Martin’s Blog

I very much enjoyed the Sri Lankan bowling lineup this morning. They opened with a medium pacer and a left arm spinner. Then it got weird:

- Isuru Udana. A left arm medium fast bowler who at one point bowled 6 back of the hand slower balls in a 7 ball over.
- Ajantha Mendis. A mystery spinner. Like most mystery spinners most of his deliveries go straight.
- Lasith Malinga. A sidearm slinger.
- Murali. The original freak, he seems quite normal these days.

So with Australia out, I’ll be following the Lankan’s. Some of these bowlers have already been figured out by various teams but in one off games they are pretty threatening.

I”ve been watching the IPL a little bit (David Hussey is going off right now for KKR) and my biggest problem is that we don’t get to see all the international players – Glenn McGrath hasn’t played a game in the whole competition!

So two solutions:
- get rid of the limit of four international players. I don’t really buy that the IPL is an Indian domestic competition.
- allow substitution. It would change the game a bit but I don’t think mildly restricted substitution would be a big problem. One way to do it would be to allow you to only replace a player who hadn’t batted or bowled yet. I’d like to be able to replace a bowler after one or two overs and have his replacement bowl three or two but this seems difficult to make work properly (you could bowl McGrath for 3 overs, then replace him with albie morkel for one over and in the batting order). Maybe if you replace someone who has bowled it only counts for the bowling innings and the bowler has to bat anyway?

Any thoughts?

There won’t be any specialist spin bowling in the Australian team for a while…

I don’t like it but the best bet for the Ashes is to play 4 quicks with North, Clarke and Katich to provide the spin bowling. The only question is if McDonald is worth picking as a bowler. If Clark is back I’d play him instead but I’m kind of warming to playing a medium pace bowler. He gets through overs at a decent pace, makes the batsman play, keeps the runs down. It’s pretty boring but I can see why medium pace bowlers used to be valuable.

Edited to Add: The other thought I have is wondering how bad Haddin’s keeping is? I didn’t watch last night but he gave up 19 byes in the innings. I don’t know enough about keeping to really judge it but people say Hartley is good. He averages only 28 with the bat in FC cricket but I think it’s feasible that he could save an extra 25 runs a game with the gloves (a catch plus 10 byes say) and that would make him basically as good. And with Johnson and McDonald he could bat at number 8 or 9.

The team sucks at the moment. But I don’t really have any answers aside from picking Katich in the one day team (surely in current form he’s more likely to score a run a ball century than any of Warner, Hussey, Hussey, White, Ferguson, Voges…)

I agree entirely with the test team to tour South Africa. It’s not a particularly good team but it’s the best they could have done.

What we need are these people who have dominated state cricket for years to come in and dominate international cricket: D. Hussey, White and Haddin just haven’t been the world beaters that M. Hussey and Clark were immediately upon coming into the team.

Alternatively Ponting, Clarke, Johnson etc need to start winning games for us with amazing personal performances.

Alternatively, the Aussies just need to play as well as they did when they lost those games to SA. New Zealand probably can’t chase 270 but we haven’t asked them to yet.

p.s. lol at England

Two batsman are on 94 with 7 runs required to win and 2 balls remaining. How can they both score their centuries?

Have a go at this puzzle from MIT’s puzzle competition.

I’m close to a solution but I just can’t get Mike Hussey facing at the start of Patel’s overs like I need to. Frustrating…