The Ashes are over for now. 5 nil, for only the 2nd time in history.
A fair result?
Moan, make excuses, defend your favourite players. Praise the best. Do it all here.
I think that England are actually a bit unlucky to lose by such a margin, as there have been several worse England touring teams that have only lost 3-1 or 2-1. But, in a nutshell, their batsmen just didn't score enough runs.
Australia's top 7 (excluding Damien Martyn) all scored at least one century in the series, and even Shane Warne chipped in with a 71 in his final innings.
England only had 4 players who managed to score a ton. Cook, Bell, Collingwood and KP. Their tail collapsed quickly almost every innings and their 'keepers hardly troubled the scorers. In the Ashes of 2005 the English tail wagged hard and scored a lot of valuable runs and really made a big difference to the final result.
The bowling of Australia was consistent and as a result made regular breakthroughs. For England, Hoggard was great and Monty a handful in one innings, Flintoff tailed off after a good start and the others were mainly anonymous. It will be interesting to see the fallout in the England camp upon returning. I don't think wholesale changes will be made, but I don't expect to see Flintoff captaining again, as it seems to have been an unsucessful experiment.
Sad to see the backs of McGrath, Warne, Langer and Martyn too. All superb players, the batsmen very underrated in my opinion.
It's obviously disappointing. Once we suffered that second innings collapse at Adelaide it really seemed there was no way back. After all the second inning at the GABA, 350 or so, showed a bit of fight. I think that is in fact the major disappoint. Winning was always going to be a really big "ask" but the craven performance from Adelaide 2nd inns on was really back to the bad old days.
Even when we won the Ashes, and deservedly, it was clear that the overall batting performance of a team needed a lot of work, but very little progress has been made. Bell's improved, but the whole concept of partnership building, batting together etc. was almost nowhere to be found except of course the fantastic Collingwood & Pietersen effort.
At the end of that day England were really it seemed to me praising themselves and getting overconfident. I think the approach of the two teams was a big factor just as in 2005. Then England with Vaughn in charge, fought and fought without taking things for granted. This time we either didn't have the form to put our plans in to practice, or just weren't as well prepared.
We may well have wanted it more in 2005. The Aussies definitely did this time round.
I do think they should bring back Darren Gough and Mark Ramprakesh, scrap the one-dayers, and offer Ozzies the best of 11!
__________________
You will play better Today than you did Yesterday, and almost as much as you will Tomorrow
El Presidente wrote: The Ashes are over for now. 5 nil, for only the 2nd time in history.
Any thoughts on the series?
-- Edited by El Presidente at 09:39, 2007-01-05
Close this F^&%^&^ thread !
__________________
Steve Fish
President/Coach/#17
Sportno Drustvo Ljubljana Dragons Lacrosse Club
Dergomaska 39
Podutik 1000
Ljubljana
Slovenija
Tel: 040 636730
E-mail : ljubljana.lacrosse@volja.net
web: http://users.volja.net/lacrosse/
