The news seems to be coming thick and fast this week. With all the hoo-ha surrounding Andrew Strauss’ appointment as MD, I’d almost forgotten we’re playing Ireland in Dublin tomorrow.
It will be interesting to see how our batsmen approach this game. One of the reasons we got a kicking at the World Cup was our failure to throw caution to the wind. The best teams rarely take their foot off the gas. There might be brief periods of introspection when a couple of wickets fall, but the best sides try to maintain an attacking mentality throughout.
I read an interesting article on modern scoring rates and scoreboard pressure yesterday. It’s incredible to think that India once made 134/4 off 60 overs in an ODI at Lord’s. Sunil Gavaskar made 36 not out off a whopping 174 balls. How things have changed.
Although test cricket and ODIs are obviously different, I’d like to see England play more aggressively in all forms. Ian Bell and Moeen Ali performed adequately in the World Cup, but because Bell in particular got bogged down in the middle-order, momentum was usually lost.
If Alex Hales and Jason Roy open the batting tomorrow, it could be a sign of things to come. Why caress the ball elegantly to the boundary when one can thump it over the ropes instead? I hope the conditions in Dublin enable England’s batsmen to express themselves.
Impetus at the top of the order is also a problem for our test team. Modern cricket, whatever the format, increasingly embraces positive players. England’s top three in the Caribbean was anachronistic.
If Adam Lyth takes Jonathan Trott’s place alongside Cook, he’ll be under immediate pressure to play positively. This is a little unfair on Lyth of course, but many will see him as the antidote to the skipper’s more pedestrian approach.
One of the reasons I’m underwhelmed at the appointment of Andrew Strauss is his cautious, conservative and methodical personality. Obviously we need to give him a chance – he’s spent time in India watching the IPL and may now appreciate the need for change – but the possibility of paralysis from over-analysis concerns me.
Although meticulous planning isn’t such a problem in tests, it can be a hindrance in ODIs. As a Worcestershire fan, it was disturbing to learn that Steve Rhodes sets targets for every stage of a T20 innings – the batsmen are told what to aim for after five, ten, fifteen overs etc.
The problem with rigid plans is that they don’t take into account what the opposition does. All plans need to be flexible. In fact, one could argue that the best plans are so flexible that they aren’t really plans at all – they’re just an approach or a philosophy put into action.
Surely the best plan in ODIs and T20 cricket is simply to ‘score as many runs as possible’ in any given situation – in other words to read the game and seize opportunities. If a particular bowler is having a purple patch, play him out rather than worrying about the target score after ten overs. Similarly, if a star performer is having a bad day, why not attack him and take advantage?
As England build towards the 2019 World Cup, it’s vital for us to become trendsetters. If we simply play catch-up – and try to build a team capable of scoring 300 plus – we’ll be missing a trick. The bar could be even higher in four years time. Maybe 400 will be a par score?
Tomorrow’s game is the first opportunity to embrace a new attacking mind-set and identify modern, aggressive cricketers capable of taking on the likes of Australia and India. I’ll be watching the likes of Taylor, Vince and Billings with interest.
James Morgan
@DoctorCopy
Sadly, I think the match tomorrow (weather permitting) will be a side-show to the freak-show ahead of the test series v NZ (Daren’t think too far ahead just yet).
With the seemingly inevitable introduction of Strauss as DoC, the continued love-in for Cook as Captain, and the amazingly silent/no questions asked of, Flower, then this game will not show us anything until selection responsibilities and coaching changes are made.
I would love for Taylor to become the replacement for Bell, yet for the purposes of this summer would give Bell the test captaincy. One – to remove Cook, so to see if his batting is returning to past form (not convinced, nor his his record v Aus at home convincing) and perhaps gain some on-field direction by giving Bell responsibility/freedom – which may also buck his batting up towards more regular meaningful contributions (2013 home being the only time he – ughh – stood up to the plate)
We have to accept that Cook will open this summer, barring extreme poor scores by end of say 2nd test v Aus, but the future has to have some foundations. So as Lyth has not batted for many a week, Hales should open v NZ having had an excellent start to the CC season.
