rjdgull
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Post by rjdgull on Nov 25, 2012 22:19:42 GMT
cope with spin on the sub-continent? ;D
Maybe I should change my username to Montygull as the other half of the spin attack is already taken!
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Post by jmgull on Nov 25, 2012 23:50:41 GMT
cope with spin on the sub-continent? ;D They can mate......playing spin well, is all about footwork and the indians are generally the best in the world at it. It's not spin on it's own that has caused the havoc, it's the extra bounce that this wicket has provided, especially when you have 2 guys (Panesar and Swann) that are bowling accurately and crucially at the right pace to extract the most out of the pitch. The reason that they have struggled more than us? To a degree it's a bit to do with the fact that Indians being generally shorter play with lower hands, than 6ft + Peterson and Cook and so struggle with the ball bouncing more than normal - Cook and Peterson have both played brilliant knocks mind. Amazing, in these days, where teams at home are allowed to produce pitches to suit themselves that India having gone 1 up haven't produced a slow, sluggish turner - makes for great viewing though. |
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Post by stefano on Nov 26, 2012 8:09:32 GMT
cope with spin on the sub-continent? ;D They can mate......playing spin well, is all about footwork and the indians are generally the best in the world at it. It's not spin on it's own that has caused the havoc, it's the extra bounce that this wicket has provided, especially when you have 2 guys (Panesar and Swann) that are bowling accurately and crucially at the right pace to extract the most out of the pitch. The reason that they have struggled more than us? To a degree it's a bit to do with the fact that Indians being generally shorter play with lower hands, than 6ft + Peterson and Cook and so struggle with the ball bouncing more than normal - Cook and Peterson have both played brilliant knocks mind. Amazing, in these days, where teams at home are allowed to produce pitches to suit themselves that India having gone 1 up haven't produced a slow, sluggish turner - makes for great viewing though. Hell JMG I have never known somebody who is so knowledgable about football display the same level of knowledge about cricket. Very impressive. As a kid I had a go at most sports but cricket I could never get my head around. As a sportsman I always thought there was something not quite right about 11 against 2, but what really threw me was that a game could go on for 3 days, one team would score 642, the other team would score 275, and yet it was a draw!!  |
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Post by rjdgull on Nov 26, 2012 8:30:19 GMT
Thanks for that insight Justin, I know the media reported the pitch as a real turner but the bounce passed me by as I don't have sky and only have the radio to go off!
Cricket was my first sporting love (ever since Botham's Ashes) though and played a bit as a teenager so always follow the national team!
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Post by jmgull on Nov 26, 2012 10:43:59 GMT
but what really threw me was that a game could go on for 3 days, one team would score 642, the other team would score 275, and yet it was a draw!! That's when it really is far more interesting ;D Thanks for the kind words Stef and rjd too. Somebody once said that Cricket is the perfect combination of War and Chess.....I reckon that's pretty close to the truth. I've always been a traditionalist and enjoy 3 or 5 day cricket more, playing 20/20 is fun but not that interesting to watch - I know a few on here like Jon and Bart like their cricket too, so I guess they'd agree. I guess it all depends on your father mate, mine, bless him has always been absolutely cricket mad, to the point of obsession - as well as a season ticket holder at TUFC since 1952 - I never stood a chance! I remember as a kid of 5, playing cricket in our garden with my old man and older brother on the 1st day of the school summer holidays, my old man decided he would bat 1st, we were told that we had to properly get him out if we wanted to bat ourselves, he was a useful local player and it soon became clear that he meant it - he batted for the rest of the day and the for the next 2 sundays to prove the point, he was eventually dismissed for 859! - I'm not joking either......it put my brother off for life, I was hooked  . We worked together for a number of years in the family business and as I was invariably the captain of whoever I was playing for - Monday mornings weren't for working, it was for discussing the previous saturdays game at length, that he had already watched from start to finish, it was the finer details and thought processes that go into the game that fascinated him so much. It was drummed into me at a very early age, that weekends are for sport, nothing else - all year round, no one in our family has ever dared to get married in the summer. So although I still play a reasonable standard and have always loved Cricket and was probably better at it than football, I think football has always been no.1 for me if I'm honest - I had to quit football at the age of 29 (thank god for TUFC) Cricket is wonderful from a social point of view and has given me many good friends over the years, I hope my lad who is playing both now gets as much out of it as I have done, although he demands that I bowl at him, never the other way round - how generations change eh! |
