Brisbane
\nSteve Smith slammed England\u2019s fielding tactics as \u201cpretty defensive\u201d as Australia gained an edge after three hard-fought days in the first Ashes Test at the Gabba.<\/p>\n
The tourists had well-researched plans in place for the Australian captain, yet Smith still scored a stubborn unbeaten 141, his 21st Test century.<\/p>\n
Australia took a narrow innings lead on the third day of the absorbing Test match before England closed at 33\/2 in their second innings, a lead of seven runs. England skipper Joe Root\u2019s field strategy for Smith was likened to Bodyline, a notorious leg theory bowling tactic devised by England on their 1932-33 tour of Australia, specifically to negate the dominant batting skills of the great Don Bradman. \u201cI thought they were pretty defensive from the outset,\u201d said Smith, who was out in the middle for eight-and-a-half hours. \u201cIt was almost as though they were waiting for our batters to make a mistake. Unfortunately, four of the top batsmen made those mistakes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt felt like it was very defensive. It might be a series where boundaries might be hard to come by. They were pretty defensive pretty early.\u201d
\nBut England paceman Stuart Broad supported his team\u2019s strategy to restrict runs and not let the game get away from them. \u201cIf we can restrict them from scoring lots of boundaries… as a seam bowler your job is to really restrict scoring,\u201d said Broad, who took three wickets. \u201cIf Australia got away from us we\u2019d be sat here saying \u2018We\u2019ve put a lot of pressure on ourselves because we\u2019ve let Australia get away and score a lot of runs really quickly\u2019. Actually, we\u2019re in a lot of control of this game after three days.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brisbane Steve Smith slammed England\u2019s fielding tactics as \u201cpretty defensive\u201d as Australia gained an edge after three hard-fought days in the first Ashes Test at the Gabba. The tourists had well-researched plans in place for the Australian captain, yet Smith still scored a stubborn unbeaten 141, his 21st Test century. Australia took a narrow innings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11293,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11292"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11294,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11292\/revisions\/11294"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}