I have been kind of down about our bowling line-up for the first test against England. Dan Vettori won't let us down, and Chris Martin is a trier - but Iain O'Brien, Jacob Oram and Kyle Mills won't exactly put the fear of god into England. Our pace attack doesn't have much variety to it (no left armers, no real pace, no real swing) and on a flat deck I suspect they will be slaughtered.
I initially thought that on paper it looked one of the weakest attacks I have seen. But when looking back at Dion Nash's career I found a side which was much, much worse. When Nash made his test debut, he shared the bowling with Willie Watson, Murphy Su'a, Dipak Patel and Mark Haslam. What cheered me up about that memory was that this bowling line-up bowled out a pretty strong Zimbabwean team (with both Flowers, Andy Pycroft, Alastair Campbell, Dave Houghton) twice to claim a hard fought test victory.
Does anybody else remember us fielding a worse bowling attack?
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Danny Morrison was our main strike bowler for nearly ten years. Would you play any of the bowlers from that era ahead of the current stock (apart from O'Brien perhaps)?
1st test v Zim from 1996. Robert Kennedy, Greg Loveridge, , Patel, Geoff Allot (never got the red ball to swing) etc
Then later that season in the West Indies where Morrison was joined in the “attack” by Larsen, Vaughan, Twose and Astle.
Robert Kennedy has his mockers, but I thought he was great in his first couple of games and then just went to pieces mentally and lost his run-up and his action. His problem was that he wasn't dropped and allowed to rebuild - he just kept getting picked and things kept getting worse. Greg Loveridge I will give you though. There are not too many test bowlers who never get to bowl.
Hey - after putting up that last comment I Googled Robert Kennedy and found out that he now mans the bar at my local pub! Freaky.
I remember the test - zimbo's first season in test cricket. followed it via the papers and got really excited by murphy s'ua. wha happened to that dude?
and as someone here said - that '96 lineup in the west indies was sheer genius. justin vaughan and gavin larsen steaming in tandem... you sure didn't need SloMo back then.
Against Sri Lanka in 1995, we once fielded Su'a, Patel, Chris Pringle (like Allott, had an ordinary test career), Larsen and Kerry Walmsley. This was the second test in that series during that terrible centenary season.
hey there Chris Pringle now works for LJ Hooker in Mt Maunganui. They've taken his photo down on the website but it is him and the archive of their site proves it...
http://web.archive.org/web/20060903212259/ljhooker.co.nz/agent/officeteam.php?iOfficeCode=1533
Post a Comment