England land running as Australia finally come good
England started as they hope to go on in their defence of the Ashes when they beat http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Western-Australia-c865 by six wickets at the Waca in their first tour match.
After an uninspiring start, when their first innings relied on Stuart Broad and Graeme Swann to provide some bulk to the score, England rallied and were led to victory by Andrew Strauss. The captain led by example, taking the man-of-the-match award for his unbeaten second-innings 120.
An opening tour victory can always gloss over the bad points – and England’s middle order collapse first time around has to be classed thus – but there were positives in the batting with Kevin Pietersen, whose form has been a topic of some debate since he was dropped from England’s limited overs squad in late summer, scoring a half century in the first innings.
Strauss was pleased with the way that his side improved through the match in what was the first cricket most of them had played in six weeks. Having declared the intention of winning each of their tour matches before this month’s first Test in Brisbane, Strauss was predicting even better to come in Adelaide this week.
Having seen England through, with 15 fours and a six from 141 balls, Strauss, speaking on the ECB website, said: “We’re very pleased, especially because of the position of the game at start of play.
“It was looking like a tough ask to force a result from there. But we had two choices. We could have come here and gone through the motions today - but what we did was come in and hit the ground running.”
One question hanging over England was whether their bowling attack, the pace facet especially, will be able to take 20 wickets a time in the Test matches? Broad made an almost immediate impression, striking with only his fourth first-class ball in Australia, and Steven Finn looked more threatening with the ball in the second innings.
“We’ve done a lot of talking about making sure we start the tour well and I think we ticked all the boxes really. We maybe had a bit of a slow day on the second day but certainly today and the first day we’ve been fantastic,” Broad said.
“That’s the intent and change we’ve tried to make, making these first-class games - games that we want to win and set the right tempo and intensity to.”
Australia finally ended their seven-match losing sequence with an eight-wicket win over http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Sri-Lanka-c758 in the third one-day international at Brisbane, although they had already lost the series.
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