*Official** New Zealand in England

[PY]

(our batsmen could not win it from the end of England's first innings).

Is that you conceding I win?!?!

In all seriousness, my point is that NZ had diminished chance by the end of England's first innings because their bowlers just did not perform. Both teams knew the pitch would deteriorate rapidly (hell I knew and I've never even been there) and therefore the second innings were always going to condensed affairs. Once we had that 117 lead going into the second innings, it was always going to be an England victory for me.

I see what you are saying that it should be bowlers skill rather than the pitch that plays a part in the results but think of it in the bowler mindset. He has to bowl on very very flat, lifeless pitches for a lot of the time which are extremely batsman friendly. Why can't we have a bowler-friendly pitch in a while. This IMO is why averages of modern day players are inflated, because every time they don't have a pitch where they can play their flashy extravagant shots they whinge to hell and back and groundsmen are afraid to produce pitches that do things for the bowlers that the batsmen won't like.

Rant over.

 

[marc71178]

When it's as bad as it was over the past couple of days,

Over the last 2 days of the game, England scored over 500!

 

[Loony BoB]

Is that you conceding I win?!?!

In all seriousness, my point is that NZ had diminished chance by the end of England's first innings because their bowlers just did not perform. Both teams knew the pitch would deteriorate rapidly (hell I knew and I've never even been there) and therefore the second innings were always going to condensed affairs. Once we had that 117 lead going into the second innings, it was always going to be an England victory for me.

I see what you are saying that it should be bowlers skill rather than the pitch that plays a part in the results but think of it in the bowler mindset. He has to bowl on very very flat, lifeless pitches for a lot of the time which are extremely batsman friendly. Why can't we have a bowler-friendly pitch in a while. This IMO is why averages of modern day players are inflated, because every time they don't have a pitch where they can play their flashy extravagant shots they whinge to hell and back and groundsmen are afraid to produce pitches that do things for the bowlers that the batsmen won't like.

Rant over.

This wasn't my idea of a bowler friendly pitch.

I'm not arguing at all that NZ should have won. Never did I say that! I think a draw was in the books, if not an England win. That was my prediction from a long way back (there's a post somewhere, look for posts where I say "draw" ).

What I'm saying is that the pitch wasn't friendly to batsman or bowler. A bowler could want it to do one thing and it would do another - to me, that's not very bowler friendly. My opinion of bowler friendly is when you can make it swing a lot and then either a) seam a lot or b) spin a lot. This one didn't do anything the bowler wanted it to do, and it got to the point that they just had to bowl into a certain line and hope that the bounce does something. I liked it better at, say, Lords, where it wasn't exactly a high scoring wicket - the scores were lower than in the second test for the first couple of innings - yet still the bowlers had a lot of control. If Richardson wasn't leaving Harmy's balls, NZ would have gone out for a lot less. If NZ were bowling as well as they did in SA, England would have gone for a lot less.

Maybe it's just a matter of preference? I just like a pitch that does what the bowler wants it to do - be it bounce, spin, seam, swing - at least one bowler in the team should know what the ball is going to do when it leaves the ground. That's where the genius of bowlers can really shine. This wicket didn't require genius bowling to outsmart the batsman, it just required the line and patience. Which is all good and well - I mean, if I wanted to watch a blind man bowling on a normal wicket, I'd expect something similar - but these guys (English and New Zealander alike) should have been able to let their genius show, and nobody had the chance. Like watching seven year olds play darts. If you throw it in the right direction, sooner or later it'll hit the bullseye. That's not entertainment to me.

A good example of the stuff I like to watch is Jones' swinging of the ball at Lords - beautiful stuff, really taking it to the batsmen. This one was a free-for-all. Unfortunately, NZ's bowlers were, as stated above, quite blind to it. Throwing their darts in the wrong direction. We deserved to lose. But I was unhappy with the pitch because it was a seven year old's dart board.

Rant over. But I think I'll start calling those kind of pitches "seven year old's dart boards" from now on because it reminds me of my little stepbrother Joshua when he had nine darts, threw them all one by one, had two of them actually hit the board - and one hit it dead center.

