The final day of the fifth and deciding Ashes test at the Oval ended with England regaining the Ashes with a spectacular 197 run win, to seal the series with a 2-1 triumph.
In another up and down day, the Australian batsmen showed their bloody minded resilience as they dug in defiantly and chased the game. After losing two early wickets Ponting and Hussey then defied the odds with a brilliant display of first class batting, causing the nerves to jangle for England fans and players alike.
It was Andrew Flintoff’s excellent run out of Ponting that changed the balance of the game, a wonderful dead eye dick throw to smash the stumps, with Ponting in no mans land.
When Michael Clarke was also run out five minutes later for naught, England could sense the collapse. But Hussey had other ideas, batting a suberb 121 innings he refused to give up the fight as the Australian batting order came and went around him.
Hussey was finally caught by Cook of Swann at around 5.45pm, ending the game with the Australian’s trailing by 197 runs.
While I believe this series lacked the all round quality of England’s famous 2005 victory, the roller-coaster ride of ups and downs has made for some absorbing cricket.
My man of the series is England captain Andrew Strauss who has led from the front when some of his more flamboyant players have struggled. He has won his personal battle with Australia’s Ricky Ponting, who is no slouch himself in rallying the troops, and fully deserves this excellent win for England.
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1 AliensInfoTech // Aug 26, 2009 at 6:25 am
Shane Warne – The best bowler Australia has ever produced has opened up his mind to the media. He exposed his discontent regarding umpires. According to the ace spinner barring a few exceptions like Simon Tauter and ASAP Rauf other umpires went awry in terms of performance .Expressing disappointment that the standard of umpiring has deteriorated to the worst extent in the past twenty years of time he opined that though umpiring was a hard job, the performances of the umpires in the Ashes series had been consistently so ordinary. As far as Warne is concerned umpire Billy Bowden whom he expected to deliver correct judgments was also not consistent in performing his duty.
The spinner repents that there are too many instances of such bad judgments, which is increasingly becoming a cause of concern. He directly made a mention of names of umpires Daryl Harper and Billy Bowden, accusing them to be adamant in not confessing their wrong judgments. He also tried to strengthen his claim by mentioning that several players were not having a good opinion about those umpires in their minds. Warne insisted that the umpires should maintain a friendly attitude towards the players by shedding their high-handed attitude Warne also expressed his view repetitively that fifty over match should be withdrawn once for all as if such a change is brought about it would enable the players to spend more time with their families and relieve them from exhaustion.