In test matches 300 is massive in a 4th innings, unlike the one-day game there are no bowling or field restrictions and with almost four days wear the bowlers hold all the aces...
Good win for England in the end when it looked like it could all go horribly wrong this morning. Ali 6 for 53, excellent.
A facile win today, which was always likely with SA batting last after our spinners took six wickets in the first innings. A good result, but against a poor SA side I think.
They are second in the Test rankings behind India, we are fourth. Of course there are no great Test teams at the moment. CLICHE ALERT You can only beat what's in front of you END OF CLICHE ALERT
Hopefully du Plessis back for the next one, but de Villiers is an odd one. South Africa have beaten both Australia and New Zealand in test series without him, though he is of course one of the few greats out there at the moment.
Wow! What a day.We struggled to make it to see the first ball of the day due to a 'jumper' at Bond Street station. Thankfully we left early enough to make the diversion to Baker Street and walk to Lords from there in the sweltering heat. Cook and Ballance started the day steadily as expected but the top three are too conservative for my liking. Once Cook went the rest tumbled like dominoes. This wasn't going to script, we were 8 down at lunch and a loss of 7 wickets in the morning session. I turned to my mate John and said ... '' Do you think it's because we are QPR fans? '' After a rather nervy lunch, the four of us ( 3 QPR, 1 Spurs fan) headed back to our Grandstand seats with the pavilion to our right hoping that we'd put on at least a 300 lead to give the proteas a decent target. Wood doing the honours after a decent knock, and by 2.30 England are all out leaving SA needing 331 to win. SA started their innings slowly and Anderson made the breakthrough with Bairstow diving low to his left to take a great catch and Kuhn was caught behind 12/1. After that the spinners Ali and Dawson were bought on. Between them they would take the remaining 9 wickets, with Moeen taking 6 of them and 10 for the match. The wickets continued to fall with an incredulous regularity. England won the test by 211 runs with the fourth day seeing 18 wickets fall. Incredible. A true 'I was there' sporting event. I'm going to have to watch the highlights now to make sure I witnessed what I did.
You can't beat being at the match and for Test afficienados to have an 18 wicket day producing a result is a bonus, you struck lucky with that one Nines. For all it's criticism the T20 games are a great evening out as well with entertainment the priority, I'm taking the grandson to the Surrey v Middlesex match at the Oval on Friday week, with KP and Brendan McCullum going head to head it should be a cracker...
I was very fortunate to go yesterday Soops. The best bit was when Moeen got de Kock out in the middle, that was huge. Enjoy Friday week at the Oval, I wouldn't mind going to that myself but I've got a really early flight the following morning.
Federer v Cricket? Federer wins this time, may not be too many others. Sounds like a good day to be at Trent Bridge though. I'm assuming the writing on your avatar is incredibly funny, but it's too small to read.
