A Very English Cricketing Fiasco

Selkirk vs Langholm at Philiphaugh, 8/9/08

Actually, it wasn’t a completely disastrous cricketing weekend. Selkirk did successfully chase 206 to defeat Langholm in the Border League. Not called upon to bowl or bat, your correspondent’s contribution was limited to taking a simple (but vital!) catch. Elsewhere, of course, doom and gloom and despair reign supreme.

England’s batting this morning as Broad and Swann gave it some humpty actually irritated me. Too late, far too late. But a reminder that there was nothing to excuse the abject feebleness of this English performance. This has been a strange series contested by two pretty average sides. The quality of the cricket scarcely compares to the thrills of 2005. Not that this matters too much since, despite the Headingley humiliation, the teams are sufficiently evenly–matched to provide an absorbing contest.

And despite this dismal performance in Leeds, if you’d said at the start of the summer that we’d head back to London with the series tied 1-1 most England fans would have been happy enough with that.