On the morning of Day Four, The Inquisitive Reader may be a tad bemused by the absence of lengthy prognostications from Hughesy after Days One and Two.
I didn’t have much to add to this looks to be our best Top Six, so let’s see how they go prior to the commencement of play, and had got my teeth into a lengthy Republican rant about the significance of that Ashes Test back in 1882 on the morning of Day One.
That was the only Test played on that particular tour, and a quick look at Wikipedia and Cricinfo failed to reveal any details about the rest of the tour, but then I recalled I’ve got a shelf full of cricket reference books. Suffice it to say I then spent the rest of the time before the toss and through to the start of play reading Jack Pollard, taking notes and thinking of returning to the piece I’d started on the morning of Day Two.
Day One also happened to have some personal significance, and was celebrated with some good bottles, so I was late out of bed in the morning, skipped the morning walk and generally took it easy until the start of play.
That Republican rant will have to wait, and the content relating to WG Grace’s gamesmanship and the start of the Ashes will probably emerge at some stage, but since the subject got a bit of coverage on the ABC Radio coverage, that stage may be well into the future.
Commentary on the actual play on Day One would have been along the lines of This looks like our best Top Six, but thank goodness the lower order can bat, which could have veered off into further discussion of all-rounders, batsmen who can bowl and bowlers who can bat. We have, of course, been over that ground in reasonable detail, which is why the veering didn’t eventuate.
Yesterday morning saw me looking back at recent batting history with a variation on this is our best six and today’s the day for them to consolidate their places in the eleven intended. Tracking back over the entrails of 2009, 2010-11, India early this year and the first half of the two part series kept me going through the morning up to the resumption, and subsequent events put the kibosh on that line of thought.
On a day where Rogers and Watson could have cemented their places for the rest of the summer and Smith and Bailey needed to consolidate it would have been nice to have at least one of them put their hands up. Instead, it was Warner and Clarke, wasn’t it?
Figures.
The interesting part, for me, has been the weaknesses that seem to be emerging in the English side, something I don’t usually spend too much time on, but there are definite implications for our blokes that emerge from that sort of analysis.