Having spent a thousand or so words on a day’s report having not watched a ball, I am now introducing the second day’s play in the likely knowledge I won’t see a ball of that either! At the moment I have Rohit Sharma’s double hundred playing on the DVR (not VHS Jomesy), and will watch the test afterwards. So maybe there might be some insight later. But not likely.
With England just over 300 and four wickets down it is vital that we get as near to 500 as possible. That sounds like a statement of the bleeding obvious, but the team need a platform to put pressure on the home team. We made these middling 350-450 scores against India last winter and succumbed when the likes of Karun Nair, I mean Karun effing Nair, made triple hundreds to send us to defeat. The Aussies could very well go big, but they could also trip up. Sometime on Day 2 we are likely to see David Warner give it a red hot crack, and that is going to test our mettle. He has a record of going off at Perth. There is also a recent record of big double tons at the WACA. This isn’t the rocket pitch of days of yore. (Wait a minute, Rohit scored 80 runs in the last 8 overs, on his own?)
England’s highest individual score at the WACA is 162 by Chris Broad in 1986. In many ways that innings was as big a surprise as Malan’s yesterday. Day 2 then saw Gower and Richards put a demoralised Australia to the sword. What we wouldn’t give for a repeat.
I am not going to put too much more into the preview for tonight’s play. Sean has said he’ll take care of tomorrow’s report, but in the meantime the nightshift of Q, P and Sr can comment away, and us early risers can join in when we wake up. Let’s hope optimism pays off.
Me? 350 all out and them 250 for 1. It’s the hope that kills you.
Comment below.
I’ll also add a couple of pictures from 2006 as well. Because I can. So there!
All from Day 2 in 2006.
And a little bit of Malan….
Being Outside Cricket 
Rohit is a genius on flat pitches. His ability to accelerate when set is incredible. He does not have the power of Gayle or even abd but has cracked the art of making double hundreds. Once he passes 100 on such pitches, it is disaster for the opposition. 3 double hundreds in odis. Still hasn’t cracked the test code.
Kohli is a different kind of genius in odis. He cannot accelerate like rohit but is far more consistent.
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I thought Australia got a bit carried away with the bounce yesterday and bowled too short. Starc and Cummins looked knackered at the end of the day so it will be interesting to see how they go today.
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Good evening/morning/whatever from the tundra, where a steady northwesterly wind is making a balmy -15 degrees feel like -25. I’m sick as a dog so getting to bed.
Optimism? Right now it’s in the form of a serious hot toddy, but I can see a real and proper hundred for Bairstow today, and while we might not get enough to break Aussie hearts, i think we might just get enough for this match.
I say this having looked at the weather forecast for the last two days.
Nite all. If anyone wants my hot toddy recipe, you’ll need a kettle, maple syrup, lemons, a stick of cinnamon, and a bucket of whiskey.
P.S. Those were real test runs our boys got yesterday. Well done them.
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Two us were in my local a while ago with stinking colds. The landlord made us hot toddy, much like yours except he used Woods 100% Navy Rum. Didn’t fix our colds but, hey, we didn’t give a damn after 3 glasses.
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Jonny!! Class knock.
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He appears to be head-butting his helmet.
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Absolutely. Apparently now the highest 5th wicket partnership ever v Australia. Who’d have thought?
I’m giving up now. Mitchell Marsh is bowling and it’s too easy.
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Not much in this for the bowlers – no swing, no turn and no movement off the seam. I’m still worried that our tail could be blown away so hopefully these two have plenty more runs in them (and then fingers crossed the wicket deteriorates)
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🙂 another good start for the optimists 366/4
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also 2 out of 6 centuries i predicted. :-). ali to score one more?
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Excellent partnership.
Excellent catch.
Lyon making just a tiny bit of pressure.
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And duck for Moeen.
Just a tiny bit of pressure.
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Deceived him in the air it seems. Have to look at the highlight. But that’s something Lyon has always been able to go back to.
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Ooops, jinxed them big time!
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I think it takes a bit of time to get used to the bounce but once you’ve played yourself in, there’s a lot of runs in this wicket.
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When the bottle gets uncorked…
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This is ending rather quickly.
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I like the helmet headbutt thing Bairstow did when he got his hundred. It reflects well on his character and is the perfect comment on the pettifogging self inflicted nonsense of the ECB management.
Y’know, I have heard exactly zero normal supporters, Australian, English, or neutral — not even a single person who would be expected to turn up to a match paying for a ticket out of their own pocket — who has contended that the Bairstow and Duckett incidents in and of themselves were anything even slightly worth worrying about.
(Oh, and there goes Overton.)
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Yep. Uncorked.
Fine work by Bairstow.
I claim Lyon has occult powers – he is at his most powerful when homeopathically involved.
