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Having woken at 5:15am and struggled to get back to sleep I thought I would get up and see what fun the cricket would bring.  So bleary eyed I crawled out of bed at 6:15 and flicked the TV on with trepidation.  Immediately the screen was filled with a close up of Ricky Ponting the elf like Ozzie captain.  My immediate thought was that can’t be good if he is still in, naturally assuming they must have won the toss.  Then my eyes scanned the graphic at the bottom of the screen.  39/1 - still half asleep I thought well that’s not too bad.  Then my fuddled brain took in the “Australia need 72 to win from 42.3 overs” and after some quick maths, the scale of the disaster hit me, waking me up better than a large shot of expresso. 

Once again England have failed to bat the full 50 overs - in fact it soon became clear they had failed to bat even  35 overs, and had lost 8 wickets for 38 runs or 5 for 7 (I’m not sure which sounds better or indeed worse).  For some reason I felt obliged to sit and watch Ponting and Hayden stroll to the total, almost like watching a wounded animal being put out of it’s misery.  Buchanon and Ponting are now complaining about the lack of competition by way of preperation for the World Cup, and to be fair they would probably get more competition from my local village side.  I have always been optimistic about English and British sport, trying to put a positive spin on even the worse results, but even I am finding it hard to find anything positive in this  current tour.  It’s difficult to know where the problems lay other than in the mind.  On the practical side, a good place to start might be to try and see out the full number of overs when batting first, even if posting a small(ish) total.  At least that would give something to build on and more to the point give the paying public some sort of value for money.  The 34000 spectators today have been robbed of over 40 overs cricket - maybe the ECB should refund 40% of the ticket fee.  The lack of atmosphere around the ground was deafening in it’s silence, with a lot of people leaving at the interval, presumably to go and watch some paint dry.  The defeat was made even harder to watch, with the lack of pride being shown in the field.  England managed to cap a woeful batting performance with misfields, over throws and pretty tame bowling, with the only wicket coming from a run out.  If that hadn’t happened it could have all been over inside 15 overs with Gilchrist scoring for fun. 

I’m not one to call for heads to roll, but there has to be some sort of shake up before the World Cup. If nothing else it might re-energise a badly battered team so low on confidence. 

The worst thing about the whole sorry saga is that in a moment of frivilous abandon I put £10 of England last week at 7/1 to win the series, believing it couldn’t get any worse and that they would turn a corner after beating NZ.  I might as well have taken it out and set fire to it.  At least my brother, who is currently in Melbourne and has a ticket for the 3rd final game will get his money back!