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.

 

Have we seen the future of England cricket?

Smile Alastair, you’ve just won a cricket match. With some good new players who performed too.

All right, it was just one win, but it was the first in ten matches. And it was against a second-string Australian side, missing a number of top players. But at last there was a victory for England. And more importantly, it happened without Kevin Pietersen, James Anderson and Matt  Prior, three of England’s key players over the last seven years.

The Australian side may have looked rather lopsided, but the England side had an air of the future about it. And at least two of the ‘new’ men made key contributions as all-rounders, which is something England have been desperate to find since Andrew Flintoff retired, since it takes pressure off the specialist bowlers and batsmen, and gives the captain more flexibility should things go wrong.

Jos Buttler’s 71 runs and five dismissals in the match represent the second-best all-round performance by an England wicketkeeper in an ODI. Ben Stokes’s performance is only the second instance of a player scoring 50 and taking four wickets or more for England in ODIs. It’s looking very unlikely that Prior will be behind the stumps when the world cup comes around.

Ravi Bopara made another tidy contribution with the ball, keeping one end proverbially tight, as did Tim Bresnan, although Tredwell and Jordan didn’t make much impact.

It’s only one small step, but it is a step in the right direction – the first since Cardiff in September. And it probably means that Alastair Cook is going to stay on as England captain in both formats for the foreseeable future. Hardly limerick material, but something for England cricket fans to celebrate.

It was KP what done it. (Or was it the poor?)

‘Catch that you plebs’. The PM looks for someone to blame for the economic crisis, Andy Flower looks for someone to blame for the Ashes catastrophe.

It’s beginning to feel eerie. The parallels between political life in England and the world of English cricket team are getting too close for comfort. It happened before, of course, when we invited young West Indian cricketers over in the 1970s and then accused them of ruining the game for homegrown players, just as the innocent passengers on the Empire Windrush came to be blamed for changing English society beyond all recognition.

Except that this time the parallels are not about immigration. They can’t be, because neither of the protagonists is English born and bred. They are about who is to blame for the latest fiasco down under, who will take charge of the rebuilding project, and the struggle is between one of England’s finest ever batsmen and one of England’s finest ever coaches. In this parallel with the way the blame for the 2008 crash has been shifted from out-of-control bankers (difficult to regulate, likely to vote Tory) to ‘the poor’ (easy to regulate because dependent on benefits, not likely to vote at all), the blame for the 2013-4 Ashes debacle is being shifted from ‘a failure of the collective’ to ‘it was all KP’s fault’.

So we have article after article purporting to know the contents of Andy Flower’s mind, or of Alastair Cook’s innermost thoughts, all of which keep telling us that ‘KP is not a team player’ or ‘KP let the side down’ in Australia. It wasn’t Pietersen that picked three fast bowlers who were never going to be able to bowl fast this winter. It wasn’t Pietersen who scuttled off home early when the going got tough. Or who retired when he was taking too much of a pasting. It wasn’t Pietersen who went from being the finest wicketkeeper/batsman since Les Ames to someone who couldn’t get the ball off the cut strip. It wasn’t Pietersen who bowled too short, all the time. It wasn’t Pietersen who couldn’t score any runs when opening. And it wasn’t Pietersen who captained the side so badly that even during the brief moments it was on top, it could never manage to get Brad Haddin out. (This is Brad Haddin we’re talking about, not Vivian Richards.)

Forgive me for over-egging the pudding, but Pietersen scored the most runs of any English batsman in the series (294). So it can’t all be his fault, can it?

Well, apparently it can.

In exactly the same way that the poor were to blame for the 2008 banking crisis, by needing benefits the state conveniently decided it could no longer afford once it had spent all that money shoring up the banks that were ‘too big to fail’.

Because no sooner had the dust settled on the fifth test, than rumours began circulating that Pietersen was going to be required to play county cricket for Surrey in order to prove his worth to England, and that he wouldn’t be able to do this because he would already be committed to the IPL.

