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Australia have brought in four players and nothing has changed. This series could serve as a case study for sporting depression and panic.
Rational decision-making has gone out the window at every level, from selectors down to players and it’s formed a vicious circle. Players aren’t sure of their places and are playing accordingly. No-one seems to have confidence in anyone else.
On the field, we today saw several Australian batsmen playing really ill-advised shots. Sometimes things go against you as a batsman, but you have to trust your method. In their current frame of mind, the Australians can’t recognise this. In a bid to take control, they’re trying to do something – anything – different.
It’s change for change’s sake and when the new method fails, they change again, getting another step further away from what they should be doing.
This is basically what’s happening with selectors, captain, batsmen, bowlers and fielders at the minute and it’s a unique feature of cricket how this can grow over the long hours and days of a Test series.
Changing the players won’t help. It’ll only compound the problem.
Sigh, if you guys managed Australia we’d win The Ashes. I suggest a career change.
Please?
If we managed Australia, we’d have grown frustrated with other people sounding self-important by now and would have stormed out to take up a more solitary career, such as writing.
If we managed Australia we would open the bowling with Doherty and Beer & force Johnson to bowl with his doing arm.
If I managed Australia, I’d insist on hundreds of weekend-long team building exercises that coincidentally lookd like pub crawls.
I do manage Australia.
Oh right….that might be the problem
If I managed Australia, I’d give Ricky the team he wants.
KC, isn’t a simpler solution to just year large sound proof ear muffs or earplugs? Then you could still manage Australia and we would still win.
It’s a good plan with two major flaws.
One, people are generally annoying whether you can hear them or not. Granted, they’re less annoying when muted, but they’re still annoying.
Two, we’re English.
Damn it.
You’re heartless.
http://v4admin.sportnetwork.net/upload/66/66_0_1292515912.jpg
No KC, no need for panic and sporting depression in the Australian camp… Langer has the obvious answer – merely take soundbites from the England camp and Australianise/bastardise them.
Apparently Australia need to “arrest this momentum” (of England).
Not merely stop it. Nor stop and search it. But arrest it.
Always good to make a start on the Wisden Cricketer newsletter a few days early. Thanks SW.
Did anyone else notice that Chris Tremlett took a wicket in his first over of test cricket for three years? This implies that the English County set-up is a conveyor belt of cricketers ready-made for the international stage. If I were managing Australian cricket I would split each of the state sides into three bits, thus immediately increasing the opportunities for the selectors.
Bollocks. Changing worse players for better players works. Obviously. Nob.
Ged – your best venn yet. Keep up the good work.