Another excellent day’s cricket for England at Chester-le-Street; it’s a shame so few people turned up to watch. Ravi Bopara scored his third century in successive innings and must be feeling that he cannot do much more to cement a place for the Ashes. An interesting statistic about Bopara is that this third successive century was preceede by three ducks in a row (two first ball) in his three previous innings.
This potentially interesting fact, led me to email the commentators on www.cricinfo.com for the first time, asking whether this was a first (no answer), but they posted my comment, including a comment of their own about the “tremendous quantities of geekery”. Finally my reward, and a proud moment. It’s in the 80th over of the first day’s full commentary.
Otherwise, not much to talk about – Alastair Cook continues to score runs, despite looking a little out of touch still, but if he can do so, then all credit; he needs to push on to a really big score tomorrow – his current best of 139* isn’t quite good enough. England will need to aim for 500, and hope the pitch deteriorates, otherwise a boring draw is on the cards.