Except, of course, he wasn’t already committed to the IPL. In fact, the franchise who ‘owned’ him, the Delhi Daredevils, had decided not to retain his contract in advance of the next player auction. (So that’s answered that question, without even opening the debate on whether playing against second division bowlers in the second division of the county championship on green pitches at the beginning of the season would be more useful than playing against the very best players in the world (including the very Indian and Sri Lankan cricketers who will be coming on tour later in the season).

Then it was rumoured that Pietersen would be retiring from international cricket in order to concentrate on his lucrative Twenty20 career.

Except, of course, he denied this. And let it be known that he is very keen on playing for England again. (At which point he was accused of being ‘media savvy’ by people within the England camp who were themselves media savvy enough to make sure the story ran.)

Then Andy Flower denied that he had ever said ‘it’s him or me’. When no one but Andy Flower had ever mentioned the possibility of him having said it in the first place.

Then the ECB hierarchy offered their support to Andy Flower as the right man to take England forward. In advance of their own inquiry into who was the right man to take England forward, and before Paul Downton, Managing Director of the England Cricket Team, had finished his gardening leave.

Then Alastair Cook pointedly refused to support Pietersen, at the same time as pointedly supporting Flower. And started to let it be known that the strain of the ODI captaincy might be affecting his form in the longer game.

So far, so spare bedroom tax. But what are the facts?

Pietersen is one of the finest batsmen in the world. Just over a year ago, he played his finest innings for England, making 186 runs, largely in tandem with Cook, in a partnership that helped secure a momentous series win in India. And he made more runs in the summer, as well as top scoring for England  in the last fiasco.

Cook of course is also one of the finest batsmen in the world, but in a diametrically opposed way to Pietersen. He is all accumulation, while Pietersen is all destruction. He occasionally wafts a wide ball to slip in just as frustrating a way as KP holes out to a man on the boundary put there for precisely that purpose.

What happened after that series in India was some sort of spectacular failure of nerve on the part of the England management. Instead of going off to New Zealand and battering their limited side off the park, England retreated into their shells and were very lucky indeed to escape with a drawn series. Poor Nick Compton ended up carrying the can for that, in the same way that Pietersen is being lined up now.

But it’s not their fault, honest.

During that series and the return matches that followed it, Alastair Cook (and Flower) were out-captained by Brendon McCullum. In the two Ashes series, he’s been out-captained by Michael Clarke and Darren Lehmann. Both opposing captains espoused a much more aggressive form of the game than that favoured by England. In England, it failed them, but away from our seaming wickets, it proved much more successful.

You can’t lay the blame for that at any individual’s door. Unless that individual is Andy Flower.

Yes, KP got out to some silly shots in the winter, but so did everyone, including Cook. And it’s massively unfair to blame Pietersen for the collective failings of an entire strategy. He didn’t plan the itinerary that denied everyone proper preparation. He didn’t fail to work out how broken Graeme Swann’s body was, or how tired Jimmy Anderson was, or that Chris Tremlett can’t bowl fast any more, Boyd Rankin isn’t fit enough to play test cricket, or that Steve Finn has been messed about with so much that he doesn’t know which end is up. He didn’t even pick Chris Woakes and Simon Kerrigan for the Oval test, which he came close to winning, on his own, with a uniquely aggressive form of cricket.

Am I the only one who remembers that at the end of the summer, Flower was teasing us all with his refusal to confirm whether he wanted to stay on after the Ashes down under. Now he’s certain he wants to, but he doesn’t want to be held accountable for the failure in Australia. I thought that was the whole point of having clear lines of responsibility. (I’m not saying he should be fired, but I do think his efforts to blame someone else to take the heat off himself and his captain are very unseemly indeed.)

I don’t think there’s time to find the right candidate to take over from Flower. Ashley Giles is too compromised as part of the existing set-up. Duncan Fletcher is too compromised by his past experiences. Darren Lehmann is too busy rebuilding Australia, and may be about to undergo a chastening experience at the hands of the best test side in the world. Which leaves John Buchanan, tainted by the Ross Taylor fiasco, and Gary Kirsten. Kirsten is an excellent coach, who achieved a great deal with India, but who gave that job up because he wanted to spend more time at home, which isn’t in England. (He’s also a little bit like Flower as a coach, but without the connections or the experience in county cricket.)

