Briliant England get it wrong again

He’s bowling like he’s seen a Dementor. Sadly, England’s Draco Malfoy has lost his zip and needs a rest.

It seems England had a plan to get back to winning ways after the Australian debacle. It involved ‘lancing the boil’, keeping five seasoned professionals as a core, and then bringing in some young talent that would not be under incredible pressure to deliver. All under a new leader.

Sadly, the plan appears to have ‘gone agley’. Not because the young talent was unable to deliver. (Joe Root, Gary Ballance, Sam Robson and even Moeen Ali have played better than anyone might have expected.) But because the senior pros have completely collapsed.

Among the batsmen, Alastair Cook has made 115 runs in his last seven innings. Ian Bell has mustered a paltry 173 in the same time. Poor old Matt Prior is held together with sticky tape and optimism, and has decided it is time to throw in the towel. (He calls it ‘taking a break’, but I’m afraid if we see him again it will only be because things have gone from bad to worse.)

For the bowlers, it’s worse. James Anderson seems in terminal decline, with wickets costing more than 35 runs apiece for the last year or so. Stuart Broad seems to have lost his bounce and his Draco Malfoy-like ability to thrive on niggle from the opposition. They both need a rest, whether they want one or not.

And we don’t have a world-class spinner anymore. (Or even one the captain trusts to exert control).

The other thing that we’re missing is some top-class South Africans. There’s a case for arguing – and the Saffers and Aussies I know argue it a lot – that England were only ever any good because we pinched some of their better players. KP, Jonathan Trott, and – let’s be honest – Andrew Strauss aren’t really very English cricketers at all. So perhaps we should think of this not so much as the end of an era, but rather as the end of a South-African-inspired upward blip on the graph of England’s more typical flatlining mediocrity.

In the meantime, we need a new captain, because Cook is never going to survive to face Australia next year, however long he manages to hang on by his fingernails. Michael Vaughan thinks we should take a gamble on Eoin Morgan (another from outside the elite development programmes). Victor Marks says we mustn’t give the job to Joe Root.

It’s difficult to see where the management can go from here. Peter Moores is just as much the wrong man for the job as he always was. Though he may well have been right to suggest that Liam Plunkett try to bounce the Indians out. It would probably have worked if only he’d been bowling at English batsmen whose minds have been fried by too much failure. Sadly, he was bowling at some very good Indian batsmen who are beginning to believe they might just have what it takes to thrive in ‘English conditions’, and are more and more visibly believing in their captain.

Just as is the case with their equivalents in the Premier League, the English counties have taken the money they receive from the ECB and from test matches and repeatedly wasted it on expensive imports. Surrey are absolutely the worst case, developing barely a single test cricketer in the recent past. At least Yorkshire have got back to winning ways with a reliance on local talented, only supplemented by foreign players.

That explains my pick for new coach. Another outsider: Jason Gillespie.

He’d be really keen to get into the Aussies next year, and at least it would look like our boys are having fun.

 

Whither now England?

Now there’s a sport we could dominate for years to come. And you can’t play it with paneer, or goat’s cheese. COMEONYOUINGERRRLAND!

 

 

 

Well, home for a bit, obviously. But after that, what direction is the team going to take? Alastair Cook responded to Geoffrey’s suggestion that his form was ‘a recipe for resignation’ by saying that he’d never quit at anything. I don’t know if anyone else felt this way, but for me it all seemed a bit like ‘Tiger’ Tim Henman’s attempts at punching the air during his routine quarter-final defeats at Wimbledon – learned behaviour, you might call it. As roars of defiance go, it was neither very roary, nor even very defiant.

What did we learn at Headingley?

England were supposed to roll Sri Lanka over, secure a confidence-boosting series win and start a new chapter of the glorious story of English cricket, so we could all stop harping on KP and banging on about the Ashes and get right behind Paul Downton, Ali Cook and the boys.

It didn’t quite work out that way. Perhaps because Sri Lanka were never likely to be whipping boys. (Three batsmen in the top ten at the moment and Mathews averaging 79 as skipper doesn’t suggest they were going to roll over for England, and the quality of their attack surprised those critics who were busily patronising Sri Lanka’s bowlers only a few weeks ago.

But we did learn something, and this is what I think it might be:

Moeen Ali can bat – but Alastair Cook doesn’t trust him to bowl. So we still don’t have a spinner, though we do have a number 6 with an enormous heart and grit and no little style.

Sam Robson can bat.

Gary Ballance can bat – but he’s going to get a lot of balls swinging into his pads unless he changes his trigger movement: back and then back some more – top class bowlers are going to notice that straight away.

Ian Bell can bat. And he’s going to need to, now he’s England’s foremost player. There’ll be talk soon of the need for him to convert more fifties into tons, as if 20 test match centuries didn’t tell you he already knows what he needs to do.

