Reaction from Joe Root and Peter Siddle at the end of the third day’s play in the Fifth Test between England and Australia at the Oval in London on Friday
On not being able to score freely all day
“I mean, people come along to watch cricket for a number of reasons, but that’s something that we can’t always control. We need to play the situation and fair credit to Australia, they bowled pretty well tonight – well, pretty much all day really – and they made it very hsard for us to score fluently. The pitch is quite slow and quite hard to time the ball on and you know, you’ve seen throughout the summer that people like Ian Bell and Kevin Pietersen will generally score quite fluently. It’s not always that easy. I think fair credit should go to Australia, they bowled pretty tightly and we played pretty well to get to where we are tonight.”
Joe Root, England batsman
On percieved ‘sledging’ from the Australian players
“Australia are there to win games of cricket and they are going to try everything they can to try and do that. We’ve just got to make sure that we concentrate on what we do and not worry about them. Make sure that every opportunity that we do get a chance to do anything well, we nail it.”
Joe Root, England batsman
On how the Australian team are feeling about their cricket
“Yeah, I guess it’s a positive that we’re playing some good cricket. I guess that’s all we can do. We did all we could do with the bat and then then got stuck in with the ball. They got off to three 50-run partnerships in a row, but we kept building the pressure, kept to our game plane and kept the runs down, so that’s all we can do. We’ve just got to keep getting out there, keep attacking them as hard as we can and see where we end up, so that’s a hard game, it was a long day, but the boys will be ready to go tomorrow morning, knowing that if we can get a couple of early wickets, get a couple of new batters in there and see where we end up in the afternoon and where the match is at then.”
Peter Siddle, Australia bowler
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