a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwX4rTn4O8OQKHBTVQMN0o34S1M93PvtOlz4VEgkgw9pxiT-IC5jOsvzQJD8tyE6JQG2nobOvIKsazq4Yfe1M_HItvbH4p_OJe1mPCPTIaa9yA5fA62PUH4Lk72EYkEExSXGRTCKMfI6vF/s1600-h/brearley.jpg"img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 160px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 160px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357694227808287586" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwX4rTn4O8OQKHBTVQMN0o34S1M93PvtOlz4VEgkgw9pxiT-IC5jOsvzQJD8tyE6JQG2nobOvIKsazq4Yfe1M_HItvbH4p_OJe1mPCPTIaa9yA5fA62PUH4Lk72EYkEExSXGRTCKMfI6vF/s400/brearley.jpg" //aToday's nerve-shredding finish, which saw thousands of Welshmen cheering every forward defensive by the last English pair, was a reminder that test matches produce more drama than the limited overs game can ever do.br /div/divbr /divEither limited overs matches are close, in which case they are exciting at the time but soon forgotten, or they are not, in which case they are rather dull and soon forgotten./divbr /div/divdivBut there is a limited overs game I attended 30 years ago that I still remember, and that is because it did not feel like a limited overs game at all./divbr /div/divdivWhen I was a student at York in 1979 I went to Leeds to see the a href="http://www.cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/39/39294.html"England vs Pakistan/a World Cup group game./divbr /div/divdivIt was a typically seam-friendly Headingley wicket and England, batting first, made only 165 - the highest scorer was Graham Gooch with 33. I remember Sikander Bakht bowling very well for Pakistan./divbr /divWhat followed was a display of the tactical genius of the England captain a href="http://liberalengland.blogspot.com/2007/05/mike-brearley-to-be-next-mcc-president.html"Mike Brearley/a. He had four frontline seamers and he bowled them out to take wickets. Mike Hendrick's figures were particularly good: 12-6-15-4./divbr /divThe game ended with Phil Edmonds and Geoff Boycott bowling at the Pakistani tale and England squeaked home, bowling them out for 151./divbr /div/divdivA lesser captain - indeed almost any other captain - would have fitted Edmonds' overs in somewhere in the middle of the innings, taken the pressure off the Pakistani batsmen and lost the game./divbr /div/divdivBrearley, incidentally, had a habit of giving Boycott a bowl in tests in those days. His theory was that opposing batsmen hated the thought of getting out to him so much (he bowled gentle medium pace with his cap turned back to front like Benny Hill's Fred Scuttle) that it made them cautious and slowed the scoring rate./divdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6606798-4143646303919553553?l=liberalengland.blogspot.com'//div
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