Alastair Cook can’t bat any more and needs to work out how to. If I was him, I’d drop out the one day side and concentrate on the basics again. But England are obsessed with having one captain for both test and ODIs – I don’t know why, except that if they gave the ODI job to someone else and they did it better than Cook then there’d be an almighty hue and cry about it being time for him to give up the test captaincy again. Frankly, I’d rather have that, and have him in the side getting runs.

Joe Root can bat, and bat some more. And he seems to get right up the opposition’s noses. (Anyone who can reduce Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene to sledging must be very irritating indeed.

Matt Prior has done enough to keep his place until the end of the summer. Let’s hope he does well now he’s got it back, otherwise he should make way for Jos Buttler (see blogs passim).

Chris Jordan is here to stay. He can bowl and he can bat. His action’s not classical, and he wastes a lot of energy, but he can work on that.

Jimmy Anderson can defend staunchly, but he doesn’t deal with the short ball as well as he used to. Maybe it’s his eyes: he is getting on a bit – that’s how he’s taken more than 350 test wickets and is closing on Sir Beefy’s record. No one in their right mind could blame him for failing to see out the last two balls of the fourth innings. But they should blame him for letting Sri Lanka score so freely with the new ball the day before. And for failing to exploit the ‘typically English’ conditions. Generally, he bowled too short to let the ball do anything.

As did Stuart Broad. Which suggests it may have been a plan concocted by ‘the greatest coach of his generation’, Peter Moores. He’d better put some of that coaching greatness to use soon, because England can’t afford to give India’s batsmen the four lives they gave Sangakkara in the first innings here. Broady has always been a streaky bowler, but he was decidedly patchy here, his second test hat trick notwithstanding. B Road needs to get more consistent, fast, or it’s going to be an even longer summer of sporting humiliation for England and their fans.

Liam Plunkett reminded us why he hadn’t played for England since 2007. Too short, even on his home ground, and obsessed with Moores’s pursuit of what Andrew Strauss likes to refer to as ‘leg theory’ but just looks like short balls banged in that go down the leg side so aren’t threatening in any way.

None of the England bowlers did as well as Sri Lanka’s pacemen, even though they left their most controlled bowler, Kulasekera out of the side. And Angelo Mathews marshalled his troops brilliantly, as well as bowling and batting amazingly well. As we’ve said, he finished the series with an average of 79 as captain. Obviously, that won’t last, but even the smallest of proverbial small boys knows there’s only one man who has ever averaged more than that with the bat.

Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s surprise weapons (like Uruguay and Italy’s surprise weapons of Luis Suarez and Andrea Pirlo in the football) Jayawardene and Sangakkara proved themselves to be two of the greatest batsmen of any era.

We should have known this was likely once Sanga signed on to play for Durham at the start of the season. Anyone who has ever been to Chester-le-Street can tell you he wasn’t there for the cuisine or the weather, but to hone his technique against the seaming ball. (Shouldn’t have wasted his time: he didn’t have to face any.) But when one of the all-time greats commits himself in that way, you can bet he’s not going to be satisfied with  a quickfire 35 in the tests before popping a slower ball up to mid-off.

Talking of bowling. Moores has since said he’s planning to rotate some of England’s during the series against India. Maybe that means we’ll see another spinner – but it probably won’t be Monty. Far from expecting the new Andrew Flintoff or Steve Harmison, all the portents suggest we should be expecting the new Neil Foster and the latest model Alan Igglesden…

By the way, the Indians are bringing six pacemen, one specialist spinner in Rohit Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja as an all-rounder. Given Ashwin’s struggles away from the sub-continent, we’re unlikely to see both of them bowling together. Oh, and they’ve got a lot of very good batsmen from the young generation,  including Shirkar Dhawan and Virat Kohli.

All in all, it might be time to watch the football. (Oh no, can’t do that.) Or the rugby (can’t do that either.) Or possibly the cheese rolling. (That’s it, I’m off to find the cheese rolling…)

 

 

 

I’m starting to get bored of this cricket catenaccio

Catenaccio – the obsessively defensive football strategy that almost squeezed the life out of the beautiful game in the 1960s.

This morning, I was convinced something different would happen. I felt it in my bones. It almost did. But then, in the end, it didn’t quite come off.

I really believed that at some point during the meaningless ODI between England and Australia, Alastair Cook would make a decision of his own.

But he didn’t.

He continued to bowl Ben Stokes at James Faulkner. Who continued to hit the dross Stokes was delivering out of the ground. As a result, England lost the match, and find themselves two down with three to play. If Australia have their way, they’ll soon win this series 5-0. And England will be in a proper mess, in all forms of the game.

This can’t all be Kevin Pietersen’s fault. Like the poor and the banking crisis, he’s being put in the frame for a crime he didn’t commit.

