Yeah but you don't need bag full of wickets from your seamers in India, you need them to keep the runs down and pick the occasional wicket, Mathews can do that as well as Stokes and he is a far better Batsmen in SC conditions, anyway not disagreeing that Stokes is a far superior genuine wicket taker but he is no Stark (in that he can make the pitch irrelevant just by pace), I just don't think that skill of his is as important or effective in Indian conditions, If you are depending on your pacers to take a fifer here, then you have probably lost already.
When odds are against a specific team, the team may lose, but if odds against a team is a huge number, that team ends up winning. It's weird, but I have experienced this many times practically, there are invisible energies in nature at work.
Pity nobody informed him about this.
Jeez you're feeling bold if you're going to call it a million to one shot in a two horse race
Bingo, this was an XI for Indian conditions, not for a straw man arguing about Stokes being the better Test all-rounder.
Agree, I went for Stokes btw, just thought Mathews deserved a mention if it's played in the SC, Some funny defensiveness above
hopefully there are a lot of invisible energies during this series and they work very hard
Does anyone really care who "retains the trophy" though? Other than the Ashes people tend to think of these as just individual series IMO
I care *shrug*.
Oh ffs, there were no turners in the Eng or NZ series except for Mumbai, which was tamer than normal anyway. They were just normal tracks that deteriorated naturally. Aus will get smashed because they, like the others recently, will be looking for something and preparing for something that just isn't there: too much turn.
Hb was saying they didn't turn v England