I’d love to see Vince do well as I think he has a good ‘brain’ and could still grow to test status.
The bowling, both pace and spin is more of a problem, but we can’t continue with the samey 80-85mph quartet, whether they can bat (Stokes, maybe Jordan) or not (Broad)
We failed in giving opportunities in the WI through continued conservatism (small c) so Rashid, Wood, Plunkett missed out. With the likelihood of injuries (again) and rushed-back too soon (again)… we have to worry, and with much evidence for it.
It will be a long summer…
I also wonder if Hales could be a future Test opener. I don’t recall him being talked about as he seems to be regarded as a t20/ODI player only, but the same doubts were cast at David Warner a couple of years ago, and he’s a key member of the Australian Test team now.
I cautiously suggested that Hales could open with Cook prior to the 2013 Ashes. I like the idea of fighting fire with fire, but I’m not so sure now after Hales’s struggles at the top of the order in ODIs.
We’ve got the power but not the culture. We’re playing with fear and hesitancy. Our most exciting and innovative batsman for the past 30 years was sacked and publicly humiliated, so none of this is a surprise. More of the same to come for years and years.
I have spent the last few days getting apoplectic on various forums about the current state of our team and the appointment of Strauss. I am now tired with the whole thing so have decided that I am going to sit back and watch and see what Strauss does. Thought the overwhelming response to his appointment is one of disappointment and frustration, there have been a few voices, who have met him and worked with him, who say he might surprise us yet. So I am now going to cut him some slack and see what he does, or does not. Then I might start venting again, but in the meantime, I am holding a watching brief.
I am also looking on the bright side that at least I do not have to listen to his drone in the Sky commentary box any more
I think tomorrow should be rather fun
That’s a good plan Elaine. I intend to do exactly the same. Watch and see. I don’t expect much from him so who knows, I might get a pleasant surprise.
Now is the time to experiment and be bold with ODI selections, there is nothing to be lost and certainly nothing to be gained by continuing with the previous squad.
I don’t see the need for whole sale changes to the test side, we’re two positions short of being a good test team and a besides a successful ODI side should help the test side.
So which two changes will make us a side capable of beating Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Pakistan away in the UAE?
If we can’t beat any of these we are not a good side. We have already failed to beat Sri Lanka and the West Indies in the last year.
God help us if Jimmy Anderson gets injured in the next couple of months.
Australia the team so highly lauded on here, lost the Ashes 3-0 in 2013 but were considered an emerging team the fruits of which are being seen now. It’s a matter of perspective.
It’s unrealistic to expect an England side to dominate in the test arena for a prolonged period, we can hope and wish for it, but it’s not a given right, no coach or captain (other than Flower/Strauss) has come close to this.
But yes, I would class the 3rd/4th ranked test team to be considered as ‘Good’.
Fully agree with the point about plans. England had a good record in the first PP in the WC (2nd best of any team I think). England outscored India in most of the first PP in the ODI series at the end of last season – but lost 3-1.
We desperately need some analysis about what is going on in the middle overs. The batsmen allow too many dot balls and the bowlers don’t pose a wicket-taking threat.
But surely the “game data” has already been analysed? :)
These ODIs are exactly the one thing we don’t need. They will just serve to maintain continuity and inhibit any serious change.
We should have taken 6 months off from the debacle of the world cup, and then started again from scratch, with a new coach, a new captain, and a new squad, all picked entirely on merit from the domestic competitions.
If that means established performers miss out because they’re too busy playing test cricket to prove their abilities in the shorter formats, then so be it.
it’s all about the MONEY – the cricket and quality thereof is secondary – bums on seats time, and, naturally, people are queueing up to watch this despite their criticisms of the system – the ECB can do what they like because there is no significant challenge to them by the so called fans, they pay anyway!
In a nutshell….everything!!!http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/england/11590096/Alex-Hales-asks-England-to-give-him-a-chance-to-play-like-Kevin-Pietersen.html
Have England got the Power? – overnight it seems we have the power to return to the 17th century but don’t despair because there you will find the ECB still prevaricting over over whether the England cricket team is any good
Finally I’ve cracked it: this vituperative anti-regime whinging is just misplaced “class-ism”.
