Out of our misery

Here we go once again, along with multitudes of masochistic England cricket fans, waiting for start of play.  Surely the Aussie plan will be for Rogers to continue doing his thing while the rest of the Aussie batsmen unleash carnage at the other end?  England will have over two days to survive or score an unlikely mammoth fourth innings total to win.  That won’t happen, in reality England will probably be beaten today.

A steady start but after half an hour no breakthrough and the KPego is bowling???  Apart from that ‘normal’ test cricket at the moment as Rogers heads for a ton, well played…  A little wine then bed with TMS for a change.  As I drifted towards sleep I heard a couple of Aussie wickets fall but knew it wouldn’t halt the tide.

I awoke and immediately tuned in the radio to find the news I’d expected, England had been blown away for less than 200 once again and Australia had completed the 5-0 sweep with a 281 run victory.  By this stage these defeats no longer hurt, I’ve become immune to the pain and can applaud a superb performance by the Australians.  The England bowlers did OK and shared the wickets, Borthwick took 3, Rankin just the one. Carberry top scored with 43 but surely too little too late for him.  Stokes got runs and Broad slogged 42.  Harris finished the match and claimed a well-deserved fifth wicket.

In truth England have only been competitive for about 5 days throughout the series, it’s been an absolute disaster.  It started badly and got steadily worse and this final day of the series was worse than most.  For the series to be finally over has come as a relief, the pain of losing the Ashes has been numbed.  It would have been much more painful and stressful had they been snatched away at the end of a nail biting, cliff hanger series.  However at least then we would have left Australia with pride in tact at least.