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The thing about Australians is that when it comes to the crunch situations, they’ve got no backbone.
Hmmmm, thinking you might be confusing Aussies with our own fine nation unfortunately. Granted, they have a history of not liking to chase small 4th innings totals, but generally they don’t know when they’re beaten. They made 400+ in the 4th innings at Lords and 350 in the 4th innings at the Oval. I’m fairly confident England would have been 150 all out in those situations (cardiff aside, Adelaide ’06 a better example). How many times has Ponting made a big hundred when they have been in the mire? Clarke, Hussey, S Waugh, Langer and so on.
piss off benno. you’ve missed the point entirely. Australians are soft. They are bought (brought?) up playing to participate… wtf do they know about winning? Fark all.
I agree. I think it’s because they just don’t care about sport generally.
….and they always look a bit embarrassed to be playing in those funny green caps.
That’s right, KC
you packed us off here 200 years ago because were weren’t tough enough for your climate. You were doing us a favour, weren’t you? giving our land to sheep.
I have a theory about backbone, but unfortunately it’s a sensible one. Sorry.
The Aussies have a pretty good batting line up (Katich, Watson, Ponting, Hussey, Clarke, North). That’s not bad in anyone’s book. Yet they collapsed in three first innings, and were largely unable to recover sufficiently.
England, throughout the bad times, had pretty good batting line ups. Consider Butcher, Atherton, Stewart, Hussain, Thorpe, Ramprakash from the summer of ’98. On paper that’s much, much better than now, yet they still had the ability to collapse at will.
So here is the theory: Batting backbone comes from trust in your bowlers.
If the Aussie batsmen had felt they could trust their bowlers to knock teams over, they would have batted with backbone. However, the Australian bowling line up of Big Ted, Little Ted, Humpty, Hamble and Jemimah was not one to inspire such confidence. Their willowiness was passed on like a virus to the batsmen, who then become weak and feeble as a result.
From this analysis comes a tactic:
Weak Bowling – Catch It, Bin It, Kill It!
Kevin, we packed you all off 200 years ago because you broke the law! Not that you ever let that bother you of course
Whoa! Unnecessary aggression, Brad. Didn’t think my post was that provocative. PMT?
Steve, how old do you think we are?
We didn’t pack anybody off anywhere 200 years ago.
And we’ve been packing them off to this very day
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_league/super_league/celtic_crusaders/8207827.stm
Don’t take it personally King, but as King, you are representing your nation.
Moron Tom,
yes, you are!
We can cope with being associated with the England cricket team, but to be representative of the UK?
Spare us.
The typical Aussie sporting traits were still in evidence, Clarke backed himself and the team to the hilt and I think the 2nd innings batting performance at Edgebaston inparticular was full of the never say die attitude and confident Aussie swagger or “winning mentality”. Broadly speaking over the course of the series the Australian players looked a lot tougher and suffered less individual crisis (Hughes and Johnson Vs Cook, Bopara, Bell, Collingwood, Broad until the last two tests) but when they were favourites and under the pressure of expectation at Lords and particularly the Oval they quite simply choked.
Without a memory bank and a belief in your ability based on past victory like Shane Warne et al this is easy to do. It was very nice watching an Australian cricket team choke though! Not sure I’ve seen it happen before, even the secret powers of their Baggy Greens couldn’t help them..!
Their habit of eating too many meat pie floaters means that they are unable, from the captain down to – well the vicecaptain -to run sharp singles properly
They must be quite tough though KC. Remember when Clarke took a fearsome blow to his glove, the ball flying off and being caught? So staggeringly painful was it that it reverberated up past his wrist to his forearm that he had to rub it to show the umpire just how much it hurt. That’s Aussie toughness right there. Not cheating. Toughness.
Another example of that CK, was Watson showing his bat to the umpire, when he’d missed the ball by miles, and had his pads thudded right in front. It hurt his legs so badly, that the pain travelled the length of his body, down his arm, and even hurt an inanimate object that was not involved in the collision.
Toughness, not cheating!
The English are such sore winners.
I don’t know what you mean KC…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9HGGFaAGSE
You’re contradicting yourself here; just after the Headingley Test didn’t you mention “when Australia have been down, they’ve fought like bastards”, and “on England’s bad days their heads drop and they seem to resign themselves to it”??
England won the big moments, that’s for sure, and hence the series. But don’t let the euphoria of this victory cloud your judgment: England are the number 5 side in the world, and with good reason. Australia were still hugely competitive in an away series, something which England haven’t managed in yonks, least of all on Antipodean soil. A balanced perspective should reveal that there’s no question which side has more “backbone”. One narrow series win doesn’t make England the better Test side.
I can’t help but feel there are some people posting comments who’ve missed the point entirely.
This is what comes from being “popular” KC. Don’t you miss the old days when we’d be talking about cats by now?
I think Australia lost the ashes because of Peter Siddle’s face. Imagine going off at every lunch break and tea break and having to see it. How can the opening bowlers concentrate, or the batsmen get their eye back in with that horror preying on their mind?
Terrifying.
They really lost the series because they’re a bunch of flamin’ galahs.
Lemon Bella! Hello!
In amongst all these lads being testosterone ridden, can I ask how Strausscat is these days? How indifferent is he at present?
I am not testosterone ridden, thank you, being a girl.
And if the cats are still indifferent, see if this can engage their attention –
http://www.catcerto.com/cat_video.htm
It was a wonderful series. Cricket was the winner at the end of the day!
P.S. Thank you KC for promoting my attempts to raise money by attempting to play cricket and a big thank you to all who donated!
KC I think some people are confused over whose job it is to troll on this site. :p
Bert has most of the answer there, although Pontings trash talk in the leadup didn’t do us any favours. The selectors should be sacked after such an atrocius series. Some cosmetic surgery for Siddle or some sort of elephant man like sack arrangement should be considered too.
One of Englands strengths is that they rotate the captaincy, allowing them to cover for the fact their captain is a congenital idiot. Strauss, while not in the same league as Ricky in the moron stakes at least had some experience to fall back on when he ran out of ideas. For the future of Australian cricket Ponting should resign as captain and let someone with a clue take over (such as Katich, North or even pup).
But the real unanswered question in this series is how did Meowcus Trescattick feel about his namesakes decision not to answer his nations call?
Bert’s on the money
I can report that StraussCat is as indifferent as ever, but has had to have lots of vet visits recently and I felt guilty making him pose next to pictures of Andrew Strauss holding the Ashes aloft
Meowcus Trescattick is still sadly failing on the indifference front. He was quite annoyed people even thought of asking his namesake to play again.
Ceci, what the hell is a meat pie floater? Where I come from, you certainly wouldn’t want to eat one.
I based my comment around the Playschool toys! How exactly is that testosterone-charged?
Boycott and Flintoff — the adrenaline-charged Big Ted and Hamble of cricket?
My theory: a team has six batsman in the hope that each will come off about one in three times, or to put it another way, that two will succeed each innings. One good individual innings can bolster a side, but you need two to post a decent total. This, by my reckoning, would mean that if you are carrying a batsman who you know wouldn’t get the runs in a curry factory, then you are guaranteed to struggle about one in three innings, or, in a five test series, assuming nine or ten at-bats, you are going to suffer, logically, about three batting collapses.
If this premis holds water, could I then suggest that it was Mike Hussey what lost the Ashes?