cricket with balls

Sportsfreak gives us a minnow feel on the Ashes.

Oh yes.

A test that had it all. It was played on neutral ground, KP found really funny ways to get out, Hauritz took 6 times as many wickets as the much vaunted England spin twins did combined, some gamesmanship, Punter getting moralistic, and at the end a Boys’ Own Annual finish.

Nothing as neat and ordered and 21st century as a result with a clear winner. No, this was a top drawer draw.

And then when Ponting threw the ball to North it seemed a little bit like he had just given up.

But lets face it; Australia owned around 80% of this test. The 2 week boot camp in Worcester had paid off. While the English batsmen threw away all those good starts on the opening day in some strange mix of elegant kamikaze, Australia rolled up their sleeves and clamped themselves to the pitch.

And no more so than their captain. This was a snarling, middle digit century, and it laid the platform for the journeymen who followed. It is one thing spending a day trying to get rid of Katich and Ponting, but spending the day after the next one failing to remove North and Haddin is rubbing a lot salt into a large wound.

And Stuart Broad will have a lot to think about while playing county cricket this weekend.

Bowl at the stumps Stuart.

And then after 2 ½ days of Australian dripping water torture the mental disintegration of the England top-order and Billy Doctrove began, and it all seemed to be set up for the killer blow on Day 5.

They did it by bowling straight, which was a total reversal of England’s tactics.

This tactic wasn’t deciphered by KP though. He just thought he was back in the nets again.

And then when Hauritz bought a couple of top order wickets it looked as if we were in for a quick death.

But that didn’t factor in Lord Collingwood. This was a situation made for him. No need to be aesthetically pleasing; in fact ugliness is an asset in such a situation. He even managed to coerce Freddie into batting with a brain for a while.

They honoured him for a peripheral role in one test last time around. You shudder to think what glories await him now. Keys to some Ginga Nirvana perhaps.

Then Swann the batsman, who appears to be far more interesting than Swann the bowler, started showing that batting on a dead pitch against an attack without Warne and McGrath wasn’t actually that hard, the game changed.

So what did Australia do? They changed tactics.

They started bowling like England. Wide of off-stump, in the Corridor of Impotency.

And even when they got through to Anderson and Monty they bowled like that, and 2 of the worst batsmen to ever play test cricket didn’t look in that much trouble.

Australia huffed and puffed but couldn’t blow a house of twigs down and, somehow, things are still all square.

And so a test at Cardiff ends up with the side from the Southern Hemisphere dominating proceedings, but being too clueless to win the match at the death.

Sound familiar?