The pitch, prepared by the diligent Matt Page, was perhaps a day shy of ideal, its early moisture and grass yielding unpredictable bounce and seam.
Batters from both sides crumpled like autumn leaves in a gale. Wickets tumbled in clusters, scores hovered in the low hundreds, and the crowd, that vast sea of 90,000 souls at the MCG, was left cheated of the epic they deserved. What shocked me most was not the conditions themselves, for cricket has always been a game at the mercy of the elements.
No, it was the batters’ reactions: gestures of disbelief, muttered oaths, wry smiles as they trudged off, as if they alone had been cursed by a rogue delivery in the sport’s long history. They behaved like novices encountering adversity for the first time, oblivious to the blood, sweat, and sheer willpower that have sustained Test cricket through far worse trials.
The media are jumping on Stokes pitch criticism, but he is speaking with a forked tongue.
Stokes and his coach know all too well that to have any chance of winning a series let alone the odd test, the Bazball regime needs dead flat pitches. So what do the media and public expect, to hear him praising pitches with a bit of bowler assistance?
Bazball is basically cross bat cricket, deviation, turn or variable bounce are it's natural enemy.
The tragedy of the MCG Test is that the Aussies went soft letting the Poms win against the trend, they've used the pitch criticism as cover for their own abhorrent lacklustre play! When stoicism was needed to crush the opponents hope, we folded and left the doors open.
You could see the complaining apologists setting up for the barrage of pitch related excuses yesterday, and as you mentioned it came overnight.
These people are apologists for sh1t cricket, they expect the batsmen to be delivered billiard tables not a turf pitch.
Go back to the days of playing on the hession matting and it'll give this lot something to really complain about! Back in the day when 1st class was rained out, we would play against test bowlers who would come back to grade cricket to run out the cobwebs on the mats. We played in one such game where a certain bloke bowled short on the mats for 6 byes.
In Benaud's day, tests were played on hession mats when the pitch was deemed unsafe.
Yesterday's pitch was a good 1st day wicket 10, 20 and 30 years ago, now in the T20 era it's labelled a death trap by some extremists who think batsmen have the right to run at the express bowler regardless of the conditions. It's sh1t cricket, and as sad as I am hearing about Border losing the plot he's probably saved from watching yesterday's rubbish!
I'm growing weary very quickly of the media apologists defending shizen cricket by bashing the pitch.
There wasn't much wrong with that pitch by traditional cricket standards, what it isn't is it is not a T20 pitch!
It's clear to me T20 $ has made modern cricketers soft and weak minded, the greats of the past made hundreds on pitches far worse than anything this modern lot play on!
FFS, Green's home ground in Perth was similar and as many wicket fell, and today the same bloke, the one most of us have calling to be dropped ran himself out when the side was 5 for not many!
The pitch complaints are a smokescreen, camouflage for shizenhouse cricket delivered by a bunch of soft overpaid pseudo-professionals.
At the moment the USA is burning, companies are going to the wall at an alarming rate, RedTrump's reports aren't as useful as dunny paper. He's used a government shutdown to boost the short term figures, another version of his faked results, as fake as his tan!
I'll come around and throw rocks at your house, which I won't talk about, but I'll keep telling people that you are prone to attack me! You'll prove me right, nothing is more certain.
Josh Frydenberg, ever the opportunist, is criticising the Government's position on hate speech but he strongly advocated weakening existing hate speech legislation when he was an MP.
Because he is guilty of it, he wants to throw rocks for political gain, that is part of his hypocrisy exposed.
He is no different to Pauline, same tactics from a more profitable perspective. One targets the welfare state, the other billionaires.
We seem to have some idea what we're doing to top order batsmen, but no idea how to deal with tail enders. Look at the runs Archer has made this summer!
We are scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of leadership and tactics, Lillee or Hughes would destroy the tail order with just one or two bouncers, now these crap tactics have proliferated to the degree we are seeing the bulk of deliveries in the bowlers half.
Even in war, win or lose, combatants go to trial and often jail for targeting and killing women and children, I think the legal name for it is genocide!
As an aside I have some very good friends who are Iranian, they had to flee their own country due to radicals, leaving behind a beautiful family home with hundreds of years of heritage. For people here to look at them and label them amongst the same radicals that they had to flee, radicals who destroy their country, is also in my opinion criminal and racist. But that is what some including local Israeli lobbyists do on a daily basis, they claim my friends have no place in Australia because of the behaviour of criminals back in the country they had to flee.
Blokes like Frydenberg and Netanyahu seem to willfully ignore the hypocrisy of that behaviour just for political point scoring, and destroy any unity the world has managed to build in the process. But there are crooks on both sides, there are just as many Imans guilty of this as there are Israeli politicians.
That psalm or proverb, or whatever you want to call it, about casting the first stone, it's a wise set of words and I suspect it exists for a reason, somebody somewhere learned a lesson and didn't ignore it.
When you watch this morning rubbish tactics, sh1zen bowling to sh1zen batsmen, you can understand why people have become disillusioned with Test Cricket. FFS, it's like D-Grade cricket tactics, and it's being lauded on the broadcast by former captains like it is revolutionary!
Also, how Green topped the IPL auction can only be a confirmation that marketing spin and corruption dominate performance.
Netanyahu is within rights to steam roll palestine and solve that problem once and for all,
Surely nobody, neither side in this dispute and nobody in any dispute, has the right to target facilities or take actions that cause the collateral death of children and infants, either directly or indirectly.
Target military, terrorists and gorillas all you like, but stay away from civilians and children.