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Post by Jon on Nov 26, 2012 22:49:47 GMT
I remember as a kid of 5, playing cricket in our garden with my old man and older brother on the 1st day of the school summer holidays, my old man decided he would bat 1st, we were told that we had to properly get him out if we wanted to bat ourselves, he was a useful local player and it soon became clear that he meant it - he batted for the rest of the day and the for the next 2 sundays to prove the point, he was eventually dismissed for 859! There's some video of that innings on youtube: I didn't think the gardens in Frobisher were as big as that. I do hope you didn't wander round the corner onto Lord Chelston's estate. He doesn't like kids playing on his land. |
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Post by jmgull on Nov 26, 2012 23:06:24 GMT
  Brilliant find mate! I'm going to mail him this.....I bet he suffers a sudden loss of memory Don't even ask about the monopoly game at Xmas  It was in Monastery road, so thankfully Lord Chelston wasn't troubled although across the road in Frobisher we have got a Victor Meldrew ball confiscator/burster.
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rjdgull
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Post by rjdgull on Nov 26, 2012 23:25:30 GMT
;D I've always been a traditionalist and enjoy 3 or 5 day cricket more, playing 20/20 is fun but not that interesting to watch - I know a few on here like Jon and Bart like their cricket too, so I guess they'd agree. The rise of 20/20 in the last few years has been breathtaking but Sunday saw 15 wickets and over 300 runs scored which is pretty special. It also perhaps shows how this form of the game has changed since I started watching it with the likes of Boycott and Tavare putting more emphasis on staying at the crease as the five day form of the game really was a "Test" of technique as players like Hick and more recently Morgan have been found out. However, despite individual players looking to entertain, I feel it was the Aussie team of the 90s which changed things with greater emphasis on scoring faster and thus more likely to get a result - I remember talking to a foreign student years ago who was staggered that a game could actually last for 5 days and even then was likely to be a draw after running out of time!  Even in the "timeless" test against the old enemy, possibly between the wars had to be abandoned so that the team could catch the boat back home! ;D Without dusting down a wisden, may have had a rare team score in that game that was in excess of your old man's PB! |
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Post by jmgull on Nov 26, 2012 23:46:10 GMT
 Jon - here is a piece about him in the herald several years ago, written by the wonderfully expressive Brian Carter. He's mellowed in his later years thankfully |
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Post by Jon on Nov 27, 2012 0:04:01 GMT
here is a piece about him in the herald several years ago, written by the wonderfully expressive Brian Carter. Brian Carter is quality. Email your dad this link too: www.cliftoncollegeuk.com/ocs/news/232/ |
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Post by rjdgull on Nov 27, 2012 10:13:15 GMT
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Post by jmgull on Nov 27, 2012 11:23:09 GMT
Thanks Rjd - that's an interesting read...
I totally agree about the aussie side of the 90's - they changed the face of Test Cricket and raised the bar to new heights.
A test match can be just as entertaining as a 20/20 match, even to the occasional cricket watcher - but in order to do so, it has to be staged on the right surface, just as the game was recently finished in Mumbai - it was an even contest between bat and ball and that will almost always produce a good game for spectators.
You get the feeling it was a bit of a fluke and you wonder whether the groundsman still has a job today - the vast majority of the time the asian sides will produce wickets that are dead flat, keep low, do not swing or seam and are totally unhelpful to the tourist side - even more so when they go 1 up in the series, they are more than happy to draw the rest of the matches, winning the series is more important than entertainment sadly.
The most cricket mad continent in the world......and you see most test match grounds 3/4 empty - and they wonder why?
