Posted by Big innings, bigger innings, small innings, smaller innings. That used to the be the sequence for a Test match taking place in India. Declarations happened a lot.
Australia just made 451 and it seems a good score, but it wasn’t so long ago you’d be thinking that a team had been skittled if it had only made 451. These sorts of matches still happen, of course. England made over 400 in the first innings of the fourth and fifth Tests last year and lost both by an innings.
Surveying the third Test between India and Australia, it seems like a reversion to the archetype. But how can we be sure? Those old Magic Eye pictures never revealed themselves when you tried to will them to. You just had to chill out and wait and hope that your Zen-like staring-into-the-middle-distance state would do the job before you.
So we’re going with that. We’re adopting a Zen-like, coffee-drinking, reading other news, maybe popping out for a couple of pints later and possibly buying some fried chicken state. All will become clear.
Meanwhile we now have irrefutable proof that we soft, inhospitable southerners are better…
…by which I mean orders of magnitude better…
…than those gritty, but friendly, northerners, in the matter of playing cricket.
But did we really need to shlep all those people out to the Gulf of Arabia to demonstrate something that all of us, deep in our hearts as well as in our heads, already knew?
According to Hayden, Hazelwood has been bowling unrelentlessly. Why do people let Hayden near a mic?
Because it’s funny, we suppose.