Quote Originally Posted by the other bob wilson View Post
I couldn’t see England taking ten wickets today, especially with most of the afternoon washed out, but, while everyone talks about the batting with bazball, it also has seen them become far better at taking twenty wickets in the match than they were.

The winning margins of two and three wickets and two of forty odd runs shows how close the series was, but it’s hard to see how it would have been anything other than a very comfortable win for England at Old Trafford if it were not for the rain.

The one negative for me is that a five match test match series in this country should not be finishing in July as it was shoehorned into almost a month to accommodate the bloody Hundred - what an anti climax the next month threatens to be.
Agree with the last paragraph.

I also think England were better than the Australians by a distance. I always associated their teams with toughness and resilience, but they seemed to capitulate whenever the game was getting away from them. Not since the sight of Warner and Smith crying over the ball tampering fiasco have they looked the same. Ok, they are 'world test champions' but that's an engineered format which doesn't really reflect the strength of the test playing nations. Lots of praise for the Aussie top 4 but in truth they never really got on top of the England attack [incl. Stokes and Root !]