Completely agree with the second paragraph. Being a non-pisshead in a senior cricket team or a rep side is ridiculously rare. It's crazy how much so many of the top blokes live for getting on it.
Roach got worse after the first session. He had one reasonable spell of reverse swing, but barely beat the bat. He was dreadful with the second new ball too.
The guy is clearly rusty...since coming back from a six month lay if this is his FIRST first class match...so forgive me if i don't beat up on the guy just yet.
You can get away from it a little more I've found in other sports and society in general, I found cricket to be the most linked to alcohol of any other sport - i.e playing a Hawke Cup match and being out every night on the town with the boys. Or finishing every training session with a beer. It helps if you've got a bit more of a goal ahead of you like a Kane Williamson and a single minded determination to get there, but lets be honest, how many young cricketers are going to make the right sorts of decisions when they've got club and district pros telling them to drink up.
Taylor was up over 140 early on, dropped into the mid 130's throughout the day. Roach was 130-135 all day, well undercooked.
It's kinda nice of the West Indies to slowly raise their game, giving our batsmen time to find form against better attacks stepwise.
To be honest though, if you get rid of South Africa, Australia and England - no other side in world cricket really has a bowling attack that is any better. Pakistan arguably is an exception but the rest? NZ's three prong seam attack is the fourth best attack outside of the top three.
Yes, this. I've played a lot of different sports, and cricket is definitely the worst from that point of view. It's more common to start with, and there seems to be a slightly different attitude towards alcohol as well - it tends to be about getting people, particularly young/new guys, completely and utterly smashed; whereas with some other sports I've found it more to do with people just enjoying themselves. And yeah, the number of good young players I've seen turn into boring beer-swilling, skirt-chasing clones of each other due to the influence of older guys...it's actually quite depressing.
Think NZ's attack is probably equal to England's.
The stats indicate that a score above 300 will make it incredibly hard for the Windies to compete in their current situation. NZ look on track to make at least 400 even with a mid order collapse and without doubt have a much better seam attack than the Windies. The Windies will have to bat last on this wicket which will make crap spinners like Sodhi, Williamson and Craig look like superstars and ultimately, Windies didn't penetrate enough on Day 1 to make it difficult for NZ to set a big target.
I think England still have a great seam attack, they just rely on Anderson and Broad too heavily, the rest are bit part accomplices.
Gayle needs a performance here to show that he still has it at test cricket, his recent results haven't been great. Bravo and Chanderpaul are class acts but there really isn't much behind them as we saw in NZ. They don't have Darren Sammy performing miracles in the bottom order anymore either. They look very fragile in the tail.
Yeah a draw is definitely on but besides Taylor and Benn you've bowled very poorly and with Samuels and Shilly both on notice for chucking variations I don't think this attack is going to be able to trouble us too much.
