Tell us more Bandage.
I remember we had Hanse Cronje there in the green for a while.
Bandage, tell us about Ryder. I’m intruiged.
Sorry, forgot to reply earlier. He signed as one of our overseas player to play in the one-day competitions that we enter against the English counties about 2 or 3 summers ago. Then he didn’t arrive on the scheduled date to join the camp and didn’t reply to any phonecalls or emails and didn’t even offer an apology for not fulfilling the contract. I think they’d paid him an upfront fee and they were struggling to get it back from the fat cunt at the time. I’ll google it and see if I can find anything.
presumed it was something like that…did you see the big red face on him after getting the century…he was out for 102 then!
Sachin is such a joy to watch. I hope he retires with more test hundreds than Ponting. Have been watching him bat tonight and it’s magnificent.
Despite a mass of extras and some incredibly shite Windie bowling, England’s middle order is falling apart. Mascheranas gone for nothing, 217-5.
Take this to some shitty pyjamas cricket thread please, Turenne! 
I see Sachin went for 160 last night after. India look set to wrap up a fairly straightforward victory there.
South Africa are also on course to secure a consolation victory against Australia in the final test of their 3-game series. It’s the exact opposite of the earlier series between them in Australia.
ODI’s come under pyjamas cricket?
English all out, Windies need 266 from 47 overs to win. Balls, Gayle gone, 6-1.
[quote=“Turenne”]ODI’s come under pyjamas cricket?
English all out, Windies need 266 from 47 overs to win. Balls, Gayle gone, 6-1.[/quote]
Here, were you watching it last night? I see the Windies coach made an absolute mess of the Duckworth/Lewis calculations to hand England the win.
England not having a great start against the Windies today. They were 90-1 after losing Strauss early on, then lost Cook and KP in successive deliveries from Edwards and Collingwood a few overs later. Bopara was lucky to survive an LBW shout as well. 109-4
England finished at 289-7. Bopara still there at 118. Fair play he took his chance well. Windies dropped a good few chances today.
Pretty eventful/odd day of cricket yesterday. England and Wales made 377 - Bopara was out for 143 and Swann had a decent knock lower down. Then Swann, the spinner, took the new ball and opened the bowling! Gayle was scoring at a cracking rate before Broad got him then Swann came back on and got 3 quick wickets. Onions was then introduced and his first two overs in test cricket went for 15 runs. He settled down a little bit after that before incredibly taking 3 wickets in his 6th over. He also got the last couple to end up with a Michelle on debut. Windies are following on and are already 2 down.
West Indies collapsed to 79-5, then a good recovery with half centuries from Nash and Ramdin brought them back. Ramdin just out for 61. West Indies 225-6. Scores level. England & Wales will surely wrap this up today.
Wrapped it up fairly quickly alright, set only 32 to win. Swann got MOTM, 63 runs, 6 wickets and 2 catches. Could be the end of Monty Panesar’s international career. Indies weren’t too pushed in this one though. Meanwhile Phil Hughes is scoring runs for fun for Middlesex in the County Championship, 195 today.
Article on Morgan from the Guardian:
Eoin Morgan leading the charge as the unorthodox becomes the new orthodox
The Middlesex batsman’s ability to improvise could place him at the forefront of England’s plans, and not just in Twenty20 games
The ball was going to pitch outside leg stump. The batsman anticipated this, switched his grip and set himself to play a reverse-sweep. The ball drifted wider away, too wide for the shot he had in mind. Instead, as it passed by, he swung the bat down vertically, inside-out, to flick away a single to fine leg.
The batsman in question was Eoin Morgan. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can see for yourself. It’s the last of the eight reverse shots in this highlights reel (see below). I’d be interested to hear if you’ve ever seen anything quite like it before. I’ve had a quick skim through my tattered copy of Don Bradman’s The Art Of Cricket, and found nothing close in there.
That clip is from his 161 against Kent at Canterbury on Monday. His century took 93 balls. He hit eight of those with a reversed grip, for a total of 17 runs. It was an audacious, impish innings, that defied the vocabularies of the assembled pressmen.
