How big’s the dog? No sure who to back in this one.
Should have been called dead ball that movement from Pope imo - the law is an ass in that circumstance
He was probably hoping to get a few more wickets but, according to people who know the pitch, it’s supposed to get easier to bat on as it dries out so he may have had that in mind too.
No worries stokes will come in and smash 50 off 30?
To be fair, 99% of us would have been in favour of enforcing the follow on. The feeling was that the pitch would start getting easier to bat on.
Said to my dad before we bowled them out first innings that there's no way we should enforce the follow on with two ageing seamers as our main threat i felt that was the only way they could have won.
I'm all for the new positive and there are going to bumps in the road but I felt at the time unless there was going to be weather issues the positive option would have been to go in and thrash 200+ very quickly, give the bowlers a break and then go again. All semantics as they're instilling a philosophy and have done an amazing job. I just feel they opened a door that didn't need openingI'm not bothered at all by the declaration. We could very, VERY easily have won that game and I don't think it's fair to start throwing that around because we lost. That declaration was totally in line with how they approach games and IMO it's a bit unfair to start judging and complaining because it didn't work out on this occasion. How many times have we moaned about how they play it safe, this is exactly what we want and what cricket needs.
Surely, we all knew that occasionally this kind of thing will happen, this was a superb test match and luck just wasn't on our side, that's all. A great game played by two good teams, the series was a draw but IMO we had the better of it, what do they call it? A 'winning' draw? Anyway, the Ashes next. I'm actually looking forward to it. A year ago we'd have been filling our panties at the prospect
