Australia undone by flying Indians

So, with every passing day, and each new post, the genius video blog gets further and further away.

*sigh*

So anyway, if you watch the highlights of Australia’s uninspired innings, you will notice something about the dismissals. The wickets were wangled out – the bowler genuinely beat the batsmen on every occasion. Perhaps only Stuart Clark gave his wicket away – the rest were beaten by balls that were too good for them.

This is the cricket that we snobby purists love: the bowlers are on top, the batsmen are struggling and girlfriends are mystified by the whole thing. The world is as it should be.

More importantly, Australians are losing. Even more wonderfully, the Indians are showing the Ausslers how to bowl, on their own turf. All these things are fantastic and marvellous and wonderful.

It also shows that lesson in cricket that has been forgotten in recent years: if you bowl well, you take wickets. Put the ball in the right place and move it about a bit and any side is vulnerable. The last time that Australians faced consistently good bowling was in 2005, when they lost the Ashes. Since then, the Australian batsmen have had it easy. Just look at Michael Hussey for Crickey’s Sake.

If India continue to bowl this well, in Australia, then we might have to give them the Ashes. The Borders-Starbucks Trophy was never really a worthy prize for the two biggest teams in world cricket.

If we can’t give them the Ashes, we should go for something better. How about an environmentally friendly pile of compost? Ricky Ponting, and the Australian team, could learn to contain some of that aggression through the gentle past-time of gardening.

It would be like those prisoners that unbended themselves through a love of gardening in the gaol yard, and won the Chelsea Flower Show.

Dammit. This idea is brilliant. All teams should be forced to have “garden-off” on the fourth day of test matches, to cool off and add a little colour to the proceedings. Say, the team with the most audacious juxtaposition of acantholimon glumaceum and helleborus hybridus is awarded a hundred extra runs.