^But were India really going to drop Jadeja and play 3 specialist spinners and 2 specialist pacemen? That seemed the least likely option, because despite Ashwin and Harbhajan being able to bat a bit, it's still a long tail - and a move that would be uncharacteristically aggressive from the Indian selectors. To me it seemed to be Ojha vs 1 of the pacemen vs Harbhajan for the last 2 spots.
Henriques did really well but for the Ashes the seaming pitches do we need him? If Watson comes back and bowls we will have a lot of seam bowlers.
But by then, I HOPE that O'Keefe will have a crack.
Also, on the note of bowlers what do we do with Cummins? When's he fit again? Although, we already have enough bowlers.
Henriques situation will be interesting for sure. I'm sure they'd rather have only 1 seam bowling all-rounder + 1 specialist batsmen. Depends if Watson is bowling again, and it probably depends how well Henriques (and Wade) bats in this series. If the batting looks short with Wade and Moises at 6+7, then he may not get a spot in England and they'll pick someone like Bailey or Khawaja.
And Cummins will get his shot. Speaking negatively...it's only a matter of time before Pattinson and Starc hit a hurdle. Patto struggles to stay fit, and we know Starc will need ankle surgery at some point.
Happy to see Henriques making runs, good to have a piece stroll through the forums/comment section without reading about how crap he is. Has a lot of Mark Waugh about him, good technique, elegant but has these lapses in concentration which has brought down his stats. Played the spin as well as any of our batsmen apart from that last shot.
Not much to add on Clarke, just another typical captains knock. So far we haven't seen anything to suggest we should have gone in with the 2 spinners unless you have 2 good ones which we don't.
Yep, he played well until that sweep shot. But then Clarke had a couple of brain fades too - he just got luckier. Was impressed that Moises took what Dhoni gave him and didn't force it. He was always looking for singles, which I loved. On the reverse side of that, Dhoni gave him too many singles. Henriques only hit 5 boundaries his whole innings, and 2 of those were very fine edges/shots past the keeper that you can't place fields for ie. he wasn't smashing the ball through the field, yet there always seemed to be plenty of gaps for him to work singles. Eg. Henriques had a 3rd man for a long time, and it just made him nudge down there like he would in a one day match. Bring 3rd man into slip or gully and he probably doesn't try that shot as much. Looking at his wagon wheel, he scored 38 singles - about 5 each to 3rd man and long on, a couple to deep point and plenty to square leg.
And I'm not sure sending out Starc at #8 was the right call late in the day. Siddle is the better defender, and while Starc probably deserves the 8 spot from the way he batted recently, I think that situation in particular was not the time to send him in. Hitting high over midwicket 2nd ball with only a few overs to stumps is not smart play in my opinion.