Personally, I believe Cook should give up the captaincy so that he can concentrate on his batting, but we’re hardly overrun with outstanding candidates. I think KP should be made vice captain and told to play nicely for the next couple of years.

One thing’s for sure, amid all this talk of ‘building for the future’, there’s an Indian team coming over here at the end of the summer who have already done all the building they need. It’s not the time to fling a load of promising youngsters at a team with the kind of power that the latest side from the sub-continent have at their disposal. Ben Stokes aside, we haven’t really seen anyone better than the blokes we’ve got.

And that is what the people in charge of England cricket should be thinking about. Not who to blame. But how to change. Quickly. Attritional cricket won’t work against India. They’ll just bat until they’ve worn the bowlers out. We need to be more aggressive. And that means we’re going to have to trust younger men as well as our established players.

Just as austerity won’t rebuild the economy, nor will blaming Pietersen solve the problems of a team whose method has come radically unstuck. It takes joined-up thinking to do both.

Where did it all go right?

“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me there”. The deathless words of the Tygers of Pan Tang sum up Michael Clarke’s angry response to physical contact from an umpire.

Cricket. Bloody hell.

If you look at the statistics, it seems very much like Australia were robbed this summer. England never reached 400 at any time, Australia kept declaring at around 500. Alastair Cook, Jonathan Trott and Matt Prior never seemed to click properly, Jonny Bairstow was discarded and Simon Kerrigan and Chris Woakes were carted to all parts of the Oval.

However, the three lions trumped the baggy greens 3-0, which is something that no England side have done since 1977, when Australia and its cricket was riven by Kerry Packer. England came within 21 runs and 24 balls of winning the series 4-0, which is something they have never done before. But for some umpirely cowardice, they would have done it too.

And they would not have been flattered by the result.

Nonetheless, there’s a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction about the 2013 Ashes, as if in some way the whole series has let the side down, and Australia have been hard done by. Part of this is down to Michael Clarke’s very convincing media persona. He’s immensely likeable, seems honest and engaging, and is prepared to take a risk every now and again. (He has to, of course, because his side can’t win a Test.)

Partly, the disappointment is due to the fact that 2010-11 was one of England’s finest Ashes series ever. From boot camp to final test, almost everything worked perfectly, England’s OCD preparation was impeccable, and Alastair Cook scored gazillions of runs. Unfortunately, it all happened in the middle of the night, so most of us missed it.

Partly, it is a consequence of dramatic timing – or the lack of it. We like our Ashes series to go down to the wire. In the annus mirabilis of 2005, the whole nation was praying for rain at the final test at the Oval, while Paul Collingwood made one of the greatest 13s of all time, and Kevin Pietersen played one of the greatest innings of all time.

In 2009, England started appallingly, sneaked in front, succumbed to almighty hubris and then needed all of Broad’s amazing streakiness to secure the series, at the Oval again. Once again, the climacteric and the climax coincided.

This time, it was all over too soon, and without any tension.  Ashes praecox. The first Test at Trent Bridge was the closest and most nerve wracking, but it was won, and then Australia capitulated at Lord’s and it rained at Old Trafford. So the Ashes were retained in very short order, and then secured at the very next opportunity.

It’s like one of those terrible Hollywood films with no dramatic tension in the third act. Just a lot of CGI monsters engaging in battles whose outcome the audience can always predict. Even the drama of the last day at the Oval proved false compared with what we’ve come to expect.

Of course, we should congratulate England on their supreme efficiency in winning without ever looking like they were dominating.

But how did they do it?