 

[Loony BoB]

Over the last 2 days of the game, England scored over 500!

And if NZ's bowlers could bowl a line, who knows who'd have won? I think it would have been pure luck to decide it. That's what I'm complaining about. Pitches should be better. Even the English commentators were saying it (at least the ones I was listening to).

 

[anzac]

congrads ENG on the series win - should be well on the way with a settled squad to building up for a showdown with RSA & IND for the #2 position on form if not rankings..............

I'd have preferred to see a series between 2 evenly matched sides - but with the NZL injuries across the team that was not likely to happen.........a shame because it should have been a very very good contest..............

 

[PY]

Contrary to the scores though, I think this series has been very good to watch for a neutral.

Lord's IMO was a classic and Headingley I would say if not a classic then a good contest which got buggered by injuries and a slightly () unpredictable pitch.

 

[anzac]

I'm somewhat surprised that anyone can say that this series was a contest when the NZL bowling attack has been so poor throughout - granted some reasonable performances in part from Styris & Oram, but as a whole they did not turn up in either Test so far IMO...............

 

[anzac]

I'm starting to feel like TEC...............

I've had 3 rants about NZL squad & team selections & been right on each...........
#1 - WC
#2 - PAK ODI series Away
#3 - 14 man squad & selections for current ENG tour

AFAIC Bracewell has shown that he's as full of **** as his predecessors so far as his early comments that I so often bring back to haunt him (us?) with..........

 

[PY]

Fair enough. .
Maybe I was just trying to console the unconsolable.

I, from a cricketing point of view, thought that Lord's had everything with both sides winning sessions with the bat and ball. I didn't think the Kiwis played badly at Lord's, just got beaten by Strauss and Hussain.

I haven't seen NZ play for ages though so maybe it's a big disappointment to you guys who have seen so much better.

 

[anzac]

I see cricinfo have confirmed my suspicions re the 3 players who "passed" the late fitness test to be selected - both Tuffey & Astle are still struggling with knee injuries.............

Papps - broken knuckle
Fleming - may pull out after 3rd Test for OP
Astle - knee injury
McMillan - broken finger (same finger twice in same place)
Oram - side strain
Vettori - torn hamstring
Tuffey - knee injury
Bond - back injury & left squad
Mills - hand injury????

Styris - struggling for form with bat
C Martin - admits to still struggling re Duke ball = no confidence

Richardson - fit
Cairns - fit
McCullum - fit
Sinclair - fit
Hopkins - fit

I know that the immediate priority is to get a team on the pitch for the 3rd Test, but it also raises the question re the ODI squad, as all of the injured players are part of that squad.............do NZL risk the walking wounded in Astle, Oram, McMillan & Tuffey in the 3rd Test, or rest them for the ODI series????

Me thinks the decision will be forced by the lack of time, and who is currently playing in ENG with some experience / form...........when are Marshall & Harris due to arrive to join the squad???????

My preference would be to see as many of the injured players out of the 3rd Test team as possible & to make the ODI series the main target re having a result from & that means a fully fit team IMO..............

 

[anzac]

Fair enough. .
Maybe I was just trying to console the unconsolable.

I, from a cricketing point of view, thought that Lord's had everything with both sides winning sessions with the bat and ball. I didn't think the Kiwis played badly at Lord's, just got beaten by Strauss and Hussain.

I haven't seen NZ play for ages though so maybe it's a big disappointment to you guys who have seen so much better.

Nice thought..............

I agree that Lords was a great match so far as a spectacle goes, but it should / could have been so much more if the NZL bowlers had shown half of what they are capable of v RSA...............

unfortunately it's the old story - doing well in IND & then v RSA, making all sorts of noises and then looking like complete ********s...........eg the Tuffey v Harmison poll etc...........

I just get so damned ****ed at the selectors when they f**k up so badly as this & don't learn anything from it...........I'm having deja vu re ZIM / RSA 2000 - we had to rebuild our bowling attack twice over from that little jaunt, and now even the batting lineup has taken a battering.............

