Every 5-10 days we have the same argument and I don’t see either of us changing our stance. You did well to get me to admit that I thought Joyce was a prick for the comments he made the other day.
You see you opened the door and now I’m trying to force my argument in there. It will come to pass.
Ireland are 6/1 on Paddy Power and apparently 14/1 on BetFair. Waiting to see how the toss goes and what the weather’s like before doing any bets.
England won the toss and chose to bat. Let’s get this Joyce lad out early doors. Come on the Ireland.
Umpires: B R Doctrove, S J A Taufel
Ireland: J P Bray, W T S Porterfield, E J G Morgan, N J O’Brien, K J O’Brien, A C Botha, D T Johnston, W K McCallan, A R White, D Langford-Smith, W B Rankin
England: M P Vaughan, E C Joyce, I R Bell, K P Pietersen, P D Collingwood, A Flintoff, R Bopara, P A Nixon, S I Mahmood, J M Anderson, M S Panesar
JOYCE GONE!!!1
Boyd Rankin just took his off stump out of the ground.
YYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
Trying to get on The Guardian’s over-by-over coverage with this effort:
‘Ed Joyce, Wrong Choice. Ed Joyce, Wrong Choice. Ed Joyce, Wrong Choice!!!’
Repeat to fade!!!
I was hoping these arrogant, patronising quotes would come back to haunt him:
‘All the minnows can create a lot of problems if they get on top of you, but if you get on top of them they have not got a lot to come back with,’ he said.
‘We’ve shown that against Canada and Kenya and hopefully we’ll also show that against Ireland as well.’
Well, you won’t be showing it anyway, Ed.
Come on the Ireland.
Rankin bowling beautifully but Langford-Smith seems very nervous and has been quite loose.
Half their runs are wides.
Absolutely superb. Other cricket fan in here came jogging over to tell me the news. Delighted for Judas.
Now come on Ireland"!!!
Vaughan gone too now! Superb stuff from Rankin.
Bell gone now. 89-3 after 22 or thereabouts.
Missed all of our bowling effort after the initial 6 or 7 overs but we had them at 170/5 after 40 overs and they ended up adding another 90 runs in the last 10 overs. The bowling at the death allowed them to post 30 runs more than we wanted and made the chase harder for us. Rankin had cramps and couldn’t come back to finish his last 3 overs which was a blow in that we couldn’t alternate our bowlers when they were toiling at the end.
The chase was an admirable enough effort. We lost it by an inability to get runs while their spinners were bowling. They weren’t taking a lot of wickets but we’re inexperienced at facing quality spin bowlers, like Panesar, and were unable to work the ball around. We were only going along at 3 an over when facing the spinners and that wasn’t good enough in the circumstances. It might have been worth bringing Trent, who showed his power and ability to hit 6s, in earlier to improve the scoring rate. We lost our momentum with Botha and Kev O’Brien going slowly and had too much to do when TJ came in. Good knock by Niall O’Brien though.
No shame at all in the performance and we can build on it against South Africa tomorrow.
I think while Panesar certainly slowed us down what crippled us was the fact that they got Vaughan on the other end to do the same. It was one thing being tied down by Panesar’s quality but there was an absence of aggression when facing Vaughan. I read one report which was praising England for introducing Vaughan and basically saying that England were content for us to push the ball around and score in singles when Vaughan was bowling. Perfectly true but it’s only half the story. We weren’t even scoring singles off him.
That said we didn’t disgrace ourselves in either innings and there was certainly 10 overs at the end of our bowling that changed the game utterly.