England V Sri Lanka - First Test at Cardiff 26-30 May

[Red Bear]

lol, Indias pace attack? Zaheer Khan and not much else.

World bowling stocks are shithouse at present. Saffers two very good bowlers, England have a few, then there is Kemar Roach and Zaheer Khan. That is about it.

Australia have a few potentially fairly good and a couple who on their day are good, but no one with any consistency.

As for spinners, Swann, occasionally Singh, bout it really

 

[Hallatia]

I agree that England are better captained than South Africa at the moment, but that's about all I'll concede.

In their last 14 tests - which is all RSA has played since 09/10, they have retired Ntini and had 4 seamers debut. The most capped since being Tsotsobe who has better first class stats than England's top 3 seamers. He hasn't however performed overly well at test level where he has only played 5 tests, which aren't an awful lot to judge from. Tsotsobe has played 20 ODIs and his figures there are fantastic.

The other 3 are McLaren, de Wet and Parnell who have played 1,2 and 3 tests respectively. McLaren has great FC figures but was pretty ordinary in his one test. de Wet was fantastic in his first test and should have gotten a 5fer too (damn Smith and his wanting to give Ntini the match winning wicket in his 100 game and Saffas ended up losing the test too *RAAAAAAGE*), he's playing for Hampshire at the moment and doing well, but he'll be 31 soon. Parnell is the youngest of these three and has played internationally most recently - he does okay without doing fantastically, but I can tell that South African coaches/selectors/etc see more in him than I do.

 

[Patorick]

Go Sri Lanka!

 

[Hallatia]

Go Sri Lanka!

*like*
and second test starts this evening - wooooooooo. I freaking love test cricket

 

[Sudhir]

lol, Indias pace attack? Zaheer Khan and not much else.

To be honest, without Zaheer Khan, we're probably behind both South Africa and England

 

[Red Bear]

Just cold hard truth. Even with Zaheer Khan you're behind those two, especially outside of India. Although a very good batting lineup still helps your cause.

 

[Hallatia]

I have always thought that India have the best batting line up in the world. But, I am sure spending so much time in subcontinent batting conditions inflated batting averages and helped give the confidence to be what they are.

Oh and Sehwag's batting style is a blight on the game.

 

[Sudhir]

Oh and Sehwag's batting style is a blight on the game.

Que? :?

 

[Hallatia]

I know it gets him heaps of runs and perhaps that should be what matters, but this is cricket not baseball. He gets his runs at the expense of everything other than getting them, it is not good to watch and it is even worse to try to learn from.

 

[Twizzle]

Que? :?

if you had kids or were coaching kids, would you want them copying his technique ?