Australian squad for Ashes 2013

Originally posted by FMF
Michael Clarke [capt]
Brad Haddin [v-capt]
Shane Watson
Peter Siddle
Phillip Hughes
Nathan Lyon
David Warner
Ed Cowan
Matthew Wade
James Pattinson
Mitchell Starc
Usman Khawaja
Chris Rogers
Ryan Harris
Jackson Bird
James Faulkner

Chris Rogers, one test in the last five years?

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
Chris Rogers, one test in the last five years?

35 years old too. One of the surprises in the tour party. Might be a case of horses for courses, with him being skipper of Middlesex. Fifty eight 1st class tons at an average of 50. It might also be that he doesn't play in any of the Tests and that he is simply there as a left-handed, local-conditions-savvy, salty-old-pro cover for the Aussie's brittle top order.

Originally posted by FMF
salty-old-pro cover for the Aussie's brittle top order.

They should have gone for Dame Edna then. I know hardly any of those names. And I won't get to watch the Ashes either. I went looking for some stats of my own. 7 million or so for C4 coverage down to 1.5 million for Sky coverage.

Originally posted by thaughbaer
I know hardly any of those names.

A team in transition, it would seem. If they grab the Ashes back it will be a famous victory.

Originally posted by thaughbaer
And I won't get to watch the Ashes either. I went looking for some stats of my own. 7 million or so for C4 coverage down to 1.5 million for Sky coverage.

Something about the combination of TV rights and advertising and money so often makes TV business people and sports business people go nutty. When the EPL on the TV really took off here about ten years ago it was on terrestrial TV and there were maybe 50,000,000 households watching the big games on Saturday evenings.

Despite all the exposure that this gave sponsors, and all the potential for branding and endorsements in this huge emerging market, after a few years of roaring popularity, whoever controlled the rights to screen EPL games down here sold them to a poo-for-brains bunch of business executives who owned a satellite TV company with only 800,000 subscribers and only available in Jakarta.

For about two years virtually nobody could watch EPL. The satellite TV company went bust because their number of subscribers only increased by a few 100,000 from the previous 800,000 as Indonesians started watching Dutch and German league football for free instead of EPL, and also returned to Italian football [free to watch on TV for as long as I can remember], which had been dominant here in the 1990s.

Finally, it returned to how it had been, and now once again there are about 3 or 4 EPL games broadcast live each weekend, millions upon millions of people watching them, and advertisers jostling to fill up the pre-match, half-time and in-game [around the edges of the screen] slots.

OK. Right then. That was a bit off topic. Never mind.