SCG Blues
This being summer in the antipodes, cricket is the game to watch, so I’ve put some time in this year to learn a bit about it, the Ashes being an especially iconic test match. That England gets to keep for the first time in 14 years. They deserve it. They outplayed the Australian eleven pretty much throughout, on offense and defence. God knows it’s got to be pretty nearly impossible to make a comeback from a first innings score under 100, or even 200, especially when your opponent seems capable of doubling that rate or better, and we managed to be caught out pretty easily for just such results more than once.

It’s not like we weren’t trying, of course. The Ashes is a big deal here. But in Melbourne, for the Boxing Day test, whereas England bowled 42 overs in the first innings, Australia expended 159. This meant we spent a lot of time chasing balls before managing to take a wicket, whether caught out, leg-by-wicket, or bowled out, whereas we hit quite regularly to just where the English thought we would, our batsmen caught out.

And I’d rather not mention the second innings performance.

There’s some suggestion that this was inevitable, given the recent spate of retirements of such as Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, leaving Australian cricket bereft of talent, and it’s interesting to note that whereas two on the English side are more regularly 20/20 players than in test cricket, all but two of the Aussie eleven are 20/20 stalwarts. Strategy and skill-sets would be quite different, I’d think, but I guess either the selectors didn’t think so or their available pool is indeed diminished. So I blame Rupert Murdoch and television. And no wonder. Games that take four days to play are pretty hard on the attention-span, especially when they start at 10 a.m. and run past 6 p.m. (Who invented such a thing? Or did cricket evolve to this? Must read more CLR James.)