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Dire cricketers who had a successful test career

analyst

U19 12th Man
Hayden also has a habbit of sometimes being in a very aggresive frame of mind way too early on in his innings but his bat and his feet don't neccesarily share his thoughts, hence he doesn't seem to be able to negate the swing. When he does, he obviously copes slightly better, if selected for the series in England, I think he has a lot to prove, because England have some real fine swing bowlers who would love to bowl to him in English conditions.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
What we have to hope, though, is that the ball does swing as we always expect over here.

It didn't swing much between 2001 and 2006 (not not at all, but nowhere near as much as you'd expect under normal circumstances) and though the status quo was restored in 2007, it slackened again in 2008. On the whole, though, I'd still say it swung more in '08 than any season between (inclusive of) '01-'06.
 

Uppercut

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What we have to hope, though, is that the ball does swing as we always expect over here.

It didn't swing much between 2001 and 2006 (not not at all, but nowhere near as much as you'd expect under normal circumstances) and though the status quo was restored in 2007, it slackened again in 2008. On the whole, though, I'd still say it swung more in '08 than any season between (inclusive of) '01-'06.
The bowlers involved have a lot to do with it IMO. Steyn, Sidebottom, Anderson and Kallis were always going to get some degree of movement, as were RP Singh and Zaheer Khan in '07. SA swung the ball round corners in the first innings at Headingley, the only point in the series when conditions favoured it. Taking '05 as an example, the only specifically swing bowlers on view were Hoggard and Gillespie (who inexplicably decided the Ashes would be a good time to become ****).

Also, the weather's been unusually balls this past two years. Always helps swing.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
I reckon the ball swung about as much in 1999 - a pretty good summer - as it did in 2007 or 2008. Also, 2002 was almost as diabolical as 2007 or 2008, and 2004 was better but not by a huge degree. In neither '02 nor '04 was swing in the slightest prevalent.

It was noted by any number of county bowlers in early May 2001 (before the summer's opening Test when Dominic Cork, one of the best swingers of the last 15 years, failed to get so much as a single ball to go off the straight through the air) that the ball simply wasn't swinging that year. Everyone presumed something in the manufacturing process had changed, though Dukes never admitted anything, for obvious reasons. Then in 2007, they started to go properly again, and county bowlers noted this within a few weeks once more.

As I say, it'd be nice to blame the poor weather, but poor weather was certainly not unusual in some summers from '01 to '06. '03 and '06 were pretty good, and '05 was standard-fare. But this decade as a whole has been seriously schizo on the weather front in this country.
 

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