"If McGrath doesn't step on that ball, we win the Ashes. Probably 5-0"

[Stapel]

Haydos is dreaming if he thinks we could have won 5-0. We might have draw/won the series though. On balance we were outplayed and really only Warne, self-belief and the ability of the lower order to scrap kept us in it.

More or less what I wanted to say. The England attack was all over the Australian batsmen. And Warne arguably had his greatest series ever. Easy to forget in a lost series.

 

[harsh.ag]

They would have won 3 tests at the very least, so Hayden, while being a dick about it, is right.

 

[GIMH]

A fit McGrath wouldn't have helped their lefties learn to play Freddie. Freddie is God. End of

 

[Furball]

He sort-of is, his recon was done with an artificial ligament. 10 years ago a quick who needed a new ACL in their early 30's, Test career over. As it stands, he'll need a replacement in a few years and he's probably worsened the morbidity of the knee but I'd guesstimate that getting the fake ligament has given him 4-5 additional years of Test cricket.

Isn't Harris' issue that he's got **** all cartilage left?

It's not an artificial ligament, they take a hamstring tendon and use that as a ligament. I know, I've had the same surgery done.

 

[Top_Cat]

Yeah you're right, dunno why I thought he had the artificial tendon. If only someone would invent some sort of machine where one could input information to search for this stuff.

 

[Daemon]

Why did Harris' knee ligament disappear?

Police caught it holding a joint

 

[Furball]

Yeah you're right, dunno why I thought he had the artificial tendon. If only someone would invent some sort of machine where one could input information to search for this stuff.

Imagine how good he'd be with 2 knees. WAG he is.

 

[pardus]

5-0 might be overstretching it, especially considering that Australia barely escaped with a draw at Old Trafford, a match in which McGrath played. But I do think Aussies could have defended the Ashes if McGrath played. I was in so much awe of his bowling that psychologically I couldn't help but put an asterix for every team for any of their victories against Australia in his absence.

I remember Aus-SA Test series in 96-97. The series was being hyped as "The Decider". A lot of talk was about how SA would tackle Warne. But I was curious to see how SA would handle McGrath. Needless to say, on the first day of the first Test, McGrath set the tone for the series by knocking off the top 4 SA batsmen (3 of them for less than 10). McGrath's first spell read 10-4-10-3.

Another match I remember well is the 1999 WC super-six match against India. Both teams had come to super-6 at the bottom of their groups, it was a must-win match for both. Aus had suffered severely against Tendulkar in their previous 5 or 6 ODI matches (including the Desert storm). He had scored 3 explosive hundreds in his 3 previous ODI matches against Australia, but with one huge caveat (for me), McGrath was absent in all those matches. In a dazzling display of fast bowling, McGrath removed Tendulkar for a duck in his very first over, and then went on to remove Dravid & Azhar for 2 and 3. He basically broke India's back.

McGrath's ability to turn up his performance for the big matches and against the best batsmen is uncanny.

 

[vic_orthdox]

Simply, if McGrath could have contributed to England underachieving in the first innings of Edgbaston, a mental hurdle may well have emerged playing against Australia, and the rest of the series results' that people have mentioned in this thread become irrelevant.

Even the fillip of McGrath stepping on the ball, and then getting the result they wanted at the toss, probably played a part in the group's turnaround - it wasn't so much scoring 400+, it was how.

Flintoff talks about how he didn't find the first Test "fun" and decided he needed to enjoy his cricket in the second Test. If he had have been coming in at 4/80, do you think he would have been thinking about fun at that time?

 

[BigBrother]

Would have been 4-1 but for rain and that's a fact Eric bischoff

I agree, Australia could have easily won 4-1, but there is no guarantee one test would have gone England's way