It was 23rd October 2013 when Alastair Cook and England’s best cricketers flew out to Australia. It is now 27th January. Boy, what a tour. Fortunately for our beleaguered captain, he can finally fly home, get some rest, and eventually chew the fat with some sense of perspective. Stuart Broad however, the man who has suffered more abuse than anyone else over the last few months (they were still booing him at Adelaide yesterday), has to soldier on a little longer. It’s because they’ve thrown in a...
After the fall
You can sympathize with England’s coaches, especially Andy Flower. He was the greatest batsman his country’s ever produced, ranked number one in the world and one of the finest batsmen of his generation. Dedicated, hard-working, diligent, the product of the graft he put in to the game. Sounds very much like his deputy Graham Gooch, although Flower is also renowned for his impeccable character: principles as rigid as his backbone, standing up to the dictator who destroyed his country and...
Bin the tactics, Ashley
We speak from the heart here at TFT. We try not to pull too many punches. As a result we can occasionally sound like a broken record. If something’s annoying us, we’ll tell you. And if it’s constantly annoying us, we’ll tell you some more. Please forgive me, therefore, while I chastise Ashley Giles, again, for making the same basic, elementary, simplistic, kindergarten mistakes. Ash, old friend, this is 2014. It’s not 1985. You don’t instruct your batsmen to start every innings slowly, lay a...
Odds and ends – England favourites for 2015 Ashes
It’s been a rough few weeks. First we had our noses put out of joint; then we had them rubbed in the dirt by our understandably elated antipodean cousins. However, if the bookies are to be believed, we should get our revenge in 2015: they make England slight favourites at odds of 6/5. Basically, the bookies have looked at the real stars of this winter’s Ashes – Rogers, Harris, Haddin and Johnson – and concluded that Australia’s difference makers will be different themselves in two years time...
Coaches pass the buck as Flower refuses to wilt
Have you heard the one about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Zimbabwean? England’s performance at Sydney – the worse performance of the worst tour of all time – gave Australians a feast of belly laughs. It was a spineless, incompetent, shambles. A joke. Not even the bookmakers could have predicted quite how easy it was for Australia. It was just as bad as England’s recent practice sessions – in which Jonny Bairstow dropped everything that came his way and the players hardly looked...
Anatomy of a failure part 3 – the coaches
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...