Firstly, their three top bowlers were really very good indeed. Not always, and not all at the same time. It was Jimmy Anderson at Trent Bridge, using his sheer force of will to get Brad Haddin’s wicket after cricket’s best-timed lunch break ever. Anderson’s ten-for seemed to make such demands on his mental and physical fitness that he looked frankly exhausted throughout the rest of the series. Then Swann did it at Lord’s, when his horrible full toss deceived Chris Rogers and precipitated a full-blown Australian collapse. At Chester-le-Street, Broad tore the heart out of the Australian batting once again. For once, the raw statistics are helpful: England’s best three bowlers took 70 wickets between them in the course of the series – that’s nearly enough to win four test matches on its own– while Australia’s best three only managed 52. And England’s bowlers needed fewer runs from their batsmen to win their matches, so the fact that they never reached 400 didn’t signify. It would only have gilded the lily. It really didn’t signify that Woakes and Kerrigan had such a poor time, or even that Bresnan wasn’t always as effective with the ball as he was with the bat, they weren’t often required.

Secondly, their batsmen stood up when it really mattered. Ian Bell was magnificent throughout, and equalled Dennis Compton’s record for runs scored in a home Ashes series. His three centuries were all masterpieces, but each was different. On the slow, untrustworthy pitch at Trent Bridge he barely hit the ball in front of square. At Lord’s, he played with all his classical beauty. (He really seems to love it there.) And at Chester-le-Street, he was Captain Obdurate. (He’d probably have batted out the last day at Old Trafford too, had the rain not come to rescue England. ) The image of this summer’s Ashes will be Ian Bell late-cutting a ball down to third man, where, unaccountably, the world’s most lauded captain has yet again failed to place a fielder.

But it wasn’t just Bell. KP stopped the rot with four wickets down at Old Trafford. And Trott kept contributing, even if he didn’t look like he was.

Thirdly, Australia couldn’t take enough wickets. There’s a reason that Brad Haddin took more catches in this series than anyone else in any other. The ball kept coming to him. That means that, pretty much, the Australians were only taking wickets with the new ball. Which meant that for every 140 overs England batted, they were pretty safe for about 100 provided they didn’t do anything too crazy. That led to the very conservative batting style adopted by England for much of the series. They were able to fulfil their desire and ‘put overs into the opposing bowlers’ legs’ without taking any undue risks. (If you know you’re not likely to get out unless you do something stupid, then you’d really have to be pretty stupid to go and do that something stupid).

Knowing that they were unlikely to take many wickets (unless they were Ryan Harris) Australia’s bowlers went for control rather than penetration. That meant Ryan Harris had to carry even more of the burden, and Peter Siddle became less and less penetrating. All too aware of their limitations, the Australians kept trying to add more penetration, usually in the form of Mitchell Starc. No one knows what Mitchell Starc will bowl next, least of all Mitchell Starc, but what he added in terms of greater threat, he subtracted in terms of less control. In the final Test, James Faulkner took four wickets, but England were intent on pushing on. Who knows what would have happened had the hard-working James Pattinson not been injured so early in the series? (Ryan Harris would have got injured instead, presumably.) Every other match, the Australian selectors decided they needed more control and dropped Starc, which meant they had to accept less penetration. They did bowl with great discipline: giving Alastair Cook nothing above waist height to hit, for example, and making it very hard for Jonathan Trott or Matt Prior to score at all.

This will be less of a problem in the next series. The pitches down under will be greener than the ones here, and than the ones used last time around, so England might well bat less conservatively. But their good seamers are at least the equal of Australia’s good seamers, so it’s not necessarily good news for Australia.

The key bowling difference between the sides was among the spinners, which was exacerbated by the slow turners prepared especially for the series. It was almost as if England had decided in advance to deny themselves and Australia any advantage in the seam department and rely on Graeme Swann. If it was a plan, it certainly worked. Which is doubly impressive given that Swann was recovering from elbow surgery and had precious little practice.

For Australia, almost everyone flattered to deceive. Chris Rogers proved himself a steely performer with experience of the moving ball. But no one else proved up to the job of opening the batting. At three, Shane Watson will now be given another chance following his aggressive batting at the Oval. (Ian Chappell has insisted he must, and Chappelli always gets his way.) Clarke made a big hundred at Old Trafford but averaged 21 everywhere else. Steve Smith seems likely to play for a while yet, and Brad Haddin did nothing wrong with the bat. The Australian ‘tail’ can certainly wag, and the prospect of Pattinson, Starc, Faulkner and Harris all batting together is genuinely mouthwatering (a side with four genuine Test match number eights). That leaves them short of a middle order who can bat against the moving ball. Phil Huges, Ed Cowan and Usman Khawaja don’t seem to be the answer.

