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“All right, Mrs Joseph. Is your Alzarri playing out today?”
Today Joe Root was dismissed by a ball he played forward to, but which he absolutely should not have played forward to, but which it was totally 100 per cent understandable he played forward to. It was a lifter.
A lifter is not a bouncer. It is not a ball that rises sharply as a result of how short it has been bowled. A lifter is a ball that bounces much higher than physics would suggest it should.
You watch a bouncer and you deal with a bouncer. You suffer a lifter. There is maybe a 40 per cent chance that any given lifter will break one of your fingers.
Today Joe Root got a lifter.
Stokes appears to have got one as well. Now watch the pitch turn utterly benign when England bowl.
I’m not sure which the TtA Thread is any more. 😕
Yikes. I heard it on the radio, hadn’t actually seen it until just now.
97/6 at time of writing – nope, my mistake, a Foakes boundary brings up three figures before I could make a crack about how England were in danger of reaching three figures. Looks as if my “commenter’s curse” has worn off…
I think England need to diversify away from people whose names start with J. It’s half the team and clearly not working. And then there’s two more with J middle names.
In particular, there’s far too many Joes. It seems statistically unlikely that the quality of batsmen from England would cluster so much around a single name.
It’s the new Australian Mitch.
I think we need Bert to do a Liebke-style analysis of how many Joseph Somethings and Something Josephs are playing in this match.
Perhaps the solution is to replace the Joes with more wicket keeper/batsmen?
I think we should entertain the possibility that England are constructing a reasonable first innings score here.
Looks like a new ball pitch to me – i.e. the sort of pitch where a reasonably new ball will do plenty all through the match.
If England can get to 200-odd, that might, on reflection, look respectable when we look back on the match.
Rather disappointed with the “Similar deliveries” feature as given in conjunction with today’s posting.
In KCs defence, I suspect he is using the “related posts” feature that comes as standard with WordPress – as do I on my site.
The feature works well, in most circumstances, coming up with close relations where there are closely related postings and sometimes funky suggestions on postings that are a little more left field. I’m pretty sure the algorithm starts with matching categories and tags – it might even randomise beyond that, if there is a beyond that.
On the KC site (and mine for that matter) you can go for a serendipitous stroll by clicking on one of the five random posts offered each time you refresh the page (KC’s version is labelled “Get The Delorean Up To 88MPH”, presumably for in joke reasons of his own.
You can also do your own key word searches if you wish. I put the word “lifter” into the search tool and found an excellent “similar delivery” in which (coincidentally) it was me who had used the word “lifter”, in the comments:
https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/shannon-gabriel-nicks-one-for-the-windies/2017/05/05/
So to those who tell you that this four man West Indian pace attack doing well is a sudden and unexpected thing, you can point them to KC’s article from nearly two years ago.
“Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you bowl the machine wrong ‘uns, will the right highlights come out?”
https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2018/09/26/pray-mister-babbage/
As Boycs and others have pointed out, the current West Indian side is full of average cricketers. Unfortunately, they can’t hope to provide our world-class England side with a proper challenge (and shame on the ICC for allowing such a flagrant mismatch to take place). Still, looking on the bright side, the inevitable easy series vistory for England may set our boys up nicely for the rest of the year. ‘Tis an ill wind, and all that.
(Gotta laugh eh)