The Cricket Thread

Not enough for England. Looked ok at 110/3, then lost 7 wickets for 35. Another abysmal collapse in this series.

Jaiswal will get his standard 50+, sure the rest can get 120 odd between them.

Nice of England to gift them 40 before the close of play.

Awful response by England :joy:

40/0 , nice end to the day for India.

Still a ton of runs needed though. One wicket often starts the collapse in these pitches.

Oh FFS!

India will obviously win easily. They could need five runs with ten wickets left and you’d still be predicting their demise. It’s tiresome frankly. Sort it out, win graciously or I’ll report you to Cynical.

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Report me for what , being more cynical and younger ?

One out of two ain’t bad.

Rubbish.

That is unacceptable. It is clearly accepted that Two out of Three is the minimum to be considered ok

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Well, they’re both gits, so that’s a tie.

74 runs for India, 7 wickets for England needed at lunch.

That Bashir double strike has made it interesting again. I said at work earlier India would win by 5 wickets, might end up being closer than that but if one of these two batsmen sticks around until the end the runs will be knocked off.

India’s almost there. A good test match and series this.

Congratulations to India. Without doubt the better team has won, but England had their chances in this game and do seem to have found some decent spinners at last. Replacing Broad and Anderson is the next big challenge.

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I’m a little bit sceptical on rating spinners based on their performance on one series.

Fwiw , I don’t think the England spinners are anything special. But that’s probably me(being an Indian) having a higher bar on what makes an acceptable spinner.

We’ve had no one but Jack Leach for the last five years.
Bashir is very young and has a high ceiling. It’s an improvement.

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Oddly reminds me of Santner and Giles rather than Pannasar.

Ideally develops into a bowling all rounder. He’s not a Saqulain or a Ashwin.

On a more broad topic, there is an interesting parallel that is doing the rounds in my head… in the 80s and 90s there was a serious back and forth around the notion that India doesn’t produce fast bowlers because of genetics and vegetarianism… the parallel is that England doesn’t produce (often) great spin bowlers because of the weather…

Investment is everything.

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Best two players in the series have been Jaiswal and Bumrah. Runs at the top of the order and wicket taking ability at any point in the game.

I think England have bowled pretty well considering the options available to them, it’s been the batsmen who have let them down as was the norm for years under Root and Cook. Crawley has surprisingly been the most consistent of them. Duckett and Pope both have big 100s in the series but still average below 40. Root bar his 100 has been poor, Bairstow and Foakes have barely contributed and it’s gone under the radar how little Stokes has done with the bat, a solitary 50 in 8 innings is not good enough.

At no point expected England to win the series but they’ve wasted some golden positions of strength and with India have 5 or so world class first choice players missing, they’ll never get a better chance to win a series there again.

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There is far more to the climate than any genetics nonsense

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Proper diet does help to produce better athletes along with better fitness regimes. Genetics and Vegetarianism have nothing to do with it ofcourse.

Pakistanis are genetically the same as Indians. And yet they’ve produced great quick bowlers in the past.

I put it down to Pakistan producing an Imran Khan which gave the Pakistani cricketers a role model in bowling. It all depends on role models. Indian fans were more interested in being batsmen.

India did produce a Kapil Dev who was a mighty fine bowler in his own right as well. Indian fast bowling started gradually improving from the introduction of Dev (not as much as the immediate improvement seen in Pakistan with Wasim / Waqar following immediately in the footsteps of Imran) but it was a process with failures in between. From Kapil Dev to Javagal Srinath to Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra and then the likes of Shami , Ishant , Bumrah. And now the other younger guys coming through.

The role of the MRF pace academy as well can’t be emphasized enough (in developing the quick bowlers).

It’s ironic now(in a good way) to see that the Indian quick bowlers are probably the best (in terms of group) in the world right now.

Pakistan don’t seem to produce the bowlers that they used to (not since Asif anyway) and that’s on them not training their talent well.

And as much as I hate praising Kohli.

He deserves to be commended for encouraging bowlers and setting up attacking fields in tests during his term as a Captain.

A Dhoni had his defensive AF fields and his tactics weren’t bowler friendly in the sense that his first instincts was to prevent runs from being scored. And that showed in the performances of the bowlers.

Indian bowling improved immensely when Kohli took the reigns.

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Can we find an English passport for Glenn Phillips?