With a last ball six, Hope scored his century and crossed 2000 runs mark today.

Australia have overcome the World Test Champions in their own back yard in perhaps their most complete performance in years. Off the back of an odd year at the top level, Australia found a gear that would send a shiver down the spine of their upcoming opponents in this current test cycle. Despite winning the Ashes and only losing 4 of their last 19 tests, there have been consistent questions about the age of their star players and the consistency of their batting performances, often relying on their cartel of legendary bowlers to get them out of trouble.

This seems pretty unfair to judge one of the best teams Australia has ever produced on a portion of their game when the whole seems to get results more often than not, but I guess success can always become boring and we will always try and pick holes in greatness. The outlook for Australia was made to look bleak leading into this series after a loss to Bangladesh at home where batting woes laid bare for all to see and I will admit that I fell into the same line of pessimism, thinking that the team might be approaching a cliff.

But heroics from Renshaw and Hazlewood plus some incredible catching from Steve Smith, was more than enough to push a wasteful South African team away.

https://pathannah.substack.com/p/the-stoicism-of-australian-cricket?r=7coz0j&utm_medium=ios

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This is a very historic venue, being used for Cricket since the early 1880s but was officially granted to the Suva Cricket Club in 1884.

This ground has hosted quite a few big tours such as when an Australian side toured in 1905 where they played against an 18-man Fijian side or when a Fijian side beat a West Indies side with names like Sir Garry Sobers, Everton Weekes, Clyde Walcott, Frank Worrell, etc. by 28 runs in a one day match in 1956. More about that specific match here.

Outside of Cricket, this is a multi-purpose ground which is also used for Rugby(presumably Union and League, although Union is the one more popular in Fiji afaik) and can host two matches simultaneously and is also used for Football, Australian Football, Hockey(Field) and various Athletic events alongside local festivals and carnivals.

This place also played an important part in the historic first-ever trans-Pacific flight in 1928.

This ground was also the site of the flag-raising of Fiji on the occasion of Fijian independence in 1970.

The second image is the pavilion which was actually built in 2016 after the historic pavilion from 1930(which had deteriorated and had suffered structural decay over the years) was demolished to make way for the current one which has a permanent seating capacity of 1,000 people.

The third image is just a view of the stands.

In 1833, Hambledon cricketer and writer John Nyren wrote a protest against the then shift in Laws in favor of allowing round-arm bowling. Until then, Cricket has essentially only ever allowed underarm bowling as the exclusive method of delivery. In his essay, he pushes many arguments against the change. The principle of these include his disgust with the notion of rule changes to "shorten the game," which is a familiar point of contention between conservative and modernist cricket fans in the present day.

He also argues that roundarm deliveries make batting harder, rendering them unable to display their skill and elegance. I personally found it interesting how we have flipped 180 to an era where discourse is centered around the batriarchy and conditions which offer no service to the bowlers.

He concludes with asserting that if the game continues on this track it will decline from its elegance to mere horseplay. He goes on to conclude that any player in the new era will not hold a candle in skill and eminency to those players of the era gone by.

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