titan_uranus

Cannot wait for the season proper to get underway, though I'm not sure how I rate the Niners going into this season. Tough division and tough schedule, plus a few injuries on defence, I'm not sure we'll make playoffs this year. If Kap goes down we're absolutely stuffed, too.

Just scrolled through that list. Second last post provides many lols.

I can't remember the last time we had a young midfielder who combines talent with hardness, smarts and composure. I don't ever worry when he has the ball.

I find Tyson knows how to get on his left and doesn't get hampered by it much. Viney, on the other hand, needs to get some confidence in his right foot, he's much worse than Tyson at using it or getting on to his left.

What is going on with Shaun Marsh? His First Class form reads like this - 148, 44, 0, 0, 0, 113.

^ Great stats. Smith is going to be remembered by many for his poor finish and his conservative captaincy, but his batting, as an opener no less, for 109 Tests, was masterful. South Africa never lost a Test in which he made a century. As for the current Test - major struggle. Memories of Adelaide flooding back. Abbott batted beautifully for a tailender to survive as long as he did. We're in a bit of trouble now, with de Villiers looking completely trouble-free, and du Plessis being, well, du Plessis. With Duminy still to come, plus handy batting in Philander, this is no certainty (the draw's at $2.50 with Sportsbet, for those who are interested...).

Given the pace we're going at now, it's hard to see why Warner and Doolan went so slowly before lunch. Nonetheless, Warner scoring twin tonnes is immense, three in six innings, with another two 50s, all in a row. Great form.

Not sure what the tactic is here, to have scored 123 off 20 overs, then after Rogers went out 57 off 22 overs. I guess Clarke is trying to find a balance between leaving enough time and having just the right target - too large and they won't go for it (Smith is a conservative captain and we've seen South Africa's prowess at batting out draws), but too small in the time we need to bowl them out and they're good enough to chase it down (e.g. if we bowl for 130 overs, and they score at 3.5 an over, that's 455, so we need to be careful).

It's getting the next two that's the hard bit. Amla going before lunch was huge, but de Villiers, du Plessis and Duminy are the wickets we've struggled to take (as opposed to Smith and Petersen, with whom we've had little trouble really). Having four in the shed by lunch is a great result though, doesn't matter who's out.

That's probably the case Macca, that Doolan was meant to be in before Marsh was. I don't agree with it, though Marsh did himself no favours with his pair (6 ducks from his last 11 innings, what an unbelievable record). I'd have kept Marsh before Doolan, but so be it. I'm with you, Siddle dropped that pace a while back. I don't buy that as a fair reason. Harris should have gone before Sids IMO. Fantastic from Clarke (and Smith, too). Raining now though, with our score on 7/494. When play resumes after tea, Clarke may decide to declare and start bowling. We need 20 wickets in just over 3 days, we can't bat forever. If we bat on, surely they just hit out for a bit (Harris and Pattinson can both smoke the ball decently enough, and of course Clarke's still there).

I've been overseas for a month, which put me in the South African time-zone, allowing me to follow this series whilst awake (win), but taking me away from regular internet, preventing me from discussing it on Demonland (loss). FWIW, thought we were superb in the first Test, batting well to negate their (admittedly sub-par) bowling and then bowling pretty well. Second Test was to be expected, at some stage they were going to get it right and someone other than AB was always going to make runs. Selection-wise I didn't think we made the right choices for this Test. Watson had to come in, we lacked the fifth bowling option in Port Elizabeth, but IMO it should have been Doolan to go, not Marsh. To put such a huge level of faith into Marsh to bring him into the side for the first Test, and for him to make a fantastic 100, but then to be dropped one bad Test later, makes no sense to me. Why invest so heavily in him only to ditch him at his first failure? It's insane that a century-maker and borderline man-of-the-match in one Test can be dropped merely two innings later. As for his pair, though his first innings dismissal was awful, he got beaten in the second innings by a pretty damn good ball. He also wasn't the only batsman to fail, and it's not like Doolan's 5 off 40-odd was any better than Marsh's duck. The worse decision, and the one much more likely to impact the side, though, was dropping Siddle for Pattinson. For one, that's not like-for-like. Siddle and Bird are more similar, and Pattinson is more like Harris. If they wanted to bring in Pattinson, Harris should have been dropped (he's not bowling well at the moment anyway, he's wasting the new ball). If they wanted to drop Siddle, they should have brought in Bird. Now we have three new ball bowlers, and no longer-spell old ball bowler. Siddle wasn't taking a lot of wickets but he was still bowling well enough to hold up an end. Pattinson hasn't played first class cricket since Lord's, this Test is not the place to be re-starting his career. I'm genuinely worried about taking 20 wickets with this attack. Fantastic batting by Warner, Clarke and Smith, with Watson looking good so far and potentially helping us speed up towards 500. But the real test is going to come when we need to get Amla, du Plessis, de Villiers and Duminy out, twice. You'd do well to cease posting your views about Clarke. They are nonsensical at best, and downright insulting at worst.

