Posted by The First Crowd-Free T20 International between England and Australia saw the home team engineer a position where they would have to play very well and Australia very badly to secure their desired result.
England did their bit and so too did Australia, in large part thanks to David Warner’s nondescript 58 off 47 balls.
“It was the first time I’ve been here and not got abuse. It was quite nice,” said the opener afterwards.
There’s long been this idea that David Warner plays better when everyone abuses him, even though there have been countless occasions when even the mere perception of an argument has caused him to self-destruct. But maybe there’s a happy medium. If his soporific performance in this match is anything to go by, maybe he needs just enough booing to keep him awake.
Australia captain Aaron Finch had a different view on why his team lost though.
“T20 games are about making sure you take on your options and matching that up with the right gameplan,” he explained.
It is not clear at this point whether Australia failed to ‘take on their options’ or whether they failed to match the taking on of their options with the right gameplan.
If they can work out which and also what that actually means then expect them to come back strongly in the next game.
I’m not sure anyone else has written about what a waste of time Warner’s innings was. It didn’t seem so bad at the time until nobody else was able to get in.
I suppose it depends whether you think the bigger problem was the 47th ball, or the 46 balls before that…
If he’d got out for 23 off 10 instead, which is not a bad T20 innings by a top-order batsman in most circumstances, would Australia have been more or less likely to lose the match? The way everyone else batted, I have mixed feelings about whether the luxury of a few more balls to get in would have helped them that much.
Does he need elite booing to get himself going?
Do your readers really NEED metaphysics on a Saturday afternoon in these unprecedented times, KC?
And there was me thinking that David Warner was the quintessential Berkeley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley
We can be sure that Australia lost because of the bollocks that Finch came up with to explain said loss. Actually we thought Finch came across surprisingly well.
Warne & KP came across as “a right pair of twerps” though, to quote Daisy.
Ian Ronald Bell announces retirement at the end of this season. Can you continue to have no opinion about Bell, KC…can you?
https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/ian-bell-for-england-good-or-bad/2009/07/23/
Your subjects demand to know what to think.
Well batted, Ian Ronald. One of the good guys.
At some point we’re going to have to write something about this, we suppose.
You might be able to get away with it being a ‘last to retire from 2005’ so you can actually spend the whole post/article talking about Flintoff and Pietersen, plus how strange it seems in retrospect that Anderson didn’t play in any of the Tests, without really having to form a proper opinion on Bell.
We get away with a lot on this site.
You came dangerously close to taking a request there, but did manage to duck at the last moment. Kudos.
Here is KC comparing Ian Bell to a wooden spoon & sam describing it as “the best analogy yet on this site”
https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/ian-ronald-bell-is-an-actual-hero/2010/01/07/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
There was always that sense, wasn’t there, that there was more to come, that it wasn’t a peak, a flash-in-the-pan, so to speak. And he has given us moments in the years since then, just nothing consistently good over a long period, no extended time when we could say, “He’s the man for the job, that’s for sure.”
I guess that’s what you were hoping for, Sam, when you said “best analogy yet.”