Ashes

For a brief moment there was a flickering flame of thought that Australia might come back into the Ashes series with their morning bowling performance...it was however quickly snuffed out by the rain leaving England with an unassailable lead. It would have left the series much more fascinatingly poised had Australia been helped by better weather, but it is a shame that they don't get better credit for the draw.

In amateur leagues which are played over a certain number of overs per side, it is still possible to get the likes of winning and losing draws. The idea being that you have to bowl the opposition out to get the win. Wouldn't it be great to apply similar rules to test cricket? You could possibly have three points for a win but two for a winning draw and in that case England would only be 7-2 up (given they get a point for the losing draw) which would still leave Australia the chance to win the series if they win the last two matches. It would be possible also to apply this to an overall test league which the ICC must ultimately surely do. There are far too many meaningless matches otherwise. It will be interesting to see how the Women's Ashes series pans out since they are using a scoring system for matches across the test and one dayer's.

Something must also be done with the quality of the umpiring too. This has already been said by many commentators in the cricket field, but the more its said the more something might be done about it by the ICC. The umpires really do have the ultimate responsibility in ensuring that the game is played fairly and without bias to either side, but they also have responsibility towards players careers. If they continue to make poor decisions it could easily impact on whether a player gets selected in the next game and on their cricket life as a whole. In an ordinary job you can appeal against unfair dismissal (although this is being made harder) but it seems odd that you can't in a game of cricket.

On another note I would like to mention a little story that Michael Vaughan told about going out for the toss at the Old Trafford test in 2005. A little boy who had undergone numerous operations asked him if he was having fun. He said that it made him realise that he should be enjoying himself more...and maybe so should we all. Our culture sweeps us up into only looking at what we don't have or what we could have and never at what we do have, but now and again we should be relaxing and taking stock of the positives in our lives because for a lot of us there are more of those than negatives. Then maybe we might not have so much vitriol to send out towards those who are more unfortunate than ourselves, and to think a little more charitably. There is no such thing as 'workers and shirkers' except when we look at others through our own prejudices.