 

[tooextracool]

What I'm saying is that the pitch wasn't friendly to batsman or bowler. A bowler could want it to do one thing and it would do another - to me, that's not very bowler friendly. My opinion of bowler friendly is when you can make it swing a lot and then either a) seam a lot or b) spin a lot. This one didn't do anything the bowler wanted it to do, and it got to the point that they just had to bowl into a certain line and hope that the bounce does something. I liked it better at, say, Lords, where it wasn't exactly a high scoring wicket - the scores were lower than in the second test for the first couple of innings - yet still the bowlers had a lot of control. If Richardson wasn't leaving Harmy's balls, NZ would have gone out for a lot less. If NZ were bowling as well as they did in SA, England would have gone for a lot less.

Maybe it's just a matter of preference? I just like a pitch that does what the bowler wants it to do - be it bounce, spin, seam, swing - at least one bowler in the team should know what the ball is going to do when it leaves the ground. That's where the genius of bowlers can really shine. This wicket didn't require genius bowling to outsmart the batsman, it just required the line and patience. Which is all good and well - I mean, if I wanted to watch a blind man bowling on a normal wicket, I'd expect something similar - but these guys (English and New Zealander alike) should have been able to let their genius show, and nobody had the chance. Like watching seven year olds play darts. If you throw it in the right direction, sooner or later it'll hit the bullseye. That's not entertainment to me.

A good example of the stuff I like to watch is Jones' swinging of the ball at Lords - beautiful stuff, really taking it to the batsmen. This one was a free-for-all. Unfortunately, NZ's bowlers were, as stated above, quite blind to it. Throwing their darts in the wrong direction. We deserved to lose. But I was unhappy with the pitch because it was a seven year old's dart board.

i think you've seen too many batter friendly pitches since you've started watching cricket and that has clouded your opinion .
a pitch that produced 900 runs in the first inning and had plenty in it for the bowlers in both innings is definetly not a wicket that was " not friendly to bowler or batsman". this is a proper test match wicket that allowed fast bowlers to threaten batsman and show them whos in charge, something thats been missing for quite a while now. surely you must be disappointed because the pitch highlighted how poor the NZ bowling attack was rather than how good their batsmen were. i dont know what you were expecting from headingly...but if NZ came into this game thinking that their batting would be able to win it for them then surely they must be out of their mind. i suggested earlier that they should have gone in with the extra bowler instead of oram.....would definetly have helped them.

 

[Kent]

i think you've seen too many batter friendly pitches since you've started watching cricket and that has clouded your opinion .
a pitch that produced 900 runs in the first inning and had plenty in it for the bowlers in both innings is definetly not a wicket that was " not friendly to bowler or batsman". this is a proper test match wicket that allowed fast bowlers to threaten batsman and show them whos in charge, something thats been missing for quite a while now.

Can't agree with that at all. A hard WACA pitch with true bounce allows good fast bowlers to show the batsmen "who's in charge"; one that spits off a length is only appealing to masochists. If Shoaib or Bond played against England on that pitch, it would've only taken a couple of broken digits or a direct hit to someone's temple for England fans to be roaring for the game to be called off.

 

[Loony BoB]

i think you've seen too many batter friendly pitches since you've started watching cricket and that has clouded your opinion .

Actually, I'm used to scores between 200 and 400. 400+ to me is a bloody awesome score - I don't think you can say I like batter-friendly pitches on that note.
[qoute]a pitch that produced 900 runs in the first inning and had plenty in it for the bowlers in both innings is definetly not a wicket that was " not friendly to bowler or batsman".[/quote]
Don't judge a wicket by how many runs get scored, I think that's a bit foul. You can have a wicket that doesn't turn the ball or allow for swing or anything similar, and you can call that a batsman's wicket. You can get a pitch that allows the bowler to move the ball in the direction you want it to move and call it a bowlers wicket (be it movement in swing, seam or spin). If it moves in a direction the bowler wasn't going for, it's not a batsman's nor a bowlers. That's who I see things - If the batsman knows how the ball will pitch up, it's in his favour. If he doesn't and the bowler does, it's in the bowlers favour. This wasn't either.

this is a proper test match wicket that allowed fast bowlers to threaten batsman and show them whos in charge, something thats been missing for quite a while now.

