Just before I went to bed last night, Ian Bell groped at a ball outside off stuff, got a faint edge and was caught behind. His team were left staring into the abyss at 23-5.
Amongst the numerous disasters that have unfolded this tour, the dismissal was innocuous enough. However, for me it was typical, and symptomatic of a broader problem that has cost us the Ashes more than any other single factor.
Bell played at the ball with a slightly open face. He’s been doing it all tour. It brought him success in the English summer on slow pitches, but on Australia’s faster bouncier pitches it was always going to be a problem.
So why exactly is Bell still doing it – five test matches into a series? The answer, of course, is poor coaching.
Last summer, Jonny Bairstow was clean bowled a number of times – usually due to poor foot work, the result of which was a gaping hole between pat and pad.
When he came back into the test team at Melbourne – after a significant time away from the game in which he should have been working on his technique – he was out in exactly the same fashion. Sigh.
Maybe I’m expecting too much. After all, Alastair Cook has been working with Graham Gooch his entire career, and he still cannot transfer his weight properly from back foot to front. He still drives with a stiff from leg, has dubious balance at the crease, and struggles with his judgement outside off.
If ten years isn’t enough to sort out the captain’s technique, what hope has Bairstow got?!
What’s more, Joe Root has been getting bogged down at the top of the order for nine test matches. He hasn’t developed any get out of jail shots in this time; nor has he learned how to drop the ball, run quick singles and get off strike.
So what exactly has Graham Gooch been doing? I suggest all England fans that have travelled to Australia to watch this debacle petition the ECB for a refund. They can use the money that pays Gooch’s salary. He doesn’t deserve to get paid.
Under Gooch’s watch, England’s best players, Cook, Trott and Pietersen – cricketers with impressive records who are all aged between 28-33 – have all declined. They should be enjoying the best years of their careers. Instead their averages have declined markedly from fifty to nearly forty-five.
This hasn’t happened to one of them, or even two of them. It’s all of them. In fact, it’s the entire team. Prior has also declined, as has Broad and Swann’s batting too.
So again I ask you. What exactly has Gooch done to justify his position? If you or I performed this badly at work we’d be sacked immediately.
Let’s just argue the other side for a second. Technical glitches are often ingrained and extremely difficult to solve. Gooch himself had a nightmare against Terry Alderman all those years ago. It took him ages to sort his game out.
So why is it, I ask you, that Australia’s batsmen have all managed to sort out their technical glitches so quickly?
In the first test, Michael Clarke was tucked up by a Broad bouncer and caught at short leg. We all rejoiced – and the Sky commentators said it was a really positive sign for the rest of the series: “Clarke can’t play the short ball. How will he score a single run?”
I’ll tell you how. After a quick chat with the Aussies coaches, Clarke emerged in the second innings with a slightly more open stance. It enabled him to cope with the short ball fine thank you very much. He scored a century.
Michael Clarke’s technical glitch lasted all of one innings. It didn’t take years, or even weeks. It took him two days.
It’s the same story with Steve Smith and Shane Watson.
The former looked like a walking wicket in the first half of the English summer. He had a glaring weakness outside off stump. All our bowlers had to do, we assumed, was bowl in the corridor and wait for young Smudge to make a mistake.
A few tests later Smith scored a century at the Oval and has, if we’re being honest, looked one of the more composed players at Sydney. He’s no mug any more. His batting has progressed admirably, even though his quirky technique required more work than most.
Shane Watson is a slightly more complicated case, as he still plants his front leg a little too much, but he also looks miles better than he did in July and August. He now has two Ashes centuries to his name and we’ve got him out lbw just once this series …. which brings us on to David Saker and our bowlers.
Did you know that before this test match, England had only bowled eighteen deliveries at Watson’s stumps in the entire series? Yes, you heard right. Just eighteen straight balls in four tests at a man whose propensity to get out lbw is legendary. Again, let’s exhale a big collective sigh.
Meanwhile, England’s bowlers have generally bowled too short all series. One assumes they’re either bowling to strict instructions, or simply ignoring Saker completely. Either way, the bowling coach’s position is untenable.
And don’t even get me started on the demise of Steve Finn. He was our best bowling prospect in a decade. Under Saker’s watch he’s lost much of his dynamic pace and started to kick the stumps over in his delivery stride – a habit, interestingly enough, that Ben Stokes also seems to have developed.
Saker isn’t entirely to blame for Finn’s woes – Gus Fraser and Middlesex haven’t done much good either – but England’s bowling coach must take a significant amount of responsibility for Finn’s regression.
The young tyro simply hasn’t recovered from his stump-kicking malaise, and the attempt to shorten Finn’s run was an ill-advised strategy that only made things worse.
The bottom line is this: England have been comprehensively out-coached this Ashes series. The plans devised by Lehmann for our star batsmen have worked an absolute treat. Our coaches – and our batsmen – haven’t been able to respond. We make the same mistakes again and again.
For a team that prides itself on its meticulous preparation, this simply isn’t good enough.
Even more worrying is Andy Flower’s apparent determination to remain in the job. This suggests, unbelievably, that the management don’t think they’re culpable for England’s humiliation at all.
All we’ve heard about in recent days is the coach and captain’s hunger to build a new era with new players. Well I’ve got some bad news for you folks. England’s young players, with the exception of Root, Stokes and possibly Ballance, simply aren’t good enough at the moment.
What’s more, Darren Lehmann’s success proves that you don’t need wholesale changes in playing personnel to turn around a team’s fortunes. You just need fresh ideas and new methods – in other words, a new coaching team.
Australia are fielding basically the same seam bowling attack that was destroyed in 2011. Siddle, Harris and Johnson are not different people. They just look like they are. In 2011 they were awful. In 2014 they’re being called the world’s best pace attack.
What’s the difference? Craig McDermott, a new bowling coach, that’s what.
England’s team is slightly younger than Australia’s. Matt Prior is five years younger than Brad Haddin for heaven sake. Wholesale changes are not warranted, nor would they work. There is no golden generation waiting in the wings.
All this talk of dropping established stars just deflects attention away from the real root of England’s decline: a stale regime, a poor captain, and coaches who have been in their respective jobs so long that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, they can say that they haven’t already said to the team a hundred times before.
James Morgan
a lot harder to win when the pitches are not doctored. that’s the elephant in the room.
That’s just Australian sooking, like whinging about Stuart Broad not walking like a bunch of old women who’d never seen a game of cricket before.
Doctored pitches like in 2011 down under? Like when we won in India recently (a series Australia lost heavily). England have been good on most surfaces until the last few weeks.
[…] the brink of a crushing defeat at Sydney and with it, the ignominy of five-nil. How had our batting unravelled quite so disastrously in Australia? What exactly had the coaches been doing? The very next day, our humiliation is […]