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***Official*** Australia in South Africa

SJS

SJS

Hall of Fame Member
Burgey said:
Most every ball is doing something mate, some extravagant, often just enough.
Click to expand...
We can discuss this at length later but let me just say that the art of batting on difficult wickets is (or used to be) to move decisively front or back but not commit the bat till the last nano second and leave everything that was not going to hit the stumps PLUS the balls that were going towards the stumps not to be played with anything but the straightest of bats.

How many batsmen did we see doing that? Cant blame them for test match batting , specially test match batting on difficult wickets is not a practiced art any more. Gavaskar at Bangalore in his last test innings is the last I remember.

As for playing straight (t balls hitting the stumps) on a wicket with lateral movement and up and down bounce, we saw the great Sachin continue to play the straight balls on a very low bounce wicket to square leg and behind and again and again looking like an lbw candidate. Playing the same balls to the direction of mid on or straightish mid wicket would get the ball in the middle of the bat. And we are talking of THE modern day great.

This is not to underplay the difficulty of playing on a wicket with lateral movement but to highlight that you need a different type of batting technique to survive those type of conditions . . .

Hobbs, Sutcliffe and Jardine on a sticky for an hour or two won a match and a series once just by surviving remember . . . . There are rarely unplayable wickets, there are just wickets that are easy to bat on, difficult to bat on and very difficult to bat on and for the latter ones you need special technique.

Starting with the covering of the wickets and then with the doped wickets of the limited overs era we have just allowed that art to go out of the game. Its not new. Bradman decided in the 1920's and 1930's that such wickets are going to be so rare that he would rather mot change his technique while Hobbs whose career started 20 years ago and who played most of his cricket in wet England learnt and became a past master at it.

This is again not to criticise the modern day batsmen but to impress the point that those who batted in times of uncovered wickets had some special problems to over come.
 
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ganeshran

ganeshran

International Debutant
Aussies, please prepare flat wickets during the India tour. Or else sure there will be similar collapses with the Indian batting slide
 
I

intcricket

U19 12th Man
Ya Allah, Peter Siddle, the greatest Australian batsman since Donald Bradman. :laugh:

He stayed not out and showed the world his true caliber.

Take a bow.



^ Doesn't look too happy :laugh:
 
flibbertyjibber

flibbertyjibber

Request Your Custom Title Now!
Well if Lyon has to anything else in the match apart from take a catch then the Aussies are stuffed. Decent batting from him though.

What a mad few hours that has been.
 
P

Pothas

Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
Last two ruined it, wanted them all gone for 21.

Think it is fairly obvious the pitch is not THAT bad but these things happen every now and again and it is bloody amazing when they do.
 
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