2015 Ashes

A 'quality' wicket of the kind the oval has always produced and which over the years has produced some classic FIVE day matches. One of my most enjoyable days ever at a test was spent with hh watching gavaskar score 220 on the fifth day at the oval in 1979.

You are surely in a minority of one if you want another pitch that means

Did something go tits-up Borderman? It may have been a decent 2000th but not sure it deserved to be integrated into your 2001st. Never seen anyone do that before. Dumb dumb.

Anyway hey if it's a quality five day game then great, but if it's a five day game like Cardiff or Lord's, no thanks, I'll switch back to Absolute Radio - the 90s. As long as the game has something for both bowlers and batters it can last as long or short as necessary for me buddy boy.

Probably one of those devilish English pitches.

GD in his space-filling, "what angle can I use to churn out 1000 words on this?" mood in this much too self-congratulatory piece www.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/story/911185.html#all

"It should be a celebration, too, of the 18-county system that enabled Stuart Broad to learn his trade as a new ball bowler with Leicestershire at a time when a bigger club might have been reluctant to give him such responsibility. It should be a celebration of the 18-county system that enabled Moeen Ali to develop as a spin bowler at a time when his opportunities might have been blocked elsewhere and a celebration of the decision, just over two decades ago, to grant first-class status to Durham. Would Stokes or Mark Wood have had the opportunity to develop as professional cricketers otherwise?"

The "celebration" is a little premature in any case, since the opposition really has been dreadfully poor, notwithstanding any arguments for home pitches. The same arguments used to advance the celebrity of Broad and Ali, Stokes and Wood could easily be employed to argue for the ineffectiveness of Buttler - not quite a Test batsman yet, certainly not quite a Test wicket-keeper - and the striking fact that the county that has won 8 out of its 11 championship games has contributed two players who have definitely shown the gap between championship and Test cricket in Lyth and Ballance, with Bairstow Mark Two yet to face a really serious examination.

The fact is that in any year arguments can be produced to say how good or bad the championship system is in producing Test players precisely according to how well the Test team is selected, coached and captained. Good players have been produced by Northants and Leicester, but the system that GD praises so much has ensured that they head off to the wealthier and better-performing counties. That is merely a modern market-based spin on the old status quo of the 17 counties where Test caps went to the players who were regularly seen by selectors (think Middlesex above all, and the traditional Test grounds) and the pros contracted to the shire counties and others were hardly ever considered; players like Maurice Hallam, Terry Spencer, Keith Andrew, a host of others from Glamorgan and Derbyshire hardly ever got recognition and spent their careers with one county because there was no opportunity to move, being tied to contracts by wilful county committees. The county system harboured them and they flourished within it but there was no benefit to England at a time when so many lesser players had lengthy Test careers in that long interregnum between Hutton, Compton and Bedser, and the Illingworth, Underwood, Knott and Snow teams.

This England side today will be better judged after the much more exacting tours to the Gulf and to South Africa. The first will feature another variant on home advantage, the latter should offer some bouncier pitches and without a doubt the strongest batting around. There will be plenty of congratulations if they come through that encounter successfully, and that will be an appropriate time to think about how effective "18 counties" is as a guarantor of Test match quality.

As you said, the celebration was entirely premature. We'll have to agree to disagree if you think that Buttler is a Test class batsman and wicketkeeper.

It was a propaganda piece, the latest exercise in "everything in the garden is lovely and don't you dare touch our precious 18 county jewel in the crown". It advances no specific arguments as to why the "system" rather than inspired coaching of talented individuals should produce winning sides, ignoring the fact that the same system 4 months ago produced the shambles in the Caribbean. Jonathan Trott is a product of the county championship system, and so is Joe Root, but there the resemblance ends. There are lots of good things about the county game but it is absurd and triumphalist on the back of two wins against a side floundering through poor technique to claim that the result vindicates the whole structure of the game.

Yesterday, on another grassy pitch, in lowering conditions for the first hour, the Australians struggled again, but learned their lesson rather better, and when they did make the inevitable false strokes, it was after each of them, except for the benighted Clarke, had made a reasonable innings. England didn't get the luck with the nicks and bowled too much on a good length to get the LBW's:result a formidable Australian total is forming. That is not a vindication of the Sheffield Shield any more than a condemnation of the county championship.

Well, that were crap