Blogs Ashes 2009: Edgbaston Takes Centrestage
July 29th, 2009 by kapoorNearly every cricket fan in England, even those who consider soccer their religion has his eyes fixed on the third test match of the historic Australia-England rivalry and it seems that all roads in are leading to Edgbaston. For starters, this is not a traditional venue for hosting Ashes test matches and this trend started only recently. Secondly, the pitch conditions could severely affect the chances of the side batting first. In fact, some local cricket experts here are so sure about the ball swinging during the first morning that they have bought tickets only for half the day for the opening morning’s session. The reason — they believe that if England are put into bat first, they will not survive for more than 40 overs or so, notwithstanding the fact that there is McGrath or even Brett Lee or for that matter, even Mitchell Johnson is hopelessly out-of-form. This combined with the ongoing debate over Flintoff’s decision to hiatus from test cricket and Andrew Strauss’s request that he should be consulted before English players are leased for the IPL are making things only more interesting.
