Ashes 2025-26.

[sussexpob]

Crawley - With no trigger and an open stance, Crawley's technique is set up to pick length early, but he sacrifices ability to pick line. In order to get the front foot to the pitch, it has to come a long way across to "close" his stance, often he does not get far enough across and plays inside the line of the ball, bringing the outside edge into play.... This error is hugely problematic v left arm pacers, he averages only 8 per wicket against them (and not even the majority of those wickets are Starc, so this predates this series). This is because the ball angling across him means he has even more tendency to under-estimate how much he needs to come across to play the correct line.... Foot is planted on middle instead of off stump, plays the wrong line, curtains.

After posting this after the 4th test, I read that Crawley shifted his guard further to the offside.... Going to send Bazza my CV.

By putting his back foot further out he simply compounded the issue, and when stepping into the ball just changed which edge of the bat it was likely to beat. Here is a thought... why not ditch the weird chest on, legs akimbo stance that hasn't worked for 65 tests and adopt something that is more normal?

[Durhamfootman]

McC says there may be someone better suited to take charge if he isn't allowed to 'steer the ship'

which goes back to Dobell's recent suggestion that the ECB putting pressure on him to change his methods may simply be a ruse to try and get him to resign

He can stay as long as he changes some of his methodology, but he seems to say that he has no intention of doing so...... and indeed, did anybody really think he would?

If he's still around for the NZ test series, I'll eat my hat

[meninblue]

The Rankings of the England test team in recent years says it all. As England has not qualified for last two WTC finals and also are very likely to not qualify for the finals of current WTC finals, the current selection panel and the management team should be changed.

[alfie]

To think 3rd umpire should have given that one , as the quite significant , though not sharp , murmur came precisely as ball passed bat. Hard to see what else could have caused it at that exact moment - and certainly we've seen similar murmurs adjudged enough evidence in this series

I am not having a go at you Alfie, but discussions about the size or shape of the murmur shown on screen are the reason why we have so many problems. There really is no room for interpretation for anyone, its a completely binary decision. If there is a sound registered, its out. I dont care if its a barely detectable murmur, a big spike or the oscillator forms the shape on an elephant, the system is designed to detect a sound, the oscillator shows the sound... if it moves, its out. End of story.

The umpire has no right to make a judgement on the sound wave produced, because what he is seeing is not the sound of the edge; he is seeing the portion of the sound that has beaten the filter to block background noise out, the part of the sound that is unique to the edge. This could be anything, it depends on the sound. But in some cases what you might be left with is a unique frequency range at very low volume being the differentiator.... the resultant sound passing the filter barely registers, but its visible. People seem to think they need to see towering spikes or huge obvious sounds, I would guess because snicko has matured over the years and the waves you see are more heavily filtered and precise.

Think of it like a band. A bass drum and Bass Guitar tend to both be loudest around 80-100hz, with a chunky rhythm guitar also overlapping in the low to mid hz range. If you wanted to filter all the places these three instruments clash and hear the part unique to the drum, the resultant sound will be a white-noisey, barely registerable high-frequency click. It wont matter if the drummer is pounding the skin of his drum, the filter is removing all the loud parts and just returning the barely audible part of the sound that is unique.

There isn't really any reason why we even need to see the wave. Just pass the filtered sound through a noise gate that removes any sound at background levels, and hook it to a light that triggered when noise passes through. Does a red light turn on when the ball passes that bat? Yep... you gone.

I could design such a system in 3 minutes.

??? Not sure why you think I was disagreeing with any of that ? Although perhaps you don't and were just using my comment as a platform for some scientific music related stuff that I think we have read before

It was my contention - which I think I made clear enough - that it was ample evidence of an edge regardless of the "shape" of the signal which is why I was astonished it wasn't given. Never mind band comparisons I absolutely agree that a sound is a sound.

Have seen claims from some that the murmur might have been caused by something else other than bat on ball but since there was no issue of bat scraping ground or hitting pad I am at a loss to know what the (very experienced !) third umpire was thinking.

I think for once we are on exactly the same page on this one