But the essential difference between the sides was what happened in the big moments. At Trent Bridge, England came out on top when it really counted. At Lord’s England came out on top when it really mattered. At Old Trafford, England came out on top when it really mattered. At Chester-le-Street, England came out on top when it really mattered. And at the Oval, England were about to come out on top when it really mattered, until the umpires bottled it and Michael Clarke got all touchy about being touched.

This means that, in every key moment, there was the same winner. In some cases it was about experience. In some cases it was about leadership, and that’s where Alastair Cook’s quiet steel trumps Michael Clarke’s media friendliness and funky field placings. (It did get a bit annoying that Shane Warne couldn’t actually mention Cook’s name without accusing him of being boring, callow, conservative, afraid or just plain crap. He’s meant to be a pundit, not a cheerleader.)

And that’s how you win Test matches, and Test series: by doing the basics right and winning the key moments. Even the great Australian sides did that, and they had far more talent to call on than this England vintage. But still, we should be celebrating with a little more gusto.

Why did it happen like that? Experience.

Experience is knowing that if you just keep on doing what you normally do to succeed, the way you normally do it, then you’re likely to succeed again. That’s what they mean by knowing how to win. It’s what England have and Australia don’t. England haven’t been defeated in their last 13 Test matches. Australia haven’t won in their last seven. They spent the early part of this year fighting each other and getting their coach sacked. It’s far from clear that the boil has been lanced.

Whatever the pitches are like, no matter who’s playing for both sides, that fact will still be true when the umpire calls play at the Gabba in November.

The Ashes: Who is actually who?

The rain it rained doon aal the day, and made the groond quite muddy. But thanks to modern drainage, more than 50 overs of play were still possible at the Oval.

 

 

I went to the Oval today, thanks to the generosity of parishioner Nick Keppel-Palmer, and one of the things that struck me was how both sides seem to have transformed themselves into a version of mid-90s England.

England, having established a wise policy of not trying to pick horses for courses at Durham, broke immediately with the policy at the Oval.

At Durham, they got lucky, while Graham Onions got unlucky. James Anderson was clearly jaded and out of sorts, while his nearest replacement, Onions, was looking fresh as a daisy. England won thanks to a brilliant but statistically insignificant hot streak from Stuart Broad. Like Ashton Agar’s 98, we have to bear his capacity for performing so brilliantly in mind, but we cannot rely on it. Nasser Hussein explained this by saying that it was always useful to have a streaky bowler, because if your side didn’t know what he was going to do, then the opposition certainly wouldn’t. Anyway, Onions might have bowled more reliably than Anderson at Durham, and Anderson would a) now be less tired b) now be very cross and raring to go. He bowled well in Australia’s first innings anyway, which was a good job, because England’s recently established and even more recently jettisoned no horses for courses policy didn’t look very clever with Australia at 492-9 and every man bar the bowler and wicketkeeper back on the rope.

The two horses who weren’t right for this course were of course Simon Kerrigan and Chris Woakes. They come as a package, because once England decided to pick two spinners, they had to strengthen the batting, even if it meant weakening the bowling. Neither of them has performed well. Woakes doesn’t do enough with the ball or bowl fast enough to trouble top international batsmen on Test match wickets. Kerrigan succumbed to the remorseless pressure that Australia applied. Watto had already smashed him all around the park in the match against England Lions, and he continued to do the same. In the face of such a relentless assault, Kerrigan’s technique deserted him and nerves took over. David Saker, England’s bowling coach, insisted that he be given the chance to bowl on a turning pitch in the second innings before being judged. But unless he turns it round corners, he isn’t going to Australia this winter. And nor is Monty, as far as anyone can see.

