Saturday, August 28, 2010

Broad as a batsman

Well more than anybody else, it looks as though my yesterday's post has been read by none other than the English captain Andrew Strauss and then decided not to gift their nation to Pakistan. The last time anybody could see such a mindblowing performance from the England side was in the Ashes last year when they hosted Australia. England came back from nowhere to win the ashes 2-1 after being 1-0 down in the initial stages of the tournament. The match that England lost to the Aussies was by a whooping innings margin after escaping from the clutches in the first test.

From then onwards, it was England all the way when they didn't lose a single game from then onwards. They drew one test and won two out of the remaining three against Australia all unexpectedly. Of course, England did win the title in 2005 by the same margin with the situation being the same almost. England were 1-0 down after losing the first test by 239 runs. But, that was just a fluke which is justified by the margin itself with the English team winning the second test by 2 runs and the fourth test by 3 wickets to take home the ashes after 20 long years.

England were chasing a total of just 125 in the third test at DASH and en route to their successful run chase lost 7 wickets in between. One can guess the situation had there been 30 more runs added to the target. So, according to me that performance does not go down as England's best performance till date. Instead, last year's Ashes win against an Australian team minus Shane Warne and Gilchrist was a better one and a deserving one too. The performance by the England team yesterday was even more worth cheering when not only did England rise from 102-7 at one stage but also it was Stuart Broad who settled the issue for his team.

Stuart Broad was until then known to be a bowler and remembered for the wrong reasons for getting belted by Yuvraj Singh for 6 sixes in an over in the inaugural world T20 in 2007. Still, it would be wrong to rate him as an under achiever as a bowler. The century by Broad went on to become a 150 by a tail end batsman. Scorecard suggests that Broad came in at number 9 in the batting order and for him to do the job on a pitch that suits bowlers is indeed praise worthy. Broad might not be able to bowl the way he batted yesterday. I compare Broad with gadgets that does something efficiently for which it was not designed.

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