Forget the winners, it's the villains who need the Christmas presents
Christmas came early for the fairytale heroes of 2016.
Christmas came early for the fairytale heroes of 2016.
Australia will take a one-nil series lead to Melbourne, but it was Pakistan who skipped off the Gabba like winners. A pale and drawn Steve Smith spoke of not having any fingernails and not particularly enjoying Test matches when they were quite so exciting, whereas Misbah-ul-Haq said he was 'very happy and proud' with a 'wonderful' effort, proceeding to tell the story of the match as if narrating a great victory. Only the scoreboard begged to differ, but few were fooled by that.
Pakistan's mid-match revival in Brisbane has added an estimated 10,000 ticket sales to Boxing Day in Melbourne, and interest in the New Year's Test match in Sydney also grew with each hour the tourists were able to prolong the struggle.
Steve Smith's decision not to ask Pakistan to bat again in the first Test match in Brisbane on Saturday raises the question of whether there is any point to the follow-on rule at all.
Lower-order runs might be an afterthought, but Test series are invariably won by the team whose bottom four contribute more.
Six years in, I still don't know if my instinctive fondness for the BBL proves that I am a renaissance man of catholic tastes and broad toleration, or a pea brain.
With allowances made for daylight savings, television schedules and stopping Queensland's curtains from fading, the inaugural pink-ball Test match at the Gabba started only two hours later than the old red-ball ones.
Given the events of May 2013, Mickey Arthur's confessed feelings about coaching Pakistan against Australia are even less 'surreal' than the fact that it is Darren Lehmann who is under more pressure to keep his job.
Whew. That's a sigh of relief, not a reaction to a bad smell. For a moment the Australian cricket team was at its lowest point since the mid-1980s. But that kind of talk is so two weeks ago.
A man, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, is what he thinks about all day long. What then was Tiger Woods? What he thought about all day, or what he thought about all night?
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