Also, in a handy coincidence, NFC West plays AFC West in the 2014 season, which means a Superbowl re-match is going to occur in the regular season (as well bringing five playoff teams together to match up against one another).

Sigh. We gave it a pretty damn good shake, but sometimes it just doesn't happen. So many line-ball things we could talk about (the INT, the Bowman non-catch, Iupati getting injured, home-field advantage), but in the end we just didn't play well enough, and that's that. Three consecutive NFC Championship games for one Superbowl appearance and no rings is a little difficult to take (same record as the Patriots, funnily enough), but at the same time it's the kind of success we'd all give our left arm for here at Melbourne, so in that respect it's hard to complain. Some good points have been made re the 49ers. For mine, Kaepernick is still young and hasn't learnt enough yet to make the most of what should be a better offence than it is. Crabtree, Davis, Boldin, with Manningham in the wings, is a good receiving core, Gore still rushed well this year, whilst our O-line is one of the best. We also don't give up too many points on defence with a fantastic pass rush (though I'd like to see some improvements to the secondary). The nucleus of a great team is there, but in a tough division we'll need improvement from Kaepernick to take the next step I think. Either that or an ability to avoid Seattle in the playoffs. As for the Superbowl, it should be a great match. Instinct always says back the better defence over the better offence, but the way Peyton played against New England, no secondary can stop him. Seattle needs coverage on four receivers, but they're one down in their Legion of Boom (Browner), and Maxwell's a weaker corner I think. Sherman has to stop Demaryius Thomas and someone has to cut Decker down. Wow, didn't realise. Neat!

No, the selectors didn't drop him because they didn't need to. We were winning without him making runs. Compare him with Rob Quiney last year. Quiney was outstanding in the field, even provided a bowling option (which Bailey doesn't), but after we'd failed to win in both Brisbane and Adelaide, he was dropped for Perth as we tried to get a win. If we'd been losing in the Ashes, Bailey most likely wouldn't have played five Tests. Conversely, maybe if we'd won those two Tests against South Africa Quiney might have gotten a third short at it. By 'different opponent', what we are really saying is 'actual Test-quality bowling'. Bailey wasn't making runs against England's second-rate bowlers. He clearly stands less chance of making runs against South Africa's.

Two good knocks - I rate his 44 against South Africa in the 47-all-out Test. But your point stands - his form in that Indian series was incredibly awful. That Pakistan match was incredible! Pakistan chased 302 in two sessions! Great win for them (and another victory for positive, aggressive cricket, in the face of Sri Lanka's negative defensive batting (scoring at something like 1.5 runs per over in the morning) and bowling (Herath bowling over the wicket outside leg stump).

Clearly the selectors haven't gone with Shield form. The three leading run scorers in the Shield so far are Marcus North, Cameron White and Phil Hughes. In terms of averages, there are 15 batsmen averaging 50 or more, none of which are Marsh or Doolan. I would have thought Chris Rogers is a great example of why age should not be a determinative factor in selecting batsmen, in a sport where you can still bat at Test level well into your 30s. North is 34, but Rogers was 35 when he was brought back. White is only 30. Age shouldn't be keeping our form batsmen out of the side. Nor should previously being dropped (clearly didn't stop them picking Marsh, so shouldn't have stopped them picking North/White/Hughes/Khawaja). I suspect Marsh has been picked because they feel he'll run into form in the ODI series (he played a great innings on Sunday, to be fair to him), but as I said, Bailey is a great example of how ODI form can mean nothing in Test cricket. Doolan is in because he's been thereabouts for a while, not necessarily because he's in super form right now. I don't agree with either selection, I'd have taken Hughes and one of North and White (both of whom can bowl useful spin to lessen the load on our bowlers and prevent us having to stuff our batting line-up up by using Faulkner at 7 and Haddin at 6). What are you on about? Bailey was clearly substandard, I'm not sure how you want to go about denying that. My point was that we picked a player based primarily off ODI form and he ended up struggling at Test level, which isn't that surprising given he's not a dominant First Class player.