The animus lurking within just about every comment hostile to Cook and Strauss is a class-driven one. OK: Britain is still a bizarrely class-bound country. We all get that. But this antagonism to Cook and Strauss (and various others) is just plainly built on a misundertanding of their respective (and similar) social backgrounds.
Cook, Strauss and Pietersen are all the products of the middle-class meritocracy, not a (non-existent, but still perceived) upper class conspiracy. If I had to rank them in social pecking order it would run Strauss, Pietersen, Cook, but it’s actually too close too call (or bother with!)
Cook’s dad was a BT telephone engineer for Heaven’s sake. He got in to his Public School (Bedford, not Eton or Winchester or Westminster or the actual schools of what is left of our Upper Class) as a result of his choral abilities which took him to St Paul’s Choir School from where he gained a music scholarship to Bedford. Much is always made of Cook’s Bedfordshire farming retreat in a “country gent” sense (which seems to be meant as an insult, bewilderingly to many hard-working farmers) but which he actually picked up from his wife’s family – who themselves only went in to farming in the 1920s and run an efficient working mixed farm as a business rather than a “landed estate” as you might mistakenly believe from the Press comments that this attracts.
Strauss is closer to the upper class mould that his critics like to portray him as representing, having been to Caldicott and Radley, but he was born in South Africa (to an English mother) and can forever be “only” an import in to the British class system. (We could debate three years at Durham and it’s social categorisation, but one thing’s for sure: you won’t get any Oxbridge product accepting that Durham is truly “top-drawer” and he will have suffered gentle condescension from those lucky enough to make the Oxbridge cut throughout his life.) Escaping South Africa, his parents went first to Australia before settling in England: Strauss’s background is quintessentially that of the returning ex-pat “grafted” back in to British society, becoming re-grounded in the upper-middle class ranks.
Neither of them are Upper Class twits, “born leaders” or silver-spoon-in-the-mouth products of (unmerited) privilege. They are the products of middle class meritocratic endeavour.
Hardly in contrast to these very ordinary backgrounds, the lightning rod of all this nonsense, Kevin Pietersen, was also born in South Africa to an English mother and an Afrikaaner father and went to Maritzburg College. As Pietermaritzburg High School this school has been an emblematic Public School in South Africa, following a fairly Victorian British model involving hierarchical organisation, lots of hearty songs and sports and slavishly adopting the now outdated British class approach to life that, ironically, has been pretty much banished from the top flight of British public schools. The Harrow of South Africa I would put it as.
So, all this blather about class. Please stop it. All the protagonists have come through a pretty traditional background. None of them are Upper Class (a group which hardly exists in modern Britain in any case) being given “jobs for the boys” (or conversely excluded from “jobs for the boys”) in a bizarre Upper Class conspiracy to do the hard-working meritocrats down. All have displayed abilities for which they have been identified as future performers and given specialist training and support by a system rooted in middle-class meritocracy.
For Heaven’s sake, drop this outdated and absurd class-ism. I’m sure it doesn’t bother the Chef, Strauss or KP who are, I suspect, quite secure in their obvious middle class rootedness. It’s not an explanation or even useful context for understanding their performances, their selection (or exclusion) or their tribal loyalties.
very interesting but stupid!
is that you Mike?
I thought it was Ed Smith in disguise?
“Finally I’ve cracked it: this vituperative anti-regime whinging is just misplaced “class-ism”.
The animus lurking within just about every comment hostile to Cook and Strauss is a class-driven one.”
That’s your theory. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.
“For Heaven’s sake, drop this outdated and absurd class-ism.”
That exists only in your imagination.
I’m as middle class ex public schoolboy and as privileged as Cook is, and you’re talking nonsense. The antipathy to Cook comes because of his words and actions. Strauss because of his words and his unsuitability for the role he’s being shoehorned into.
Literally the only time class has been an issue is when the phrase “the right sort of family” was used. And it wasn’t us who said it.
Ali Martin, Nick Hoult and Lawrence Booth all reporting that Moores will be sacked early next week. Gillespie being mentioned as a possible replacement of course but for the first time Justin Langer’s name is cropping up.