Chris Tremlett will be, and would have been bowling here today instead of Woakes had a) the pitch not looked like a raging turner b) he been able to bat at all c) he done a bit better at T20 finals day at the weekend. As it was, he was carted around the park and fared almost as badly as that other England part-timer Jade Dernbach. Apparently, the brains trust who run the England team took one glance at the pitch on Tuesday and decided it was crying out for two twirlers. Monty was otherwise engaged, James Treadwell is not regarded as a Test match spinner, so Kerrigan it had to be. Meanwhile, Tremlett took 5-50 at Chester-le-Street. He’ll be going to Australia for sure, because the baggy greens are still terrified of him. So will Steven Finn, although Alastair Cook seems more terrified of him at the moment – or at least of letting him bowl. Those bouncier pitches are crying out for big men with a bit of aggression to their game and bowl up at around 88mph.

Woakes isn’t one of those men. One, he’s stocky rather than big, and two, he’s not fast enough, and he doesn’t hit the bat hard enough. I think this is probably something to do with the length he bowls, which isn’t full enough and which gives batsmen more time to play and the ball more time to decelerate. But he may still be going to Australia, especially if he scores some runs over the next few days.

So that’s why England are looking like a version of themselves in their mid-90s less than pomp at the moment. But what about Australia?

Well, they have already fully adopted the horses for courses policy, with the selectorial hokey-cokey alternately picking then dropping Mitchell Starc. (Bowled too short and too wide this evening), and consistently rotating the batting order and the players within it. Thanks to Watto’s blustering 176, he’s probably now nailed on at number three for the first Test at the Gabba in November, which isn’t good news at all for Australia, because his technique is still horribly flawed against a ball with any sort of lateral movement.

Steve Smith will almost certainly play at number six in that game, which is probably less bad news for Australia. His technique is improving, and he certainly has the guts to play for Australia, unlike some of the men above him.

They’ll probably still be looking for an opener to partner Chris ‘the boiled sausage’ Rogers at the top of the order, because David Warner doesn’t really look like the man. And they’ll still be searching for a new ball partner for Ryan Harris, unless James Pattinson recovers in time. The highly promising PAt Cummins is injured yet again, Mitchell Starc isn’t accurate enough, Mitchell Johnson isn’t accurate enough, Jackson Bird is quite accurate but lacks penetration, James Faulkner isn’t accurate enough and they just won’t ever give the new ball to Peter Siddle, even though he never, ever lets them down.

As ever with England in the 90s, they’ll let sentiment take the place of judgement when picking their team (Ah look, we can’t drop Watto, he’s just made 176 in a match that didn’t matter). In England, they used to take a dim view of players who always saved their best performances for last, in order to secure a contract for the next series. In Australia, they used to take an even dimmer view of teams who crowed about how well they’d done in matches that didn’t affect the outcome of series. Now England are the ruthless discarders of failed promise, and Australia the endless dispensers of second, third and fourth chances. (Any bets that Phil Hughes will get a game at some stage in the winter.)

As to the question of what will happen at the Oval over the next few days, who knows? Cook and Root batted well in the gloaming, and deserved to bat for longer, given England’s shameless time-wasting earlier in the day. Harris bowled well, Siddle bowled better, but Faulkner and Starc hadn’t adjusted their radar properly and delivered too many opportunities to score. The wicket looked benign today, especially with a wet ball that didn’t deviate at all and couldn’t be spun, but it may have more devil if the sun comes out to play. We’ll be seeing lots of Nathan Lyon’s non-spinning spin, and possibly a lot of Watto’s underrated but hard to hit medium pace.

Cook, Trott and Prior are all due a score. Woakes needs a score, and Bell and Pietersen have been so good recently (especially when batting together) that they should make a score. All of which means England should beat the follow on and just keep batting on and on. They don’t need to win this match, but Australia do.

Then we can all get on with the utterly pointless drivel of the limited overs games.

I’ll leave you with the thought that I don’t believe that anyone at all would have guessed the team that England picked, or the team and batting order that Australia picked. What are the odds on that?

Oh, and we should all feel sorry for Matthew Wade. He’s the only member of the Australian squad not to have played a Test match. Brad Haddin’s done really well with the bat, and really well behind the stumps:  he only needs to take three more catches to set a new record for catches by a wicketkeeper in a series. Well done that man.