Squad for SA has been announced, and contrary to today's reports, there's no Phil Hughes. Whilst Bailey has been dropped, the replacements are Doolan and Shaun Marsh, which is very surprising and a little silly I'd have thought. They seem to have gone with Marsh based on his limited overs form, which as usual is great. But that's what they did with Bailey, picking him because of the India ODIs, and we know how that turned out. I suppose Doolan will get the nod and bat at 3, to put Watson where he belongs at 6. He gets things wrong so often. I remember him getting another selection issue wrong in the lead-up to the Ashes.

A lot of love for the Niners this week. I can't see it happening. We're playing well, and I don't think Seattle are at the best right now, but if there's any game to get Seattle playing their best, it's a home game against us. And I'm still not sure Kaepernick is good enough to get it done at Seattle. As for the AFC game, I'm going to give it to home-field advantage, but it could go either way. New England 30 Denver 33 San Francisco 17 Seattle 20

Actually, looks like we're both wrong: http://www.footballzebras.com/2014/01/14/10138/ NFL rules are so complex, but apparently the referee was correct to not call the 12 in the huddle penalty. I think.

The 12 men in the huddle non-call was terrible. It looked like the ref was looking right at the huddle at the time to see the 12th man run out! Definitely got lucky there.

Can anyone explain was Colston was trying to do with that play for New Orleans? Surely he should have stepped out of bounds and given them one more play? In the end though the better team won. Same goes for SF-Carolina, I think. Carolina's defence was pretty good all day but gave up some pretty needless penalties, whilst Cam got worse as the game went on. We're in pretty decent form right now, but I can't see us beating Seattle in Seattle. As for the AFC, New England's running game is a force to be reckoned with. Brady was actually rather average vs Indy, but it didn't matter with Blount, Ridley and Vereen tearing it up on the ground. Very potent offence (imagine what it would be with Gronk too).

Not entirely true WJ. If we win, and the Saints win, then we'll host New Orleans in the Championship Game as we'll be the higher seed (5 vs 6). Of course, for a Wild Card that's the only way to host a game, but it's still possible. Chances aren't all that remote either. As Macca said, of late Wild Card teams have done pretty well. Since the 2005 playoffs, number 6 seeds are 5-2 when playing the number 1 seed. I don't think New Orleans will win, but it's not out of the question!

New Orleans 17 Seattle 27 Indianapolis 24 New England 31 San Francisco 20 Carolina 17 San Diego 24 Denver 27 Confident enough picking Seattle. No confidence in SF or Denver. Not sure about the Patriots, but they should win.

Oh right misread you, sorry. It's not that common that a team sitting at 2 rests starters anyway, it's usually the case that if they slip up they risk losing their first-round bye. So I'm not sure there is a problem with teams easing up (it seems to be rare overall anyway, unless the team is coached by Andy Reid). I'm sure fans would get used to it, as I'm sure AFL fans would get used to a 9th or 10th team in our finals eventually. It's not so much the history that bothers me, it's the fact that the playoffs need to remain special and hard to make, and the more teams we let in, the less that becomes. More likely to get weak teams in the playoffs if you expand it. As in, my position would be that I'd rather good teams miss out than bad teams get in. Gives those unlucky good sides more motivation the following year, more burning passion. Keeps the competition for spots strong too.

I'm not sure how it creates a greater incentive to win the division - winning a division already guarantees you a home playoff in Week 1. Adding another playoff team doesn't change that. In fact, it diminishes the need to win the division because one extra team now makes it as a wild card. I personally think everything's fine with the playoffs as they are (though I see merit in seeding based on record as opposed to making the wild cards 5 and 6 no matter what). But as CFH said, money talks.