Another day, another T20 defeat for Ashley Giles’ beleaguered squad. The days when Britannia ruled the T20 waves seem a long, long, bloody long, time ago.
When I look at England’s side on paper, we have a few useful cricketers, but we just can’t seem to get our strategy right. We’re also clearly lacking confidence, and it’s hard to know how a bland character like Giles can turn things around.
Having said that, the best team doesn’t always win T20 contests. There’s little ebb and flow during matches, and once a team falls a long way behind in a contest, there’s little chance to recover.
With a bit of luck (or a lot of luck in England’s case) average teams can triumph in this form of the game. They just need things to go their way.
Furthermore, as the Windies proved in the last T20 World Cup, it only takes a couple of star players to hit form and a stuttering team can suddenly find momentum. Eoin Morgan is one such star, and Jos Buttler is another. If these two go ballistic, who knows what’s possible.
The problem, however, is that our team has no real cohesion or plan. English batsmen have traditionally struggled against spin, and as our struggles against Narine proved in the recent ODIs, we’re certainly not getting any better.
England’s opponents will have one plan: post a decent score and then suffocate our batsmen with a relentless diet of slow bowlers, and even slower bowlers. We might hit the odd six, but ultimately teams like India, Sri Lanka, the West Indies and Pakistan will fancy their chances of bamboozling our middle-order. It’s not going to be pretty.
Meanwhile, the thought of Dernbach and Bresnan bowling at the likes of Gayle and Dhawan on lifeless surfaces is enough to make even the most optimistic England fan shudder. One suspects our bowling figures are going to get ugly, fast. And the faster the bowler, the faster they’ll disappear to the ropes.
What’s worse, we don’t even have a single chucker in the side. And as all IPL watchers know, the chances of success in T20 cricket directly correlate with how many slow bowlers with dodgy actions you have. Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but it certainly helps if you’ve got the odd mystery spinner – the mystery being, ‘how on earth does he get away with bowling like that’?
Basically therefore, there are no rational reasons to think we can be successful in this upcoming World Cup: the conditions are against us, we have few players in form, we don’t seem to have any coherent strategy and confidence is probably at an all time low. In fact, the only thing in England’s favour is the old adage that in the shortest form of the game, anything can happen.
It’s true. In T20 cricket anything can happen. But it usually doesn’t. Not for England.
James Morgan
The team lacks confidence (not to mention quality, particularly in the bowling department). We’ve seen some encouraging signs in the Caribbean, but there’s still quite a lot more work to do before we’re genuine contenders in international tournaments. I would just enjoy the show, if possible.