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5 for 25. (and will probably be 6 before I finish typing) There were people before the series saying that England had the stronger lower / order tail. They may want to reconsider that
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Ian Chappell commenting on the “bombardment” of the tail-enders by the bowlers of both sides. He seems genuinely unimpressed – must have mellowed in his old age.
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Huge 6 (pull shot) from Broad to bring up the 400. Going the tonk is probably his best strategy.
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104 metres. Nice!
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All out for 403 after losing 6 for 35 (if my maths is correct). Hard to say how good a score that is. I think its good conditions for batting once you play yourself in so if we bowl short it could be carnage. On the other hand, you never know till both sides have batted blah, blah blah. Also, if the cracks in the wicket open up, batting last could be a challenge.
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Classic team-clique Shiny Toy on TMS. Talked about how the huge 6 was with the wind, and now, from the other end, Broad would be thinking of getting the ball down to 3rd man or into the open spaces of the off side. Too far to hook into the wind.
Norcross: “I don’t want to sound insulting, but is Broad really thinking about it that much?”
Shiny Toy: “Oh, yes. He’s a thinking cricketer.”
First ball, hooked into the wind. Straight up in the air…
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Just woke up. 403 all out is disappointing.
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And…… on Twitter, guess what? Plenty of people happy to #blameMalan!
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I obviously can’t watch this video at work. However I would be very interested to see the relative weight of blame attached to Malan (140, attacking shot) and Moeen (capable of hundreds, capable of sticking around, second ball duck, absolute toilet shot).
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Good God! He’s turned into Selvey Mark 2
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The balance of this report is at Selvey/Rashid levels, and as for the reaction to criticism…
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I speak to GD on Twitter Direct Message a little bit. I find him to be a fair, open-minded, interesting bloke who is quite frank with me on certain issues. It’s not every five minutes, but it happens from time to time (last time was when we both used Bullseye in our piece on the same day).
That said, and predicating this on their being no previous history, he was wrong on this one. I’ve had my share of Twitter nonsense in my time and have not had a blow up for a while (Alastair Cook in Ashes time….). You put out a point like that, you know people are going to respond. I think it is a terrible point to blame the bloke who pulled you out of the shit for putting you in it again. I defended KP for it, I will defend Malan for it. I hope GD considers what happened and thinks about it, because there is no way he is a Selfey, and it would be a great shame if he was thought to be so. I don’t agree with him all the time, but he’s one of the best voices, and in my opinion, writers out there.
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Leaves an exceptionally bad taste for me. Like Rashid he’s in his first few Tests. A further point is that he’s played a *lot* fewer matches than all bar one of the guys going in below him, as well as two of the men above who made 27 runs between them. I thought it was bad when we did it to Pietersen, but at least he *was* a senior player.
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He does start the piece by saying….” It’s a bit unfair….but…”
I think he has got this call wrong. Sure we would like to have seen Malan go on after seeing off the second new ball, so too Bairstow, but this is his first test century and without it England were dead & buried.
Vince seemes to have got a pass and Ali gets no blame at all. England and the media do seem to have a double standard. Some players are above criticism and the excuse train is rolled out everytime they fail. Others are tarred and feathered when they make 140.
England clique rules. If you are not in the clique shit will be flung at you.
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The comparisons with the Amiss and Atherton innings are grossly unfair. Both were experienced Test players at the time of those innings and both were in the second innings so they had defined targets (where time mattered much more than runs). They were both once in a generation innings.
Defining Ali and Woakes as “the tail” is the bit that particularly grates with me. There’s been a lot of ink spilt of their batting abilities – and now suddenly they’re just tail-enders?
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I’ve had a conversation with him on Twitter about it. He is sticking to his guns that it was a harsh but fair piece and I am sticking to my guns that he was completely digging out the wrong guy and there were plenty of others who deserved criticism.
I don’t expect for everyone to agree all the time and at least he responded to me (something Selfey wouldn’t have done). I’m also pretty much in agreement with Dmitri on this one.
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It is just like last time around when KP was excoriated for getting out (off Lyon’s bowling in about the same way!) and wound up top scoring in the innings…
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Good to see lessons have been learners from last test. Only 58% of balls in the first 10 overs bowled short.
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Warner and Bancroft look very comfortable. Only one play-and-miss so far.
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Overton you little beauty! Look what happens when you get your length right (said the bishop to the actress)
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Overton nearly pulls of a great caught and bowled. He then punches the ground in frustration which will probably get him a fine and an early trip home if comma was watching.
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Great review by England! Overton has clearly listened to the locals and is pitching the ball up. (I’ve not seen much of this guy bowl but I really like what I have seen. When’s his brother going to be fit?)