They weren't "in charge", as shown by NZ's first score. You can't say someone is in charge when they don't know what the ball is going to do. If a bowler is in charge, the bowler chooses what the ball does. The batsman is in charge if he can see/predict what the ball is going to do. The pitch is in charge if neither of them know what the ball is going to do. You can't tell me Harmison knew when the ball was going to dip and when it wasn't.

surely you must be disappointed because the pitch highlighted how poor the NZ bowling attack was rather than how good their batsmen were.

No, I knew the NZ bowling attack was poor (er, not in potential, but in form) after Lords.

i dont know what you were expecting from headingly...but if NZ came into this game thinking that their batting would be able to win it for them then surely they must be out of their mind.

If anything, yes, the batting was going to win it for us - why? Because the bloody bowling certainly wasn't! But seriously, we went into it knowing that we needed to perform in all areas of the game and our bowlers, again, did not. Don't think that NZ is so stupid as to not know that.

i suggested earlier that they should have gone in with the extra bowler instead of oram.....would definetly have helped them.

Would it? Don't know about that. Oram was a required batsman. With Styris, Cairns, Tuffey, Martin and Vettori we had four seamers and a spinner. That SHOULD have been enough, and we shouldn't have to sacrifice our batsmen. What we should have done was not played Tuffey, because for most of the game he was as effective as a 12th man. Didn't bat - and didn't really bowl, either. What's the point? May as well have played Mills. If they play him again and don't have him bowl much again, I'm going to be so very disappointed.

 

[MoxPearl]

the pitch was just not bad in terms of bounce.. it was just plain dangerous..

Having LUCKY balls that do not bounce AT ALL or bounce stupid amounts is not showing "Whos in charge" the logic is "he who gets the lucky bounce wins"

i just dont know how anyone in there right mind can think it was a good pitch.. i think the high score was due to bad bowling by both sides (england in the first innings and nz in both)

a good pitch means a result is a result because of skillfull playing.. not luck of how the ball bounces...

england were just lucky bond or butler were not bowling cause that would have been just simply dangerous for there players

 

[SpaceMonkey]

Can't agree with that at all. A hard WACA pitch with true bounce allows good fast bowlers to show the batsmen "who's in charge"; one that spits off a length is only appealing to masochists. If Shoaib or Bond played against England on that pitch, it would've only taken a couple of broken digits or a direct hit to someone's temple for England fans to be roaring for the game to be called off.

Lucky for NZ Simon Jones wasnt playing

 

[SpaceMonkey]

the pitch was just not bad in terms of bounce.. it was just plain dangerous..

Having LUCKY balls that do not bounce AT ALL or bounce stupid amounts is not showing "Whos in charge" the logic is "he who gets the lucky bounce wins"

i just dont know how anyone in there right mind can think it was a good pitch.. i think the high score was due to bad bowling by both sides (england in the first innings and nz in both)

a good pitch means a result is a result because of skillfull playing.. not luck of how the ball bounces...

england were just lucky bond or butler were not bowling cause that would have been just simply dangerous for there players

Not unless they actually pitched the ball properly, Hoggard was only bowling low 80's but cos he put the ball in the right areas he got the indifferent bounce, most pitches will misbehave on the last day.

 

[MoxPearl]

yeah.. and bond would have :P when hes fit hes new zealands number 1 bowler by a long way

Butler... thats another story lol

 

[Loony BoB]

Not unless they actually pitched the ball properly, Hoggard was only bowling low 80's but cos he put the ball in the right areas he got the indifferent bounce, most pitches will misbehave on the last day.

This pitch was misbehaving from the first over Martin bowled at the latest - wasn't around for the first day to see how it was then, but I hear it was pretty bad.

 

[Loony BoB]

a good pitch means a result is a result because of skillfull playing.. not luck of how the ball bounces...

england were just lucky bond or butler were not bowling cause that would have been just simply dangerous for there players

Harmison isn't as fast as Bond, but I think it's safe to say he can do similar damage if he hits you.

Agreed on the pitch bit. Pity our bowling meant we wouldn't have won either way. That's the reason I was so annoyed by the pitch - if I can't have my team win, I at least want to watch some cunning cricket.