The Ashes is alive after England Wins Game 3 as it brings the Series Scoreline to 2-1. While Australia are still in front the momentum has shifted and the contest on the field between the teams remains very close. There is still a lot to happen in this series with 2 games left to play and that means there should still be some good betting action to be realized. Thus for me its all good as despite being an Australian I’m happy to see England win one and keep things interesting. Game 4 kicks off in 8 days so there is a short rest period here for the players and no doubt a bunch of selection decisions to deliberate – but particularly for Australia. As is often the case, it is the losing side which needs to make the biggest changes and this will be no different.
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I’m happy with the calls that I made for this game and the match played out pretty close to the way I had expected. I did miss a couple of opportunities as I had erred on the side of caution later in the game, but I ended up in front with my betting so that makes up for the loss of last game. All up the match saw 37 wickets fall and only 3 of those (8.1%) were to Spinners so my expectation that the game would be Dominated by Seam and Pace with the Spinners taking a back seat was pretty spot on. It was particularly notable that during the 4th Innings chase on Day 4 the new Australian Spinner Todd Murphy only bowled 2 overs out of 50 (only 4%!). This is pretty much unheard of for Australia and would never have been the case if Nathan Lyon was playing. This may well have been the difference in the match, but the side-lining of the new spinner suggests that the Australian Captain Cummins doesn’t have a lot of confidence in the new spinner keeping things economical when bowling under pressure. This could be VERY telling for the rest of the series and I've noted that Australia may have just shifted from being Late Game Specials to Late Game Donkeys.
Another big call I got right was that I predicted No innings would hit 300 and they rolled out 263, 237, 224 and 254 (for 7 wickets). I scored a win backing Unders for the 2nd Innings but backed off in the 3rd Innings after some sound advice from @talesfrmthecrypt regarding recent results at the ground and the pitch still looked pretty good to me when Australia went in for the 3rd Innings. The pitch did not crack up or significantly deteriorate as the match progressed and I think the 3rd Innings is where Australia really lost the game. They should have set a higher chase on that pitch. They did set 251 runs for victory after I’d earlier predicted 250 would have been about par, however that total just wasn’t enough because the pitch was still in pretty good shape leading into Day 4.
I would have backed England to chase down that final total if it was a bit bigger but before play on Day 4 the price on England to Win had shortened right down to about 1.36 which was just too short. There was no value at that price so I went NO BET again. I'm happy with that decision because there were a couple of wobbles in the English chase that would have given short-odds-backers serious heart palpitations, but England did eventually get there with just 3 wickets in hand.
Bring on the next Test! I’m expecting the last 2 games to be played on nice spicy green wickets as England will be keen to push for results in the hope of saving the series and they have time to prepare the remaining pitches to order. As such my early notes for Game 4 have the Draw totally discounted if the weather forecast is reasonable.