Has Australia blown its best chance of regaining the Ashes?

I'm serious.

Honestly, what was the point of batting on just long enough on Sunday morning to allow Justin Langer to get his hundred? Apart from allowing Ricky to strain his back while taking a run and thus keeping him off the field for the rest of the day... and possibly for the Second Test.

Today, November 26, has been proclaimed a National Day of Prayer by the Heads of Christian Churches meeting in this time of severe drought.

The heads of Churches called for all Australians to pray for:

• desperately needed rain
• those who are severely drought affected, and
• commitment to responsibly care for all our natural resources

There is a lot more information, including prayer resources, at the National Council of Churches website.

Do you think Ricky Ponting has enough confidence in his team? How big a target will he set England before he can breathe easily at the thought that the opposition can't win? Will 700 be enough? Maybe he'll bat till tea-time Sunday and hope that even Australia's bowlers can contain Strauss and Cook to less than 800 runs in four sessions.

There's one who is following a noble tradition...

Australia 602/9, England 53/3. We've been there before. Many times.

What if Freddie had won the toss yesterday? And said "this pitch has a bit of life in it, we'll bowl first"? Yeah well, what if he decided to have a bat? Maybe they would have gotten 400 and felt happy with themselves.

Instead, they batted second... starting about an hour before stumps on the second day. They might make 400. In fact, they need 403 to avoid the follow-on. That's not looking too good right now.

ABC Radio National's The Sports Factor recorded their show from the outer at the Gabba yesterday. The MP3 of this morning's half-hour program is part of the attached playlist. The Sports Factor's podcast feed is http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/sportsf.xml and it's a program I recommend very highly.

Also on the playlist, I've linked to a few cricket stories from ABC Radio's news programs, AM, http://www.abc.ne

Just over an hour of bedtime listening late last night for me, with MP3 audio summaries from the ABC, BBC, Guardian, Telegraph and CricInfo. The BBC, Guardian and Telegraph are all producing special daily podcast programs.

The ABC's Ashes podcast feed consists of a collection of four clips, being the stumps summary, two press conference interview and a radio highlights package. All of the ABC's material is also available for download from the Cricket Australia site (which does not have a podcast feed).

The Midwinter-Midwinter is back for 2006-07: The rickeyre.com Ashes Best On Ground award. Just like an MVP, except it's a BoG...

To update what I said on the announcement of the 2005 Award, you can take your Border-Gavaskar, Compton-Miller, Chappell-Hadlee, even your Peden-Archdale... I am now presenting my award for the Ashes Player of the Tournament.

Presenting: the Midwinter-Midwinter. Who needs to invoke the names of two legends when you can honour one person twice?

Throughout the Ashes, I'll be watching the Prime Ministerial website for cricketing references in John Winston Howard's media interviews. I'll also be keeping score on the number of references he makes to Darfur or any other major African conflict. (As regular followers of this blog will already be aware, the number of times that John Howard has used the word "Darfur" in public as recorded either in Hansard or in the pm.gov.au transcript archives currently stands at zero.)

Let's kick it off with JWH's interview with Virginia Trioli at 2BL ABC Local Radio Sydney on November 13:

So Natural Foods Australia Limited
(ASX code SNF)
21 November 2006

Response to Announcement of Retirement from Swimming of Ian Thorpe

So Natural Foods Australia Limited ("SNF") advises that while we at SNF will miss Ian competing in the pool, we understand his decision and fully support him as he moves into the next phase of his career.