Slight Problem – Day 3 in Dubai

That’ll teach me. Yesterday I was full of optimism. The bowlers had done remarkably well and the batsmen – led by the two mailmen – had put England in a strong position.

I should’ve known calamity would follow. That’s what supporting the bloody England cricket team is all about.

I know it’s a cliché, but one bad session really is all it takes to lose a test. And boy did England have a bad session this morning. Root went early on and the others showed less backbone than a plate of raspberry jelly. And we all know what noise raspberries are associated with.

What disappoints me so much is that Riaz was our chief tormentor. I really expected spin to be our Achilles heel. Somehow capitulating to Yasir Shah would’ve been more excusable and easier to take. We all know English batsmen can’t play quality legspin. What we are supposed to do, however, is play pace bowling reasonably well. It wasn’t even a seamer’s pitch for heaven sake.

Riaz bowled exceptionally well but England’s performance just wasn’t good enough. Stokes pushed at a wide one, Buttler looks shot and Rashid played a hopeless slog. What on earth were the batsmen thinking?

The suspicion remains that England’s batting order resembles a block of Emmental. It’s full of holes. We’ve got two reliable batsmen in Cook and Root but we can’t rely on the others at all.

As @ColinMehigan said on twitter, we’ve basically got four numbers 7s: Moeen, Bairstow, Stokes and Buttler. None of them look good enough to bat in the top five. Some of them might make reasonable 6s one day, but I doubt any will average above forty when their careers are up.

Buttler in particular looks like a passenger these days. He’s keeping relatively well – that’s if your expectations aren’t particularly high – but he can’t buy a run. I’ve said for a long time that he looks like an ODI specialist to me. A bottom handed batting technique is rarely successful at test level.

I really hope Jos proves me wrong, but there’s simply no need to play two keepers when you’ve got a guy like James Taylor – who has quick feet and might play the spinners well – riding the pine on the bench. Then again, it’s not like we’re blessed with quality batting options.

So where do England go from here? I fear we’ll just have to grin and bear it for a while. I can’t see us chasing the runs unless Cook and Root do something mental. You sense we’ll either win by eight wickets or not at all. My money’s on not at all. It’s a long way back from here.

It’s amazing how one bad session can put a completely different spin on this whole England team. Sometimes I think we’re heading in the right direction (the seam bowling attack does look good for example) but when the team collapses in a heap we’re reminded of all the familiar failings. How many genuinely test class cricketers do we have?

We keep hearing about progress – and I do think some progress has been made – but if we lose this game our record since Peter Moores departed will be won four and lost four. Is that really good enough?

Imagine if we’d lost the toss at Trent Bridge. I hate to think what might have happened then. Maybe we used up all our good fortune in the Ashes?

James Morgan

21 comments

  • It’s a shame that England don’t have another specialist opening batsman in their squad……. oh!

    Of course stuffing a team with all-rounders, let alone two wicketkeepers, rarely works. I’d love to see a properly structured, balanced batting order. But I’m not holding my breath.

  • Cheers for the mention! Effectively we need to find an opener, spinner and wicket keeper and things will be sorted….oh and a number three and why not another number 7

  • Need an opener?

    If Cook gets a mawk after the a lousy winter, decides he doesn’t need the hassle, has enough cash and withdraws to the farm, we’ll need two!

    Far too much has been staked on Cook handing over to Young Joe and still staying on for 10 years….

  • Many people have been saying these batsmen aren’t good enough but the media and yourself out blinkers on and pronounce they have potential, look that one innings means they are great etc etc

    Bell – finished
    Ali as an opener – really
    Ali in the top six – seriously ??
    Barstow top six?? Clueless
    Stokes top,six??? Urgh

    Are we that bereft of actual batsmen in the modern game ?? If we seriously are (and looking at how poor Lyth did when dominating lvcc and of course thinking hales is an opener!!) then ‘we’ really need to look at why we aren’t producing test quality batsmen??

    Personally, and I’m bored of saying it.. We will struggle to produce the quality because all Jnr and adult cricket is bosh bash biff 2020 or win / lose.. At no point do they have to bat properly, bowl properly or think tactically.. It’s just keep it tight and biff a chase… Or biff biff biff and set a defensive field and wait for batsmen to gift you their wicket..

    Sigh, this is no resurgent England side, it’s just one where they’ve found a decent batsmen in root and cook has found form (again, after stopping playing biff cricket)

  • Mirage in the desert – England has more holes than your favourite cheese you mentioned.
    Stokes is massively overrated, Jos is not a test batsman, Ali just doesn’t fit, Bairstow has no idea what he is, Bell is done – seriously, the UAE will find you out, and England is not that good.
    Find or steal an opener and England might be able to build on something.