What makes it even worse for Wade is that two players who weren’t even in Mickey Arthur’s original squad – Steve Smith and Ashton Agar – have played in the Test matches. Smith has seized his chance, while Agar was single handedly responsible for a revival in the financial fortunes of Test cricket down under. While he was scoring 98 at Trent Bridge, the MCG sold out for the Test.

 

 

Friday’s Trivial Trivia Quiz: Forgotten men

Who is that man? Ah yes, it’s that bloke who played three tests against Australia in 2001. No, I’ll get it myself.

Test match cricket. Bloody hell. This blog is glad that it got its predictions just about right last week. But that was too close for comfort,

Thank heavens for Jimmy Anderson, who did what we all expected him to, and commiserations to Graeme Swann, who didn’t really. (But then he never really does at Trent Bridge, does he.) Now the circus moves on to Lord’s, where I don’t think we’ll be seeing Ed Cowan.

I’m afraid he’s on his way to becoming one of the forgotten men of international cricket, who were the subject of the last Friday’s Trivial Trivia Quiz. I suggested that readers might want Alan Mullally (19 tests, high score 24, average 5.52, 58 wickets and 31.24) or James Pattinson (one test, 21 runs, two wickets – but he did get Hashim Amla lbw, which is more than any English bowler managed last summer).

But then I remembered a player so forgotten that I’d actually forgotten that I’d forgotten him. Take a bow Usman Afzaal. Played three tests in the Ashes series 2001, with a high score of 54 coming in at number seven, and an average of 16.6. He did play for Northants, Notts and Surrey too, but it’s for his performance against Messrs Warne and Waugh that we fail to remember him. Whatever your name is, we salute you.

Schroedinger’s Bat

Erwin Schroedinger, physicist, philosopher, slip fielder.

A bat.

You may well be aware of Schroedinger’s Cat. This is the name given to the 1935 thought experiment or paradox first elucidated by physicist Erwin Schroedinger whereby he asserts that a cat locked in a box together with a piece of radioactive material and a geiger counter may be said to be both dead and alive at the same time.

But are you aware of its cricketing equivalent: Schroedinger’s Bat?

Originally developed by leading cricket scientists Mr Simon Martin and Mr Christopher Myers, this is a thought experiment which asserts that although England may be performing magnificently at any given time, the mere act of turning on the TV to watch their magnificent performance will make it end. The experiment usually applies mainly to England’s batting. You may idly check the scores online, only to note that Alastair Cook or Jonathan Trott looks like he is doing brilliantly, and is certain to score a century. Leave the visual media alone, and that may indeed happen. But simply press the ‘on’ switch on the TV (or click onto a live stream in the modern world) and his wicket will immediately fall, precipitating what can only be referred to as a ‘typical England collapse’.

Today, I encountered a fine example of it in the field of England’s bowling performance. I was happily checking the scores online throughout the morning, and noting that Anderson, Finn, Treadwell and Broad were doing very well indeed. I resisted right up to the point where they had reduced South Africa to 81-8. Then I succumbed to peer pressure from my son, who is ‘revising’ for his A-levels while I am ‘working from home’.

In a moment of weakness, we turned on the television.

What happened?

Schroedinger’s bat happened. That’s what. It was a classic case.

For the whole of the morning, the previously staid and predictable Kookaburra white ball had been swinging through hoops and turning round corners. (All right, in the case of the admirable James Treadwell, it had been going in a straight line, perplexing the South African batsmen, who were expecting it to turn, and who rather generously kept missing it, or edging it.)

Then, as soon as we started to watch, two South African tail-enders, David Miller and Rory Kleinveldt, began to biff the ball all around the Oval like Vivian Richards in his pomp.

After almost 100 runs, we had to turn the television off. At which point the wickets immediately began to tumble and England eventually won comfortably, although unwatched by us.

This is a salutary lesson as we prepare for the Ashes.

Schroedinger’s bat does not seem to be activated by listening to the radio, or by live ball-by-ball text commentary. So if you are truly committed to helping England achieve another victory, you know what to do.