Yes. And it is still inferior to Ind.
No they don't. Just that it will feel close. If the Ind top order was better it would have been like the 2016 NZ series or 2019 SA series or 2017 SL away series. Or the first Bang test or SL test in 2022.
This is what ends up happening match after match, series after series, year after year.
And it will keep happening. They are decent 30+ averaging batsmen who come into bat when the ball is old and bowlers are a bit tired. The chance of all three of them failing is rare.
Look at the bright side: our transition phase once the oldies go can't possibly be any more painful.
How about the transition side once Ashwin and Jadeja go?
Shouldn't be too bad. Obvious drop in quality to be expected but we have a couple of decent spinners in the shed. Be harder to replace their batting chops in India though; hopefully by then the top order would look different and bedded in.
Mm yeah even in this tour though they've looked a clear tier above Axar in terms of craft though. I haven't actually been very impressed with him.
I believe it’s quite serious
England - The Stokes group Vs The Root group
Its really starting to come across as just copium at this point. I think there was a Bazball thread where I would like to address this in detail but Bazball is not mindless slogging as the lazy ones wanna portray it. To me, in essence, it is just a mindset and approach thing where the batsmen are looking to see if they can score first, and if they can't, then they defend. And with modern batsmen being brought up on a diet of T20 batting, it makes sense. Maybe by default they get into better positions to play the ball when they are looking to hit it.
It is BCCI's fault more than the players. The players wanting to push the test back by a week was understandable. BCCI not pushing IPL schedules around it was the stupid part.
#BCCIsfault
Yeah this is the key for me. Did Head go out on the evening of Day 2 and just start slogging mindlessly? No, he noticed that Ashwin was bowling really full, so he decided to attack those deliveries in the most natural way - hitting straight and through the line of the ball by getting to the pitch. Which somehow got translated into "attack everything" the next morning.
There are also batsmen who genuinely have a better chance of pulling off an attacking stroke than a defensive one. Its really all about shot selection, the ability to play percentages as far as your attacking strokes go and then defending when you get balls you can't attack, hopefully with lesser fielders around you coz you have already got them to spread the field a bit. And of course, getting singles with the boundary riders back. It is not a bad philosophy at all.
The side I posted would be their best shot, IMO. Khawaja, Head, Labu, Smith, Handscomb, Green, Carey, Starc, Cummins, Murphy, Lyon.
