Season. The day Doctor Who finishes it'll be all over the news, it's been going for 50 years

Stuart Broad got 7 wickets and New Zealand all out for 70. BWHAHAAHAHAHA

Broad plays for my county as well

Yeah, I watched that.

Broad is so frustrating to watch, one minute he's like Richard Hadlee and the next minute worse than Ishant Sharma.

The Whispering Men...oh man they were like Slenderman with teeth!

Root is looking a fair player though but if England are to win the Ashes we should be crushing New Zealand.

Erm, not really.

8th position doesn't do their team justice.

Boult, Southee and two absolutely wonderful bowlers and Wagner isn't a walkover either.

Not saying there aren't some class players in the team, it's just the consistency is lacking.

If they improved that, they could be a top 5 team.

South Africa are still machines though unfortunately.

Australia is undergoing a collapse at the moment, and England are on good form after the first series win in India for 25 years. The ashes are England's to lose, but they have a track record of failing to deliver after spells of success.

The old "snatching defeat from the jaws of defeat". It is good to see one non-Olympic sporting area where England excel at. If only it was football...

Cycling. Although it's in the olympics it's predominantly not.

In 2012 we assembled what most critics would say is the greatest cylcling team ever assembled.

Wiggins, Froome, Cavendish etc.

The old "snatching defeat from the jaws of defeat".

When was the last time we did that?

Certainly not in the noughties. We were like that in the nineties because of inconsistencies in the team and such. We never had a real collective bowling attack and rather than working in tandem Gough and Caddick were trying to compete against each other in who could take the most wickets. Our batting was god-awful barring Ian Thorpe. It was the era of the talented yet mentally fragile Ramprakash, Hick and Fairbrother (my younger brother is best friends with Fairbrother's son )

Hussain took a bunch of average players and made them into a collective unit and they stopped flopping. Of course, we still lost to the mighty Australians at the time because the likes of Gough Caddick and a teenage Anderson couldn't match up to the likes of the great McGrath and Gillespie supported by the likes of Lee, Kraspowisz etc. Furthermore, a comparison between MacGill/Warne and Giles was a complete joke.

Australia is undergoing a collapse at the moment, and England are on good form after the first series win in India for 25 years. The ashes are England's to lose, but they have a track record of failing to deliver after spells of success.

When was the last time this happened? Pre-Hussain/Vaughan era I would say. There have been blips but that isn't a case of mental breakdown but the loss of talent.

In 2008 we had lost the best bowler in the world at the time (Hoggard) and Harmison was on his last legs. Jones had just come back from a horrific injury and Chris Read was pretty terrible. Flintoff had begun his boozing, Trescothik's clinical depression had finally taken over, Vaughan was already gone and Ian Bell/KP were only starting to hit their peaks.

Then, Anderson and Broad finally begun to show the talent that they were promising for years, the unearthing of Chris Tremlett was an absolute beauty and this coincided with the ascendancy of Matty Prior, Alastair Cook and the unearthing of Jonathan Trott and Paul Collingwood. Swann's finally acceptance to not be a complete tool in the dressing room allowed him to be reselected and from then on in England haven't really looked back.

For the past 5 years, there has only been one real blip (UAE). That was a case of the players taking too long to adjust to playing spin.

We can't say SA was England underperforming because SA are that good. Dale Steyn, Vernon philander, ABDV, Kallis, Amla, Smith, Du Plessis, Morkel are simply too good. Even so, I fully expect them to be nowhere near as good as England in the subcontinent.

Why? Because Imran Tahir and Robin Peterson are crap: Du Plessis, Peterson and Kallis cannot play spin very well and Phillander and Morkel have trundled terribly on flat pitches (against the likes of Cowan, Warner, Hughes and Khawaja and all).

Having said that, the last tour of India Dale Steyn single handedly destroyed the vaunted Indian batting lineup (Sehwag, Gambhir, Dravid, Sachin, Laxmann, Ganguly, Dhoni) for less than 100 runs at Nagpur and Eden Gardens, 2009 IIRC .

As for Australia, they have a chance in England IF their pacers stay fit. (big if, mind you). Their batting is certainly collapsing and nobody seems good enough to come in , Warner, Cowan, Khawaja, Hughes, Wade, Maxwell, Smith etc are all rubbish. But their bowling lineup is class, minus Lyon who is average.

Pattinson, Starc, Cummins, Harris, Jackson Bird, Hastings, Siddle, Hilfenhaus all who on their day are absolutely awesome. Half of them are on the good side of 20 aswell.

As for England's prospects, it's looking overall very healthy. Joe Root is going to be awesome. James Taylor for Lancashire is quality aswell. Woakes, Meaker are very good pacers and Bairstow/Buttler are already halfway there. Bell-Drummond is also going to be class. But the biggest prospects are the pacers, especially the U19's.

In the U19's world cup, Reece Topley, Jamie Overton and Craig Overton tore apart every batting lineup last year. Furthermore we have Tobey Roland Jones who averages NINETEEN in First class cricket and has impressed again for Middlesex this season. My biggest hope is on Topley though. 6ft 5, Bowls at 90+mph and has an action and style very similar to Glenn McGrath.

Read, Swann, Patel and Broad all play for my county. I love being a season ticker holder of a God Tier cricket team and not some irrelevant side like Derbyshire or Leicestershire.

