rollingstoned

agreed, they have sucked at using the new ball without fail almost every single time i've seen them recently. pakistan may not find the going easy at home in pakistan compared to uae where they had perfected playing an attritional brand of cricket on those slow tracks.

it is supposed to be shown on ten 2 but can't see it.

it is not about how crazy people are in a country about a game, talk was about population and attendant expectations. beyond a point a 200mn country with a cricket crazy population will also hit a ceiling where it's population will provide it with an advantage, eg bangladesh and pakistan. you will only have so many people playing a sport in any country regardless of it's size, it is just economics. in australia, new zealand and england cricket is a summer sport. not something that no body cares about exactly. you should see the tv ratings for every important series there. what the

Arun is definitely the pick of our coaches, has been for sometime with the improvements we have seen to our fast bowling. People may not like shastri but there is a reason he insisted on having him as part of his staff. Guys like rathour we can only speculate about, i used to think bangar was a good batting coach until i had my doubts when i saw him as an expert say that he was one of the people who asked the team to bat slowly in the pp overs.

harsha wishes he could analyse technique and batting the way knight did the bygone series. he is only a column writer who somehow landed a commentary gig. it becomes more evident with every penstroke and every sentence he utters on air. a turn of phrase isn't as useful when you need to also incorporate silence with the words.

Which went against conventional wisdom that quicker you bowl through the air the less spin and purchase you will get out of the wicket. People made the mistake of pigeonholing jadeja as a darter for a long time. However not every bowler who bowls like that will be successful.

If we do not lose a test match in this series i will be impressed. After winning both wcs we got thrashed in tours. Getting your head back in the game is easier said than done.

Tbf to nadeem he had to get in ahead of ashwin, jadeja and mishra. It is like saying that herath was lacking something when he was not picked in the sl team. Jadeja got a chance after our old spin quartet failed against england in 2012 and he was performing well in domestic. He scored a 300 and had an impressive game against tripura if I remember correctly so it was not some pick out of the blue. I'm not against left field selections and picks for the record. I believe one or 2 of those helped us win the australia series.

That wasn't his point. He is not saying that he should take 400 wickets in a much smaller sample size, just that the sample size difference must be accounted for when you do a like for like comparison and due consideration should be paid to someone who has been performing for a longer period of time in domestic cricket. I have nothing against axar though it seems like he will get picked for being able to bat a bit.

Knight is a good commentator, don't know why people here are panning that. Butcher isnt a bad commentator either tbh. Gavaskar and siva are decent commentators depending on where they commentate.

Umesh and shami are well suited to sg ball.bowling and will.be big misses. I'm not sure how we will stop root from sweeping though, a reason we had success against smith was because those easy runs on the leg side were blocked off. Root isn't as patient a batsman but is harder to keep.quite definitely. If we pre empt the scoring areas it will indicate we are afraid of him while the opposite should be true in India even with jadeja missing. We have to.hope axar does a decent jadeja impression when he plays.

yes but in our defence we have enough first class teams for it. my point is it is the law of diminishing returns applies at some point. you cannot max out your population output beyond a point. brazil having several times the population of some of those european teams doesn't mean they would be that many times better at football even at their best. anyways cricket is not a poor man's sport like football is, traditionally only middle class people at worst could afford to allow their kids to play it.

root sweeps better than anyone from the subcontinent. it is something we will have to think about going into this series, none of our batsmen look that good when sweeping.

beyond a point your population isn't going to matter that much. just coz we have 50 times australia's population doesn't mean there are an equivalent number of international class cricketers playing the game at any point of time in the country even with a good system. this is something people who wish to use the population as a stick to beat us with don't understand.

he made runs even last time but not impactful ones and got out between 50-100 a few times. his maiden series in india when england took advantage of a transitional era was also a good one.