        • Australia were poor in the UAE, no question and to compare, worse than what England currently is out there.

          But Australia a poor team? Have to disagree there – one hour of madness in Nottingham doesn’t make a poor team, which basically cost them the Ashes.

          Australia are better than Emgland, consistency proving that. England will get hammered in this test, perhaps in the next as well, but who doesn’, with the exception of NZ who showed fight.

          Anyhow, let’s not turn this into Australia v England keyboard fight, we have had enough of that over the last few years. It’s refreshing to see those two playing somebody else for a change.

          Next week Australia v NZ, will be a good battle – a different looking Australian team and a well grounded and led NZ.

          Not sure if Warner is fit, but a new opener and maybe even two new openers, a new four, new bowler to join (probably stick with Siddle actually). I guess we can revisit this after the Gabba test which starts on Thursday.

          Let’s get back to England – is Ali and Jos seriously test match players, based on current form? Buttler was “rested”, has come back and failed. Ali is being bounced around the order and it’s not working. Taylor is a tenacious little fella, I like him. Get Compton back and tell Cook, if you believe the rumours that they don’t get on, to just lie back and think of England.

  • James, England need Compton and Ali or Stokes at 6. You cant play both.

    Problem is, I heard from a reliable source that Cook hates Compton, but has never told him the reason why (although it is known by others) or even told him that he doesn’t like him.

    Cook. Ok opener. Shit as a leader of men. KP saga proved it when he hid behind others. Odi captaincy saga proved it when he was blinded by self adulation

  • Without a consistent open inning partnership, and a reliable number 3, there will always be extra pressure on the rest of the lineup.
    Add to that a captain who appears to have no idea of mind management (as an example, Swann and Vaughan today were rightly dismayed by the one-day fields he set for Rashid), and the team is always going to be less than the sum of its parts.
    Similarly, what was he doing bringing on a part time spinner with a bad back – on whom our batting depends – when there are six bowlers in the team ?

    Bairstow, like Buttler, plays with too much bottom hand. On the other hand, he does seem to posses rather more mental toughness, and stands a chance of surviving long enough to refine his technique.

  • Is it just me or does anyone else find Dominic Cork and his idiotic, incoherent remarks on TV extremely irritating? The guy doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about. This has been the case for sometime. He got is knickers in a right twist after day 3, advocating the possible dropping of Stokes but then realising what a stupid thing it was to say and going on the offensive to cover his tracks. He talks such bile. Doesn’t do English cricket any good. Rob Key on the other hand, he’s a natural.

    • Couldn’t agree more re: Cork. We were tweeting about those comments last night. I liked him as a player but he drives me mad as a pundit. Says some really daft things.

  • One other aspect of the mildly absurd experiment with poor Moeen as a makeshift opener – what do we do if Cook is out of the next test with an injury ?
    We’d probably want to replace both openers at that point, which would leave the team in greater disarray.

    I like Bayliss’ instincts (the desirability of two frontline spinners, for example, or the wish to attack rather than defend), but we are carrying too many players either out of form or out of position.

  • I see Selvey has surfaced on lunchtime TMS to suggest that we persist with the Moeen as opener experiment, drop the second spinner, and play five seamers.

    How he continues to be employed as a pundit puzzles me.

      • So who is the 5th seamer? Finn or Jordan I suppose. The last time England played five seamers was at Headingley against South Africa about ten years ago. Kabir Ali was the 5th seamer. It was a disastrous experiment. Doing it at a ground that has traditionally spun, and offers the seamers little, is nothing short of cricketing absurdity. I just don’t know what planet poor Mike is on.

        • I’m not sure I can be bothered to go back and look… Doesn’t really matter; the idea was pretty silly at lunchtime.

          Given Rashid’s innings today, the suggestion that we drop a player whose second innings bowling almost precipitated a win last time out, and whose batting almost saved the game, in only his second test, is now little short of insulting.

          An apology in his column tomorrow would be the decent thing to do… but I don’t really expect it.

        • Here it is, for posterity…
          :-)

          Mike Selvey (the Guardian’s cricket correspondent) on TMS: “You’ve got to keep Moeen opening the batting, they need the experience of Ian Bell. So Cook, Moeen, Bell, Root, Taylor, Bairstow, Stokes, Plunkett, Broad, Wood, Anderson. That team might not lose – Pakistan are seeing the seamers off and going after the spinners at the moment.”

  • One thing to consider is that (failed opening experiment aside) we’ve batted pretty decently in the fourth innings on a turning pitch.

    I’d guess that with a couple of tweaks to the team (Taylor for Buttler, certainly), and acclimatisation to the conditions, we ought to give Pakistan a decent game next time around.

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