Wiggo has withdrawn from the Giro with illness and Froome is the main British contender for the Tour de France. Cavendish is snapping up a lot of stage wins, but will never win a big stage race.

[This message has been edited by Earl Scruffles (edited 05-19-2013 @ 01:45 PM).]

Read, Swann, Patel and Broad all play for my county. I love being a season ticker holder of a God Tier cricket team and not some irrelevant side like Derbyshire or Leicestershire

Heehee

(Derbyshire have Chanderpaul)

Wiggo has withdrawn from the Giro with illness and Froome is the main British contender for the Tour de France. Cavendish is snapping up a lot of stage wins, but will never win a big stage race.

Cavendish is a sprinter not a time-trialist.

He will break the Tour De France record of most stage wins IMO.

Cavendish has this ability to just ghost out of a race and at the final moment BANG, he pops in from the crowd out of nowhere and sprints forward and leaves everyone for dead. The 2012 championships was one of the most insane things I've ever seen:

Quoted from EoJ:

I did, however, watch the finale of Doctor Who.
Bloody hell.

You liked it? I thought the series hasn't been particularly good and nothing much really happened for a finale

Cavendish is a bit like the Lee Westwood of cycling; always winning the minor events (in cycling, stages) but never wins the big ones (Tour de France/Giro/Olympic). Hope he keeps going for Rio 2016 though.

I'm not too sure what the next Dr Who series will be like after the 50th anniversary as it looks like Moffat is shaking things up quite a bit.

Cav won't win on overall on a big tour. He can't compete on hills and mountains. His main aim is stage wins and points classifications, which is fine, he's a sprinter.

Sir Wiggo seems to be having a tough season this year though, he crashed in Oman and had to gain lost ground and no withdrawing from the Giro D'Italia

Wait, so it IS the series finale?? I WAS RIGHT BEFORE??


By the way, this weekend was amazing. First time the girlfriend and I were together since we've been together (long distance relationship). It was a very quality weekend

DW finale was awesome. Everyone must watch it.

What was awesome about it? Other than Richard E Grant playing himself, which is generally quite jolly. Nothing interesting really happened as far as I recall

I might be unfairly prejudiced against River's contribution to episodes by the general nonsense they tried to do with her interaction with the Doctor.

It tied up quite a lot of things nicely yet left a springboard for the 50th anniversary.

Does anyone know if the rumours about showing the 50th anniversary in cinemas is true?

By the way, this weekend was amazing. First time the girlfriend and I were together since we've been together (long distance relationship). It was a very quality weekend

do you mean quality like this?


or like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gaRb-whv2c

warning may or may not be "appropriate"

This kinda good

Punic you saucy beast.

I thought this season suffered from a) being too short (well, 7b anyway) and b) a lack of two parters. It started a little slow with most of the first two suffering from trying to fit a lot in before suddenly having to tie it up in the last ten minutes. There was a good moment at the end of the first one where the bad woman gets left by the GI and it's revealed that she had been taken over by it at a very young age, and the first half hour or so of Rings was a fantastic bit of world building, but the finale suffered a bit from the time issue I mentioned before-ironic for a time travel show...

I loved the ice warrior episode - claustrophobic and tension, as well as giving younger viewers a look into the cold war- and Hide was for once in this series well-paced and creepy, if not downright frightening like blink or the empty child. Journey to the centre of the TARDIS was another look at the workings of the tardis and whilst I enjoyed it at the time the brothers'interactions were the weakest part of the episode-eye of harmony? Great. Doctor being all serious and tricking them into helping him? Also great. Time loop zombies and a reset button? Eh, can deal with it, seemed logical enough I personally thought The Crimson Horror as actually my favourite, despite the villain not having some kind of sympathetic agenda- probably because of it! She was unashamed of being insane, and jenny, vastra and strax are always fun. Starting halfway through the story I thought kind of made the episode.

Gainman's Cyberman episode, though, suffered from having the kids involved, especially the bratty little ungrateful bugger. It sidelined them as quickly as possible, though, and took a very different direction to the one we thought it was going to take. Matt Smith was hilarious as the cyber planner, and it was nice to see the Cybermen effortlessly beating the hell out of the humans right up until the doctor tricks them into using all their processing power to best him in chess. Clearly the cyber planner has an ego.

So onto the last one. We have the Victorian gang again, and river song post-library- so no time travel stuff for once. We have a decent reason for Clara in my opinion, a very pretty tomb for the doctor, a villain who is not overcomplicating things-threaten the companions, make the doctor do what you want him to do- and as you said it's Richard e grant being himself, so that's fun.
Most importantly you have all the past doctors being referenced, depending on if they exit the time steam or not a reasonable explanation for 10 being around, and of course a mahusive cliffhanger. Strangely it feels like part one of a two-part story, really.

The second part is the 50th anniversary I guess as that will be where the John Hurt Doctor is explained.

I'm missing next week's game of thrones with the event until Wednesday because I'm doing more scouting stuff. I MAKE SACRIFICES. And I've got my RN re-medical when I get back as well. FUN FUN FUN. At least my last exam is tomorrow

What was awesome about it? Other than Richard E Grant playing himself, which is generally quite jolly. Nothing interesting really happened as far as I recall

You have to let yourself be taken by the drama and the mounting climax. Otherwise it's only too easy to be critical of Doctor Who.