Test Match Vacation 2007

I'm back from my second and final cricket-watching trip of the summer (which was also a fun trip outside of cricket). I watched days 2,3 and 4 of the drawn 3rd test between England and India at the Oval. Overall, it was a fun trip, but it would have been a more interesting match if India had lost the toss (or if the bidding system I described in my last post had been in place). Dravid's India team, leading the series 1-0, labored hard to prevent a result. There was some good quality cricket to watch - excellent batting from Dhoni and Kumble on day 2, good bowling by Sreesanth, Tendulkar and Kumble and good batting by Collingwood and Bell on day 3 things got interesting for a while. Dravid's bizarrely conservative decision not to enforce the follow-on when England was under their thumb opened the door just a crack to a possible England victory after a brave opening spell from James Anderson and Chris Tremlett (taking on extra duty due to the injury to Ryan Sidebottom) left India's second innings in a crisis at 10 for 3. Extremely cautious batting from Dravid, along with a much-needed 50 by Saurav Ganguly, closed the door on England's last realistic hope of victory, but they left England in a position to fight for a draw. I had hoped being at day 4 of a test for the first time, to watch a result in person, but alas I found myself listening to the final few overs on the internet from home in Paris.

One thing I like to do at a cricket match is take photos and, if possible, videos. A test match is especially difficult to capture because the action is far away, and you never know whether the next thing worth photographing/videotaping will happen in 5 seconds or 3 hours. Nevertheless, I made an effort to record the event in photos and video clips. Here's a montage of some of the video clips. It was very difficult to hold the camera steady with a strong zoom, so the video is choppy. The footage below shows a lot of different deliveries and happenings on day 2 and day 3. It includes the wicket of M.S. Dhoni, Kumble's century, bowloing by Monty Panesar, James Anderson, Chris Tremlett, Sachin Tendulkar, and Sreesanth (who seems to be quite an interesting and energetic character), 50's by Cook, Collingwood and Bell, and a few bits of crowd ambiance (including a beer worm rebellion late on day 3):

Test Match Ambiance
Uploaded by threegp

Enough of the chopiness. Now for some photos: