India tour of Eng, June 20 - Aug 4

[sussexpob]

Yeah, this is ridiculous. Embarrassing... Crawley just middled that, and is claiming he was hit on the glove

[Arthur Crabtree]

I was really hoping Crawley got out to the last ball.

[sussexpob]

We have lost a whole session of this game in three days to slow play, and after that England felt it appropriate to kill 2 extra overs by purposefully refusing to get set and ready to face?

Nasser Hussain said it was 3 minutes India waited after taking the field on time. As far as I am concerned, both openers should be timed out and sent back, bring in 3 and 4. Thats the rules, isnt it? You cant just sit in the Pavillion refusing to come out and play because its difficult at the end of the day. And then Crawley pulling away FOUR TIMES when Bumrah was trying to bowl. The ICC need to dish him out a ban for the rest of the series, because its beyond a joke at this point. If Zak doesn't want to get set, then let Bumrah bowl at thin air. Bowler ready, game on. Batsman job is to be ready to face.

Something has to be done. If this ends with India 8 or 9 down on Day 5, then it willbe a disgrace.

And we can moan about the umpires not having the tools to combat it. Well they gave multiple warnings to England in Edgbaston for slow play without ever actually giving a penalty. Why? Why have their been no warnings in this game, we have less than 75 overs yesterday? And as I said, if a batsman aint there 3 minutes after he should be, then time him out.

Give it 1 test match, 90 overs will be bowled everyday

[Arthur Crabtree]

Stokes says England have a disadvantage because they bowl a lot of pace! Might as well have said 'who cares?' But of course, it's not just England.

[Durhamfootman]

As Dobell says again and again..... make the ECB repay 1/90th of the ticket price to the spectators for every over not bowled and the problem disappears overnight. Most tickets are paid for online so it isn't even hard to automatically refund. Obviously weather is a different matter altogether

[Durhamfootman]

I came in tonight to find that India lost 4 wickets in 6 overs for 11 runs. They've done this before

[Durhamfootman]

Red card?

Back to Kent?

[Durhamfootman]

If he doesn't make a big score, they'll drop Crawley after this test and bring Bethell in

that's what my gut is telling me, anyway

[sussexpob]

Stokes says England have a disadvantage because they bowl a lot of pace! Might as well have said 'who cares?' But of course, it's not just England.

England were sanctioned 5 times in the last WTC round for slow over rates.... half the teams got no sanctions, and no other team had more than one. So England are clearly the worst offenders....

[Arthur Crabtree]

Fair enough. It's a while since I saw live cricket, but one of the last times I did was an England tour of India where players would take unscheduled breaks, where they would just stop playing. Tests in England have not been getting the overs completed for a long time, and I've not noticed the opposition are any different, looking at the overs bowled by the close. I accept England are the worst, but they are not big outliers.

[sussexpob]

The absence of common sense with most of these situations just show how ingrained in the culture its become, including the umpires. The press and social media are on fire about slow play this test after yesterday, and within Archer's first over he was already at the umpire about the ball. The umpire then passed it through the ring about 20 times - if it fit once, then why check again? So we waste another 90 seconds. Within the first 15 minutes Rahul had an energy gel brought on, Archer had the ball checked twice, Pant had the physio come give his finger a spray.... and then the first drinks break lasted 8 minutes!!! In that drinks break, we got another ball change. The umpires waited till everyone was ready to resume, then called out a box of balls - the box had numerous balls that didn't fit in the rings

It just went on all day. Reddy got wrapped on the head about 2 minutes before tea, and rather than call tea and let the player do his checks and get a new bonnet, out came the medical team to do the check. And then after a delay of another couple of overs worth of cricket, they hadn't brought out a new helmet to him even though its now mandatory to change it. So once again, check over after 10 minutes, now lets wait for some daft prat to remember to bring him out a helmet.... which itself would be crazy, but then one of the people who came out to the middle was left fiddling with the helmet grill for a minute before actually signaling he needed a new one (which I say again, is now mandatory so the check was redundant).

At one point, Archer even got near to his delivery stride and Ben Stokes was shouting and waving at him to pull out his run up so he could move his cover fielder 0.5 meters to the right

And then the final over of the day .... the commentators on the BBC and SKY seem to think it was box office. I was more inclined to want to throw my tv out the window. Just embarrassing.

How do you sell this sort of thing to people? Lets go to Lords, we can pay 150 quid for a ticket, 14 quid for a pint, 34 quid for the worlds worst burger, and then get to see a 60 year old guy pushing a ball through a small hoop for 30 minutes.

[Arthur Crabtree]

I don't think it's any worse now. It's not an issue for the players and the arcane culture of the game prevails.

[Durhamfootman]

and yet when it rained on the final day at Edgbaston, they took lunch at about quarter to 3, so after rain they wanted to try and make amends and cut down as far as possible on lost play. That was the one time that it was sort of one of those things..... rain happens, play stops


and it's definitely worse than it ever used to be.... even after I've taken off my rose tinted nostalgia glasses

[Durhamfootman]

I believe that trading standards ought to get involved. It might not say 90 overs on the ticket, but everyone knows that is, so to then get 73 overs or whatever it was yesterday, without a drop of rain in sight, is the cricket equivalent of being sold something underweight.

After the first test, Stokes made a big fuss about the importance of keeping tests at 5 days after years of talk about reducing them to 4 days. Well, the way things are going they might have to make tests 6 day affairs, just to squeeze in the number of overs that county sides have to fit into 4 days or face point reductions

It takes so long to bowl an over in Test cricket these days, that it's like IPL on steroids

[Arthur Crabtree]

and it's definitely worse than it ever used to be.... even after I've taken off my rose tinted nostalgia glasses

There was no minimum overs at one time. If a team was struggling they'd kill the game. Remember WI infamous 8 overs/hour?

We dreamed of 73 overs in a day!