Key events
65th over: Australia 198-6 (Carey 24, Starc 3) Shaheen keeps Starc honest with four dot balls, a mixture of full and short stuff. The lead nudges over 250 as Starc bunts a mistimed drive over the in-field to get off the mark with a couple. Starc is looking a bit twitchy against the well directed short ball, he might get a bit more of that rather than the fuller stuff he can throw the hands at.
64th over: Australia 195-6 (Carey 24, Starc 0) An important innings this for Alex Carey, the keeper- batter is one of the few cogs in the Aussie machine who has a question mark shaped cloud or two lingering over his place. A punchy 50 here that puts the game beyond Pakistan could go a long way to dissipating them.
That’ll help – Carey tucks Hasan Ali off his hip for the first four of the day and then follows up with a perfectly crisp drive through cover for four more!
63rd over: Australia 187-6 (Carey 16, Starc 0) Starc sees out three dots from Shaheen to start the day. Australia will be keen not to give Pakistan an early wicket, if they do then the visitors’ collective dander will be well up and they’ll fancy their chances of keeping their fourth innings target to less than 300.
Here come the players, Alex Carey is striding out to the crease with Mitch Starc in tow. Shaheen has three balls to finish in his over from last night. Sun beating down strongly on the MCG turf and crowd a sparse crowd filing in. Let’s play!
A Hollowing Out of The Spirit
That drop from Abdullah Shafique really was a seismic moment in the game. He’d already shelled a couple of chances prior to the Marsh drop too. There’s no worse a feeling in cricket.
Time to update the below from Marco Jansen to Abdullah Shafique.
What Shafique would give to go back to that earlier hour, or even back to the distant land of 20 seconds ago, to get another chance, put it all right. But he can’t. He has to live with it. The drop. The shame and the embarrassment gurgling in the pit of his stomach, the white-hot surging guilt that he has let himself and more painfully his teammates down. Their initial gasps of shock and cursing betray them even if now they’ve settled into torturous leaden silence, broken only by the jeers of the crowd and eventually hollow, consolatory platitudes.
The disappointment clings to Shafique like a shroud. Some element of it will stay with him forever. Etched in his psyche, felt in his bones. The agony of a dropped catch can never fully be forgotten.
Cricket and failure are familiar bedfellows but there’s a particular kind of griping wretchedness that accompanies a spilled chance. It’s the worst feeling to endure on a cricket field. Forget embarrassingly expensive, wide, no-ball or boundary-blighted overs as a bowler. The ignominy of a golden duck or the heartbreak of a dismissal on 99 for a batter, a dropped catch is the worst. Don’t just take my word for it.
The cricket writer Jon Hotten is also a (very) keen amateur cricketer. Well, batter. In his latest book, Bat, Ball and Field – the Elements of
Cricket, Hotten holds court beautifully on all aspects of the game:
“The best place to put a duffer is mid-on,” was WG Grace’s take on “hiding” less able fielders. Hotten has spent thousands of overs in his playing career camped just there. “For most of the years I have played I have hated fielding, it was simply the trade off with the chance to bat” he confesses. “It was usually boring and tiring, but with an edge of terror too, a fear and loathing of a mistake and how it will make you feel.”
He describes dropping a catch as a “hollowing out of the spirit”. It’s a perfect, description. Beautiful and desolate.
Anyone that has ever played the game for any length of time will be familiar with the feeling. If you aren’t then you are either incredibly lucky, unfathomably good or still in denial, blaming the hedgerows, a passing bird, an ill-timed car horn, foggy contact lenses … anything.
Mitchell Marsh has been giving a few interviews on the MCG outfield this morning.
On setting a total: “I think if we were all out now we would feel very much in the game… I don’t necessarily want to put a number on it for our bowlers, but we know that they can certainly hold the bat.
“A couple of good partnerships with some tired bowlers now, hopefully we can get up towards the 300 mark, but I guess anything from here we’ll take.”
On the MCG wicket: “We’re now deep into the third innings yet bowlers are still massively in the game, and that bodes well for us if we can get a few more runs.”
“With our bowlers, hopefully there’s still enough seam movement – certainly with the new ball. It sort of died off a little bit around the 35-over mark… But there’s still enough and I guess that’s what you want, you want it to be entertaining.”
Mitch wants entertainment, laaaa la la la la la
Preamble
James Wallace
Hello and welcome to the day four OBO of Australia v Pakistan from the MCG. Yesterday was a fantastically absorbing day of Test match cricket, Pakistan landing emphatic early blows with the new ball in Australia’s second innings to leave them 16-4 and on teetering tectonics.
Australia had a lead of just 70 runs at that stage and had eked their way to a lead of 100 runs when the biggest moment in the day, Test match and perhaps even the series happened: Abdullah Shaffique dropped a sitter in the slips off Mitchell Marsh (on 20 at the time). Marsh and Steve Smith went onto bat Australia back onto terra firma and beyond, Marsh eventually falling to a scintillating slip catch by Salman Agha six short of a deserved century.
We’ll get into that dropped catch in just a moment. As we had into day four though the facts stand as this: Australia lead by 241 runs and have four wickets left to get as many runs as possible. Pakistan will want to blow away Alex Carey and the tail and set about the job with bat in hand as soon as possible. They always say it, but a HUGE first hour coming right up.
Play starts (half an hour early) at 10am AEDT and 11pm here in Blighty. James Wallace here with you in the betwixtmas bosom of my childhood home in the Peak District. The tree is twinkling and the fire is crackling. Geoff Lemon will tag in for the second session live from the MCG. Let’s do this.
