a cricket player. As I said, the KP thing (if what was reported was true) was out of order, but in general he seems like a good bloke. I think the default for any human being is to defend yourself when your ability is put to task, so I don't agree with your other points as an argument for if he is a nice chap or not.
 
In your opinion awful captaincy. It actually one I tend to agree with, but this does not stop him being a nice guy. He genuinely seems to love his family and in the main has always seemed to be a decent human being. Maybe the KP thing wasn't great, but please don't pretend to think you know everything that went on because you read it in a newspaper.

I don't think he is a good captain and he has lost the ability to make big runs, but that wasn't the conversation. The conversation was about the decency of the players, which had caused a PC member to fall out of love with the English team.

You have almost instantly reverted to name calling because you don't rate him as a cricket player. As I said, the KP thing (if what was reported was true) was out of order, but in general he seems like a good bloke. I think the default for any human being is to defend yourself when your ability is put to task, so I don't agree with your other points as an argument for if he is a nice chap or not.

^^^ struggling to make much logical sense of this.

His betrayal of trust at a confidential team meeting is, iirc, fairly well established from testimony from a number of players, both pro and anti KP, and that alone is reasonably strong evidence that isn't a decent guy, and is a weak leader. You're right that we should be careful about second hand reports in these sorts of situations, but the provenance of this particular piece of evidence seems as strong as we can reasonably expect under the circumstances, and a betrayal of trust is absolutely the antithesis of decency. If we can't consider this sort of evidence then there's little basis for claiming anything about his decency, for or against.

His demand to keep KP out of the team is less reliable but it's circumstantial evidence, and seems a reasonable guess bearing in mind the range of other evidence pointing to the same conclusion.

His behaviour at press conferences is undeniable fact, and it seems inescapably true that saying "something must be done" to prevent further criticism of your captaincy is ridiculous. Defending yourself is one thing, demanding that criticism be quashed is absolutely something else, and it very much speaks to an underlying egocentric feeling of entitlement to his leadership position, and absolutely fits the classic profile of the response of a weak, egocentric leader to perceived challenges to his authority.

His criticism of the ECB decision to drop him before the WC is undeniable fact and fits the same pattern ; his record of failure with the bat in ODIs over a long period is undeniable ; the poor performances of the team under his leadership over a long period is undeniable ; thus his argument that he should have been retained as captain and player in this situation, and his wording of this statement in a way that suggests he was robbed of a job that he somehow deserved to keep despite these clear and obvious failings, is strong evidence of an unreasonable, egocentric sense of entitlement.

These are public statements, and thus primary evidence about the nature of his personality and leadership, and a hypothesis that it is part of a pattern evidencing a distasteful combination of weakness and ego and an absence of decency seems extremely reasonable.

The fact that he loves his family (I mean, wtf evidence is that? Some of the most reviled, murderous people in history loved their families) and seems nice at staged ECB events deliberately engineered to portray him as nice is a weak rebuttal, given the range of evidence against this conclusion.

Whether he's nice in his private life when under no pressure of perceived threat to his authority is another matter. I'm not commenting on his private affairs, although the fact that he enjoys shooting animals is something I find personally distasteful, and not much of an endorsement of his powers of empathy or spirit of fair play.
 
^^^ struggling to make much logical sense of this.

His betrayal of trust at a confidential team meeting is, iirc, fairly well established from testimony from a number of players, both pro and anti KP, and that alone is reasonably strong evidence that isn't a decent guy, and is a weak leader. You're right that we should be careful about second hand reports in these sorts of situations, but the provenance of this particular piece of evidence seems as strong as we can reasonably expect under the circumstances, and a betrayal of trust is absolutely the antithesis of decency. If we can't consider this sort of evidence then there's little basis for claiming anything about his decency, for or against.

His demand to keep KP out of the team is less reliable but it's circumstantial evidence, and seems a reasonable guess bearing in mind the range of other evidence pointing to the same conclusion.

His behaviour at press conferences is undeniable fact, and it seems inescapably true that saying "something must be done" to prevent further criticism of your captaincy is ridiculous. Defending yourself is one thing, demanding that criticism be quashed is absolutely something else, and it very much speaks to an underlying egocentric feeling of entitlement to his leadership position, and absolutely fits the classic profile of the response of a weak, egocentric leader to perceived challenges to his authority.

His criticism of the ECB decision to drop him before the WC is undeniable fact and fits the same pattern ; his record of failure with the bat in ODIs over a long period is undeniable ; the poor performances of the team under his leadership over a long period is undeniable ; thus his argument that he should have been retained as captain and player in this situation, and his wording of this statement in a way that suggests he was robbed of a job that he somehow deserved to keep despite these clear and obvious failings, is strong evidence of an unreasonable, egocentric sense of entitlement.

These are public statements, and thus primary evidence about the nature of his personality and leadership, and a hypothesis that it is part of a pattern evidencing a distasteful combination of weakness and ego and an absence of decency seems extremely reasonable.

The fact that he loves his family (I mean, wtf evidence is that? Some of the most reviled, murderous people in history loved their families) and seems nice at staged ECB events deliberately engineered to portray him as nice is a weak rebuttal, given the range of evidence against this conclusion.

Whether he's nice in his private life when under no pressure of perceived threat to his authority is another matter. I'm not commenting on his private affairs, although the fact that he enjoys shooting animals is something I find personally distasteful, and not much of an endorsement of his powers of empathy or spirit of fair play.

I'm sorry, but this is just ridiculous. I only said he seemed like a nice chap.

Back to the cricket anyone?
 
Jack: "I'm sick off all this Bell talk, I think people forget how he single-handedly won England the ashes 2 years back. In my opinion he is one of England's greatest middle order batsman in modern times."

Via the cricinfo live commentary thing...
 

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