It all comes down to Andy Flower, Ashley Giles, and poor old Alastair Cook.

(You’re all going to tell me that Flower’s not in charge of the one day team.) But the King of Spain is clearly following the Flower method. Amass a total, bowl to defend it. Stick to your plans. And if those plans mean that someone who is going for 7 and a bit runs an over carries on bowling at the death rather than someone who is bowling at five and a bit runs an over, then so be it.

To be fair, it’s a methodology that worked for England for a while. Particularly in England. And particularly against Australia. But it is essentially defensive. Which is fine when it works. But hopeless when it doesn’t.

It only just succeeded on very slow pitches in England in the summer. It has completely failed on slightly quicker pitches in Australia. And it’s not just a failure to ‘execute skills’, as the coaches would have it. It’s a failure of captaincy.

We know that this Australia side bat deep. And we know that the more a batsman can get into a rhythm, the more quickly he can score big runs. That’s one of the key lessons of Twenty20: never let anyone settle.

But watching England play at the moment is like watching a poor county side play Sunday league cricket in the 80s. The first pair of bowlers come on (normally one young tearaway plucked from a Caribbean beach or a south London council estate, and a skinny young lad who drives a fork lift truck around a warehouse all winter.)  and bowl half of their overs. Then they’re replaced by one slightly overweight slow bowler who is due a benefit next year and a former public schoolboy who used to open the batting for Oxford or Cambridge and who sends down a diet of unrelieved military medium as unimaginative as his choice of bedtime reading. Unless things go horribly wrong, these two bowl all their overs, and then are replaced by the opening pair, who finish things off with all the verve and joie de vivre associated with missionary position sex at the end of a forty-year marriage.

Stokes was getting smacked. Cook went and talked to him. Stokes got smacked some more. Bresnan ran in from the other end and got smacked. Meanwhile Ravi Bopara failed to bowl all his overs.

Cook could see the plan wasn’t working. So why didn’t he try something else? He’s played a lot of cricket. And there are a lot of men out there who could have given him some tips. They all waited for something to happen, rather than trying to make something happen. And that is the whole problem with England cricket right now.

I sat for a whole day at the Oval the summer before last watching Hashim Amla utterly destroy the England attack. But instead of anyone trying anything new, the bowlers just kept running in, bowling to the plans that so obviously weren’t working, like row after row of Tommies passively following each other over the top in 1916. Graeme Swann was the most toothless that day, but the others weren’t much better. And no one did anything to change the situation.

Cook wasn’t captain that series, but the method was the same, and it didn’t work. When faced with genuinely aggressive intent, England crumble time and time again. Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel and Vernon Philander comfortably outbowled England’s Ashes-winning attack in that series, while Amla, Graeme Smith, AB de Villiers and Jacques Kallis put our less aggressive bowlers to the sword.

That’s what just happened to England in Australia, and what is still happening now, isn’t it? Yes, the pitches were a bit quicker, but they were the same for both sides, and they didn’t seem to trouble the Australian batsmen too much. They played with brio and aggression, while their English counterparts played with fear and caution, followed by what looked like mindless folly.

And while this was going wrong, the captain appeared a passive observer, watching what was happening rather than trying to bend it to his will.

It’s difficult to imagine a Brearley, a Boycott or a Botham allowing himself to behave in so powerless a way. Brearley would have spent his time in the slips working out a plan of his own and then how best to communicate it to the men who were charged with delivering it. Boycott would have worked out a plan and then how to deliver it entirely on his own without telling anyone else what he was was doing, least of all his own team. And Botham would have gathered all his strength and raged in of his long run, defying reality to resist the power of his desire. All of them may have failed, but they would all have failed more actively than England are failing at the moment.

Cricket is a game of defence and attack, and only a fool would deny it. But England at the moment are playing a version of cricket catenaccio, where all attacking intent is crushed out of the game in deference to an obsessively cautious plan. And when they need to find a way to attack, they lack the confidence and the personnel to do it successfully.

And the reason for this defensiveness? A lack of attacking pitches as much as a lack of attacking players. Surely with less lifeless surfaces Steve Finn wouldn’t have been remodelled in a vain attempt to give him an outswinger, and Stuart Broad would bowl more often at his maximum pace. More young bowlers would be tempted to run in hard, and more young batsmen would get the chance to play fast bowling effectively and with a sound technique (which only Ian Bell has looked like doing for England.)

But at the moment, what we need is a new plan. And a new captain to deliver it. Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen are two vital batsmen for England; two of the finest we have ever had, as the figures prove. England need them both batting. Captaining the side is an exhausting business, even without the added responsibility of opening the batting. Cook is one of the finest England openers ever. He is not – nor will he ever be – one of the finest captains. We should just let him get on with what he does best. Under a new, more aggressive regime.