It is a game of bat and Ball

Be feelings that Cricket is not the winner out of the Display Australia and South Africa put on the other day is well supported at Baggy Green by Barry Richards. 

Cricket is much more that batting!  It is a game of skill and guile.  It is about bat and ball, it is about feilding and tactics.  But the display batting put on by Ponting anf Gibbs could have been done against a bowling machine.  With the boundaries in so close bowling and feilding was of little piont.

"There is such a propensity for hitting boundaries that bowlers have been taken out of game," Richards is quoted as saying by The Courier-Mail. "It will only be six months and we'll see 1000 runs scored in a one-day game. The skill has been taken out of cricket. As a cricket person, it is very boring because the bowlers have no chance. All the rule changes, the power plays and things, have just made things so much in favour of batsmen.

"The small grounds are like saying to Tiger Woods to play on a 4000m course; he might keep shooting 49 but what does it really mean?" he continued. "Cricket is the only game that has been made smaller in the past 100 years. It's all in the name of commercialism.

So we will see how the game pans out in the future but there is great excitment in a game that is 230 vs 231 to see a batsman carve out a fine innings against bowling that is capable and the ball is moving is exciting!  Who said it is only exciting when the batsman is going crazy!