mebfeath | Australia 602 declared vs England 157 total

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How embarassing.

And why are we batting again? Why don't they just make them bat again and be done with it? I'm not really that up with cricket tactics...

Oh, and yes, I'm at work. Yipee. Entertain me!

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From:

kapitankraut.livejournal.com

It mightn't be entertaining, but I asked much the same question of Dad when he was around today, so I'll pass on the answers:

1. We've got Shane Warne. Warney is at his best in the fourth innings of a match. He's also at his best at the Gabba. He's also at his best against England. Yes, if only two of those criteria were in play he'd still be deadly, but why not give him the third one to play with?

2. England only made 157. It's not like we need to bat forever to reverse what they did (in fact, we did that and then some just before stumps).

3. Enforcing the follow-on is nice, but bowlers don't tend to like it. Someone like McGrath or Lee, who's just spent a tick under a day hurling down over after over is going to want at least some time to recover before doing it again in the fourth innings.

4. Very few teams have ever lost after enforcing the follow-on, but Australia has done so twice. Yes, there's still 445 runs at the end of the English innings to even make us bat again, but we famously made India follow on when they had 300+ more to make us bat again a few years ago - they not only made us bat again, but they won what is arguably the greatest Test ever played.

5. Allied to that, England have got two proven matchwinners (Pietersen and Flintoff) who made about 12 runs between them today. It makes much more sense to set the game up so that they'll need to make 400-odd between them in order to win (which is harder) than to make 400-odd to get the Aussies in again (which is a challenge but can be done). Basically, it blunts the power of the pair as weapons.

6. By coming out and batting again, it allows us to really assert psychological dominance over England. It's not like the first two innings didn't do that anyway, but just imagine looking down the barrel of an Ashes tour after you've been thoroughly destroyed in the first match and still have another 4 to go. Not only does it start to play on the Poms' minds that we're phenomenal batsmen, but Harmison would have to start worrying about his bowling, they'd have to wonder about getting Jones in as keeper ahead of Read and Giles as the spinner ahead of Panesar. If England had been allowed to bat again, they might've been able to answer some of their questions from the first 2.5 days - and we don't want that happening.

From:

chiroho.livejournal.com

All very good points, especially those about how teams enforcing the follow on quite frequently allow a great many more runs in the opposing team's second innings - mostly because their bowlers are tired and cannot keep up the pace of the attack.

However, Australia bowled England out in not a lot more than two sessions, which is an usually short period of time. And it's not like there were just 200 runs remaining. England was still a long way from making Australia bat again. Yes, Warne is better when the pitch is more broken up as happens in the fourth and fifth days of a test match, but I don't know that the Gabba is really the best ground for his talents. If it were Sydney they were playing at I'd definitely agree, but Brisbane ...

And while I understand the psychological advantage of piling on a billion runs so that England have nearly no chance of winning, there's also a pretty big psychological hit from being made to follow on.

And lastly, we won the first test in the last Ashes series pretty convincingly, and yet England came back to win the series. So winning this test doesn't necessarily write the Poms off psychologically.

I guess my bottom line on this is that it's a 90% chance that Steve Waugh would have made England follow on, so that's what makes me question Ponting's decision more than I would otherwise. (Not saying anything about the fact that a team with Steve Waugh as captain would never have lost the Ashes in the UK.)

From:

kapitankraut.livejournal.com

I'm basing my Warne comments on the way the commentators have been talking during the match - apparently he prefers playing in Brisbane than anywhere much else in the country. I'm not totally sure what the stats say, but at least in a personal-preference sense it's the case.
The other interesting stat I came across recently is that teams enforcing the follow-on win 80-odd% of the time but have occasionally lost. Teams that don't enforce it win 90-odd% of the time and don't lose.

Plus there's the fact that on Dec 1 everyone's down in Adelaide ready for another 5 days of cricket. I'd give anyone a rest that I could in that kind of situation.