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“He only averages 23 against England, so England will feel that they’ve got the wool over Khawaja’s eyes”.
Really, Shiny? Is that the expression? Am I particularly grumpy this morning or is he just a semi-literate Berk?
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I hate how Vaughan expressed every point in the following form:
“That was poor from Smith”
“That was brilliant from Woakes”
“That was classy from Broad”.
Leave alone that the correct authorial ablative word to use here is ‘by’, not ‘from’ (you wouldn’t talk about War And Peace from Leo Tolstoy) it’s also his inability to get any point across with any other sentence construction.
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Shinny toy is like the starry eyed Manc with the bobble hat from the Fast Show…..
“Ain’t music brilliant!! And you can get all different types of musc. Amazing. Loud and soft, fast and slow….BRILLIANT!!…..and get this right…you can record music too, so you don’t have to have a musician by your side all the time….BRILLIANT!!”
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Bad drop by Root at second slip off Woakes’s bowling. (Khawaja the batsman). Came through head high and it looks like Root didn’t even pick it up.
Standing too close on a ground like the WACA?
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This looks bad. And I really want England to win for the sake of the series and the Ashes in general.
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Overton off injured. This could be ominous on a flat track like this.
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Is seems 400 odd is about our limit. Doesn’t matter what the pitch is like, that is how we roll. And this is with two batsman getting hundreds. 259 by Malan and Bairstow ,and the rest can just about scape together another 100.
I see Malan is getting all the blame, nice! But why does Vince who got another start get a pass? Or Englands greatest living cricketer?
And Englands attack is looking pretty toothless. The dynamic duo didn’t get much from the new ball. The joys of following England. It might be us who want the rain on day 5.
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The only Perth Test where a team scored 400+ in the first innings and went on to lose:
http://www.espncricinfo.com/series/17138/scorecard/63196/australia-vs-india-2nd-test-india-tour-of-australia-1977-78/
The Indian press probably didn’t blame Mohinder Amarnath.
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Reason to be cheerful, part 2:
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Christ, India were 240-1 in their 2nd innings and even declared 9 down, only for Aus to win by scoring over 300 with 8 down at the end!! That’s worse than us! (But probably not worse than 2006… :()
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The declaration was probably to save Bedi and Chandra from injury against Thomo (who hadn’t signed for Packer at that stage).
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Perhaps we should try that. After all according to Jimmy it’s up to the batsmen to get the runs.
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OK. So that was /clearly/ Australia’s day. But…
They are still 200 behind. That places a lot of weight on Smith’s shoulders. He’s got to score a double ton here, to put his team in front. He’s more than good enough to do it, and Sean Marsh, and the Australian tail, have showed themselves more than capable, but it’s not an /awful/ situtation.
It would, of course, become an awful situation if Smith is still in at the close tomorrow. Which he’s more than capable of. (Hopefully Overton will be fit to bowl tomorrow)
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Interesting…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/cricket/article-5180723/CHARLES-SALE-Counties-revolt-Twenty20-shake-up.html
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Beter late than never I suppose, but I expect they are too late. They got screwed over. They were stupid to believe the ECB. They sold themselves for a measly bit of compensation. The ECB is taking the one bit of profitable cricket away from them.
You would have thought they would have spotted that.
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The turkeys complain that they are being eaten after they had voted for the ‘Eat Turkey’s for Christmas’ party.
Sadly ironic….
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Another sign the Sky is falling?…
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/dec/15/bt-sky-deal-atlantic-and-sport-channels-customers
Good job the ECB haven’t done everything in their power to alienate BT. Oh….
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FWIW I don’t think it makes you an oddball to keep a lot of cricket recorded from the television! I just had this rather amusing (and romantic) image of you in a “cricket room” -converted from a study – with wall-to-wall shelves of VHS tapes of various cricket recordings….
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Brilliant idea. To be able to replay, say, Leeds 81 in its entirety, rather than half an hour of highlights with interruptions from pundits, would be magical
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You do know how horrific it is editing out advertising from betting companies?
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I sometimes wondered if the BBC could show entire test matches from 40 odd years ago. Say over 5 days starting on a Thursday. It would have to be on the red button because I doubt many people wouldn want to watch it.
But they could play them just to piss off the ECB. Who knows it might introduce a new young audience to test cricket. Something the ECB has failed to do.
And there is market for free to air sport seeing as there is so little of it. Dream land of course, but there you are.
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This for another thread really. It I think the BBC are missing out on their huge back catalogue of sporting events. Sky are tapping some over the yesteryear market but I think it has potential. Nostalgia is a huge earner. Just look at the bands of yesteryear who are incredibly popular.
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I agree. Old football matches, rugby internationals. They have a huge back catalogue. But the BBC would rather have another cooking show.
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