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    Sep 7, 2008

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    Bopara and Broad enthrall Manchester

    By Alex Bowden last year, at the end of August Leave a comment on this post

    Why am I writing a piece for The Corridor when I’ve got a site of my own? Because I’m still ridiculously overexcited about England’s run-chase yesterday, that’s why.

    I went to the fourth one-day international at Old Trafford yesterday and having been pretty comprehensively wowed by Stuart Broad’s and Ravi Bopara’s fightback, I made a point of watching the highlights on Channel 5. As is so often the case, the truncated version didn’t give the full effect. England were down and out. Wickets had fallen fairly regularly all day and with even more haste during England’s run chase. England had scored 114 when the seventh wicket fell, but that seventh wicket had been Paul Collingwood who’d scored the bulk of England’s total. The crowd knew that the game was up, so they did what they always do at times like this: Mexican waves, beer snakes and general merriment. In short, anything but watching the cricket.

    So having lost seven wickets inside 24 overs, England then lost none in the next 24. The performance of Broad and Bopara was so impressive that drunk England fans, at the end of the day, when they’d been drinking for the longest, actually put down their beer snakes and watched the cricket in near-silence.

    I’ve never seen a crowd do that before.

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    2 Responses to “Bopara and Broad enthrall Manchester”

  • Innocent Abroad wrote:
    August 31st, 2007 at 5.22 pm

    When Collingwood was run out, I switched off TMS.

    Am I ever hacked off…

  • A P Webster wrote:
    August 31st, 2007 at 7.32 pm

    ‘Innocent AbroadI nearly did the same… still, I thought the game was up.

    The ‘long batting line-up’ certainly worked out, though, eh?

    Seriously, great game of cricket - proof that it’s not all about big scores and bigger sixes.

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