It takes years to change any rule in Cricket normally, a good start would be to punish teams that regularly produce pitches that produce boring cricket matches - people want to see good batters scoring 100's but also a clatter of wickets, it's not difficult to provide the pitches for it to happen if the desire was there.
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Post by jmgull on Nov 27, 2012 11:26:50 GMT
here is a piece about him in the herald several years ago, written by the wonderfully expressive Brian Carter. Brian Carter is quality. Email your dad this link too: www.cliftoncollegeuk.com/ocs/news/232/Cheers Jon - I've copied and pasted Dad's response Thanks so much for the Clifton College cutting! I had left the school the year before the football team was formed (although it was never really recognised as a school sport). I can remember at least half of the 1958 team which is listed...some of them very well indeed. Denis Compton played in the parents match (his son was in my class, and his grandson is now playing in India....both from different wives) so his wicket was not really something to boast about...JC was a spinner and not a particularly good one. I really enjoyed the article, and will keep it with my old mementos. |
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Post by lambethgull on Nov 27, 2012 11:46:59 GMT
It takes years to change any rule in Cricket normally, a good start would be to punish teams that regularly produce pitches that produce boring cricket matches - people want to see good batters scoring 100's but also a clatter of wickets, it's not difficult to provide the pitches for it to happen if the desire was there. I think that would be very difficult to implement. There are so many variables involved in creating a good cricket pitch. A bad summer, unpredictable weather in the lead up to a test, a change in groundstaff etc. Then there's the unpredictability of batting itself, and we've all witnessed the phenomenon of batting collapses on "good pitches". I guess you could have a panel of ground staff, umpires and senior ex-players to grade a pitch before a test. You could then build up a picture of teams and groundstaff producing consistently 'bad' pitches. But I still think it would be difficult to implement. For a start off, a groundsman working in England in a normal summer (let alone one like the one we've just had) will have a more difficult job than a groundsman in Sydney with their more predictable conditions. How do you produce a standard that applies equally across the board? |
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Post by jmgull on Nov 27, 2012 15:27:42 GMT
It takes years to change any rule in Cricket normally, a good start would be to punish teams that regularly produce pitches that produce boring cricket matches - people want to see good batters scoring 100's but also a clatter of wickets, it's not difficult to provide the pitches for it to happen if the desire was there. I think that would be very difficult to implement. There are so many variables involved in creating a good cricket pitch. A bad summer, unpredictable weather in the lead up to a test, a change in groundstaff etc. Then there's the unpredictability of batting itself, and we've all witnessed the phenomenon of batting collapses on "good pitches". I guess you could have a panel of ground staff, umpires and senior ex-players to grade a pitch before a test. You could then build up a picture of teams and groundstaff producing consistently 'bad' pitches. But I still think it would be difficult to implement. For a start off, a groundsman working in England in a normal summer (let alone one like the one we've just had) will have a more difficult job than a groundsman in Sydney with their more predictable conditions. How do you produce a standard that applies equally across the board? You could never produce a standard that applies equally across the board of course, and of course recent weather etc always plays a part. You could have panels and penalties etc and I'm sure you're right that it would be difficult to implement, although it did the trick in the county championship a few years ago when teams were often docked 25pts at a time, counties soon got their act together....the pitches in England are now probably the best in the world in terms of fairness to both sides. My point really was that if you expect people to turn up and pay good money, they want to be entertained, not bored to death as both sides rack up 500 in their first innings and it ends up as an inevitable draw. Test matches in most of the world apart from here and Australia are played out in sparsely populated huge stadiums (countries like NZ it attracts one man and his dog) - If it was staged to entertain the paying public, they would come back.... ....although TUFC is probably not a good example of this as no matter how good the footy has been for the last 6 or 7 years, we still don't get more in |
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Even in the "timeless" test against the old enemy, possibly between the wars had to be abandoned so that the team could catch the boat back home! ;D Without dusting down a wisden, may have had a rare team score in that game that was in excess of your old man's PB! 