20 overs not enough

I went to the England Australia Twenty 20 game yesterday, and it was a desperate display. Not only did Australia post a record Twenty Twenty international innings, but England barely reached half the Australian total in reply.

The spectacle itself was good fun .. there was lots of dance music, as spun by Judge Jules, and the floodlights made it really quite light in the ground. We also noticed that 20:20 is obviously an opportunity to get on it very early. The couple next to us got through about 6 beers in the 3 or so hours, and in front of us were a large corporate party, and they had interestingly been to a meal beforehand. That's not interesting, but apart from drinking several glasses of wine beforehand, their guest speaker was Damien Martyn, who shockingly retired from Test Cricket hours before the Perth Test. He said that he had had enough of top level cricket, and that he wanted to go out on top of his game.

In terms of the game, it was good to see Michael Vaughn back, and he put a reasonable knock together. However, as usual Freddie was disappointing, and James Anderson was dire. Universally popular as always was Monty Panesar, even if the dance music drowned out the Barmy Army's songs.

But just following the retirement of Langer, Warne and McGrath, it was good to see some of the Aussie's new breed .. and they were very good indeed. Cameron White, Shane Harwood and Ben Hilfenhaus all performed well, as did stalwarts, Ponting, Gilchrist and Symonds, who all scored close to 50. On this performance Andrew "Roy" Symonds has cemented his place in the squad, producing some containing spin bowling to augment the medium pace swing bowling he produced in the Tests.

Let's hope England do better in the imminent OneDay series with Australia and New Zealand. Hope appears to be all we have.