What "excuses"? This like the 4th time you've said this. What is there to be made excuses for? I know English isn't your first language but you're making absolutely no sense
If you honestly think that the pitches that serious were comparable to normal Australian pitches then fair enough, completely bat**** insane and stupid that you think that, but at least the point you're making is fair, if you honestly believe that
btw you completely misunderstanding the point of an argument and then only realizing later isn't "switching goalposts" lol
not sure how any of this is relevant at all
I've said like 4 times that CA aren't helping touring sides on purpose
No.. you said the pitches were "Ridiculously" slower and lower than regular Australian pitches and I am pointing out, they were not. But as per norm, you dont want to acknowledge facts as they prove you wrong. You just shifted goal posts by trying to temper the terms of the relative comparison and then saying they helped India. It was discussed ad nauseum in that tour thread that this Indian batting line up actually likes pace and bounce on the pitch and have honestly struggled more on dust bowls than on any hard and true bounce Australian pitch. But go on, pretend that those pitches were slow and low and otherwise Australia would have blown the opposition out... And that RSA only beat you because they got the conditions they wanted, coz CA clearly want to see Australia bundled out in 3 or 4 days and losing to 10 man teams. I understand cricket is something you cannot comprehend but you still gotta know you are making absolutely no sense.
Of course, you can continue to claim any other reason why teams have done well when touring Australia but you are just completely bat **** crazy insane and stupid and one eyed for believing any of that crap which has no factual basis whatsoever and is just an excuse you are giving to fool yourself (coz lets face it, that stupid argument ain't fooling any other reasonable poster here) to think that Australia are better than they have played at home recently. Cool dude, whatever floats your boat.
If Australia wanted to press a home field advantage against India, we'd make them play at the Gabba, WACA and Hobart in that order. Instead we dish up our flattest decks in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne.
If you can't see how that benefits India you've frankly got rocks in your head. Similarly, giving Perth and Hobart to South Africa helps their game because it turns Philander into a beast.
The fact is that India finds Australia as hard as Australia finds India.
Nah.. RSA cant tour to play the Boxing Day or New Years' tests anymore and India can. Simple reason. Trust me, none of this stopped Sydney being a bouncy hard track in 2011, so its not like they cant prepare the decks they want based on where they are playing.
Except Brisbane, the pitches were indeed low and slow for Australian conditions. No use pretending otherwise.
Explain the relative here. Which conditions are you comparing this to? And how much bounce is considered "Australian"? Those tracks had enough carry and pace compared to 2003 Aussie tracks that I saw and a few more since then too.
And I would love to see you or Spark (surely dont expect TJB to understand this part) explain how you can make a pitch "bounce" more without leaving some grass on there. You speak as if it is some independent factor which can be brought into the wicket at the snap of a finger. You need grass to bind the surface hard to get the high bounce and when you do that, you are leaving grass that can be exploited by good swing bowlers, unless the natural soil itself is hard in that city. That is the difference between the wickets you see at Brisbane and the ones you see at Perth and I recall Botham mentioning that even in Perth, they had to go dig up across Western Australia almost near the Gold Coast or somewhere to get the soil that had given the old WACA pitch its bounce. Its all nice to say others are "pretending" OS but there is no use in you pretending you understand cricket wickets too.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no outright no. 1 side. Any official or unofficial rankings will inevitably depend upon different factors and how each factor is weighted, eg. Home v Away, series wins v match wins, quantity of matches, injuries etc etc the list goes on, as we've seen this thread.
There's nothing wrong with the discussion but it's important to realize that there is not going to be a resolution whereby one team is decreed "the best in world cricket". Not right now at least, and this would probably have been the case for most of history with the exception of WI 1970s, Aus 90s/00s and maybe Aus back when Bradman was around (ie Invincibles era)
Depends on how you define "best". If it means #1 among the available sides, then there surely is a best team around at the moment. If it means being dominant everywhere and almost invincible, there have only been 3 or 4 across cricket history.
You know, it's getting tiresome when every single post you make has some kind of snide remark. It frankly makes you look like a complete dick.
My number 2 team is Pakistan. Have generally been good at home, did wonderfully in England. Only real black mark so far are those two poor tests in NZ.
And you made fun of me when I said they were my #1 after that England series.
Yrs but its because Australia wants to improve their chances of winning by taking Indian bowlers out of the game. The faster pitches will give us a sniff of winning and they don't risk it. Hope we get to see them play each other at Perth soon.
I don't think that is entirely true. A pitch with lateral movement increases our odds but I don't think pace does.
You cant juust "create" pace and bounce on a wicket. Its more of a natural characteristic of the soil and the only way to artificially get it to do more is to get more grass in there which will inevitably suit the swing bowlers. I would rather face Australia in a proper seaming Brisbane or Perth wicket than the hard and bouncy roads we got in the 2014 series. Surely, it is less depressing to see our attack in those conditions than that 2014 series.
/15
Because Asia is one small part of the world, even the cricket world
It gets far too much weighting IMO because so much cricket tends to be played there. If you had a team that exclusively played well in Africa but **** everywhere else you wouldn't rate them at all
Asia is a not a "small" part of any world - cricket or the actual world itself. But I think enough people have taken this post apart for me to bother.
You're not wrong, it's a highly subjective concept.
Just my opinion on the matter
really not that complicated to understand, but if anyone was going to struggle it'd be you!
The pure number of teams playing in each continent is but one weighting factor, if that's the be-all and end-all for you then all power to you
Asia has 4 of the 10 cricket playing nations and if certain players and teams are gonna suck there, it means they pretty much suck at international cricket. THAT is neither subjective nor hard to understand yet you seem to think it is a matter of opinion. Kudos. For a person whose first language is English (unlike poor me) you certainly seem
extremely challenged in comprehending it.
I presume TJB means small as in historically and currently unimportant, and not given to leaving any lasting impression on the game.
It's pretty hard to argue against that point tbh.
Will make more sense if all your players weren't queuing to make dough off the IPL..
Face it, Burgey, cricket was nothing before the subcontinent got crazy about it and it will be nothing if we dropped it tomorrow. THAT is the point that is pretty hard to argue against.