“What do you call that? A paddle-sweep?” grunted the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent.
“It’s more of a scoop” I proposed.
“I’d say it’s a shovel” shot back the news agency hack.
“Whatever it is, I’d love to know what Frank Woolley would have made of it,” observed the man from The Times. Again.
Morgan is 22. Aged 19, he made 99 on his debut for Ireland. After 23 ODIs (batting average 35), his career there is now over. He qualified for England last May. He’s always been admirably frank about his intentions to switch allegiance and the wait for qualification has obviously sharpened his ambition. He has slipped into the England squad almost unnoticed, his selection a little lost among the welter of other good stories at the start of an Ashes summer. If he bats against the West Indies in anything like the style he did on Monday, that’s going to change very quickly indeed.
To me, Morgan is the very model of a modern batsman. Once his approach would have been called ‘unorthodox’, but that label has become redundant. Orthodoxy stems from the idea of there being only one way to do things. Batting technique (in England especially) has always been predicated on matching the correct shot to the correct ball. CB Fry, who actually wrote the textbook, managed to break down a simple off-drive into six phases and 31 component movements (really), all of which need to be right for the stroke to be correct.
Now good attacking batsman must have more than one shot to play to every type of ball, and the decision as to which to use depends on the weaknesses in the field. The speed of scoring required in Twenty20 necessitates the new approach. Batting, now more than ever before, is something done through 360 degrees, with the scoop over slip and the switch-hit opening up new areas of the field. This is filtering into Test cricket. Brendan Nash, of all people, played an uppercut over Matt Prior’s head at Lord’s last week. Nash, like Morgan and so many other modern players, has developed different styles of play to suit the demands of different modes, but also allows some cross-over between them.
Morgan is among the first generation of players to grow up with Twenty20. The switch in style comes naturally to him. Twenty20 won’t just breed short-form specialists but also all-rounders. The best players will be able to thrive in all forms by adapting their games. Morgan is capable of playing with more sedate propriety – his first-class strike rate is only 51 – but he has a flip-side Mr Hyde who emerges when the time suits. His first 50 runs against Kent took 63 deliveries, his next 111 runs just 73. But yesterday the 62 he scored out of Middlesex’s 167 against Warwickshire took a full 110 balls. For Morgan Twenty20 is “where I like to express myself”, an approach he bluntly insists won’t change when he plays for England.
It’s a good thing he is so eloquent with the bat, because he clearly doesn’t go in much for expressing himself in words. His satisfaction at his 161 amounted to “it’s good to spend some time at the crease”, a description he was so happy with he used it twice.
Perhaps he was just knackered and freezing, or perhaps he is a thoroughly modern player off the pitch as well, too wary of the media to be forthcoming. He learned a lot about “the bright lights and TV cameras” during the 2007 World Cup. He had a bad tournament himself, with a top score of 28 against South Africa, but “as a 20-year-old being out there for those eight weeks taught me so much.” It was during that time, of course, that Ireland were briefly embroiled in the investigation into Bob Woolmer’s death.
“So will the fact that you’ve played so much for Ireland help you with England?” asked another journalist.
“To a certain extent it will. But if I hadn’t played I would say the opposite.”
“That?” he replied in his sharp Dublin accent when I asked about that reverse-drive, “Yeah I’ve done that before.”
“Do you practice it?”
“Yeah, I practice it. It’s for mistakes, when somebody doesn’t feed me the ball right, but I hit it anyway.”
“I’ve never seen it played before.”
“Oh.”
To Morgan, the shot could hardly have been less remarkable. For him, such invention is an everyday occurrence.
I was meaning to post on Morgan’s 161 the other day and Ed Joyce made a big hundred for Sussex on the same day. We need the ICC to help us out here or we’re forever going to be a feeder team/nation.
There’s about 2 hopes of that happening Bandage
Is Morgan Irish yeah?
Apparently, but he’s a traitor like…
It’s a farce of a system. There’s no international interest in developing Irish cricket and the big test nations with the big tv markets will just hoover up emerging talent from Afghanistan, Ireland, South Africa etc.