Should have been very doable to bat out a draw in just over three sessions on that. Not over yet of course but the signs are not good. Knowing this lot they'd rather lose than draw, even in a hopeless situation ffs
He didn't last long, another bleedin' conclave coming up. The views expressed in my posts are not necessarily mine.
yup. they are waving the white flag, we need 5 hours of rain for a draw. Think I will put the rovers game on instead
let's hope smith knows about farming the strike. 7 down now. runs are irrelevant. he needs a single off the last ball of each over and nothing else. time for boycott mode.
i'm sure he is! there are potentially another 41+ over today, so he can get all he needs with single off the last ball of each over. he's now scored over 300 runs since he was last out and is averaging around 350 for the series so far. that's twice as much as gill!
forget that. he hit two sixes and on the next ball they got him. knocks his average for the series to a pathetic 178.5.
I'm still quite new to watching cricket seriously. Can anyone explain to me the reason for our batting strategy in the closing stages today? When it was obvious that we could only possibly hope for a draw, why were we still losing wickets taking big swings and getting caught deep in the field? Surely at that point runs were worthless and there was absolutely nothing to be gained by twatting it for the boundaries. Is there an unwritten rule or something that it would be unsporting to just stop trying to score runs altogether and shut up shop? I know that we're often criticised for being overly aggressive but I wondered specifically why we continued to do that when there was absolutely nothing to gain from it.
Good question, only Stokesy might know the answer. It looked like once we were 6 down and into the supposed tail they all thought **** it, Smith especially looked as though he just wanted to get 100 for himself. Personally I don't mind, it made for a better spectacle for the paying fans and, let's face it, nobody dies, gets the sack, loses their house because we lose. Different if it was the Ashes mind...
I think most of it comes from Stokes and McCullum’s philosophy of aggressive cricket. In most cases you’re right, they would shut up shop but it’s a lose lose situation and there’s a fine balance between batting sensibly and staying positive and putting bad balls away and putting pressure back on the bowling attack. Most likely a case of play your normal game and see if you can survive the day. Englands ‘normal’ bazball game just happens to be extremely aggressive which can spectacularly fail.
I get why they did it, England don’t pick batsmen that are naturally defensive. And if they do try to block, that invites pressure and may lead to an even quicker defeat.
