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England vs India

Another few months pass, and another legend retires:

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What a great player - shame his average dipped just below 50 over the final few months of his career. I think he was about 4 short of the test match fielder catches record as well.
 
1st England / India "1 Dayer" tomorrow and thankfully Cook's confirmed that Alex Hales is going to open throughout the series. Really think this lad could help England's batting in the 50 over game get to the level of the top sides in the 50 over game.

I also think he's got an outside chance of making the Test side if he performs here too given Sam Robsons struggles this summer. If nothing else he'll make the side entertaining to watch
 
Disappointed in Robson, so far at any rate. I had hopes for him (and still do).

Saw an article in the "Grauniad" a few days ago which made it pretty clear that modesty isn't exactly Hales' middle name. Within reason that's a good thing at Test level, but one can sometimes have too much of a good thing - witness Pietersen. Gonna be interesting.
 
Sadly torrential rain has hit Bristol and it is unlikely that there will be any play today.
 
Jordan has completely lost it, 11 wides and 5 in an over. Why they are persevering with him when we have Finn ( who took four wickets in the warm up game against the Indians ) god only knows.
 
Jordan's bowling filth. Woakes has delivered some rubbish too, although he has taken a couple of wickets.
 
I don't think England are particularly crap - I think India are just very, very good at ODI's. I can't see that we have a chance of beating them. I put a bet of £15 on India to win yesterday at evens even though I usually bet on long shots. I just felt sure my money was safe. I have put another £15 on India to win on Friday because I don't see how England can beat them.

Most of the post-mortems have focused on the batting, but what is more worrying to me is that yesterday the bowling was equally to blame. India won losing only one wicket and with 19.3 overs to spare. They could have scored 400 had they needed to.

Graeme Swann said that England play ODI's like test matches while the opposition play them like 20/20's - I think he has a point there.
 
It doesn't help that the England team now seems to be going back to the bad old days of Nasser's era with their sulky resentment of anyone pointing out their errors. This is a team that desperately needs to learn from constructive criticism, not block it out. They're not a terrible team but my god they're a stupid one.


Boycott makes a lot of sense in this.

By Geoffrey Boycott
10:00PM BST 31 Aug 2014


It is quite clear why England are struggling in one-day cricket at the moment: they cannot play the turning ball. We are playing the world champions, India, and we bat like chumps.

At Trent Bridge on Saturday, India had four spinners who bowled 30 overs and took six for 112 between them. It was not a raging turner, it just turned a little bit, and it was not the first time this had happened to England.

England play slow bowling well on flat pitches when it does not spin. It is a different ball game when the ball turns. Then they are creasebound and terrified to use their feet against the spinners.

Since Graeme Swann retired we have played Moeen Ali – a batsman who bowls spin, more of a one-day cricketer really. He has done quite well but who else is in the frame? Nobody. James Tredwell is a good experienced bowler but he is not being threatened by any young spinner because there are not any coming through.

Over the last 20 years county pitches have been covered and they either help the seamers a little bit or they are just flat for batting with no encouragement for a spinner.

It is the same in Test cricket. Very few of the surfaces turn so we have a dearth of spinners and a dearth of batsmen who can play the spinning ball.

When Harry Brind was groundsman at The Oval he produced pitches with a composition of Surrey loam and Ongar clay and the administrators saw it as a panacea for English cricket. They wanted all county pitches to be the same as The Oval and had the soil transported to all the international grounds but it has not worked.

If you want all pitches to be the same you might as well play on artificial ones. If you play on pitches that do not turn why would you want to be a slow bowler when there is no encouragement for you to take wickets?

I grew up in an era where in every county the soil was different. We also had uncovered pitches so we learnt to play on a variety of surfaces. Many of the pitches turned in club cricket, they turned in second-team cricket and they often turned in county cricket so you were ready to experience spin at Test level.

Nowadays the kids do not know what to do when it spins.

On Saturday at Nottingham not one of them went down the pitch and played with the spin and looked to push the ball into the gaps for singles to rotate the strike. The cross bat sweep or reverse sweep seemed to be their only solution.

Whenever pitches have turned abroad England have been hopeless. The exceptions are Bombay in 2012 and Colombo the same year when England won because Kevin Pietersen made two fabulous centuries which meant England had lots of runs for their two very good spinners, Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar, to bowl the opposition out. Now Swann has retired and it seems Panesar has lost his focus. We cannot play spinners and we do not have one to bowl at the opposition.

We also need some fresh thinking from our selectors. Neither James Whitaker, the chairman of selectors, nor Mick Newell have really played international cricket and they have not been involved with the way that the one-day international game has changed in recent years.

As much as I admire the other selector, Angus Fraser, who was a wonderful Test bowler, he has not played one-day international cricket since 1999 and the game has moved on dramatically since then.

The selectors need to open their minds. I have been commentating for 25 years all over the world so I have seen how the game has changed since I played in the first one-day international in 1971. Then you could win games with 230 runs but now you are not safe with 270.

Today there are restrictions on field placings and bigger bats so guys hit it miles. Young kids coming into the game are not frightened of whacking the ball or slogging it cross-batted or improvising, it is second nature to them. I was brought up to never dream of playing shots like that. We were taught at the Yorkshire nets to “keep it on the floor lad, you can’t be caught out”.

England have gone into this series with three orthodox batsmen in our top four in Alastair Cook, Ian Bell and Joe Root. They are lovely technical batsmen for Test cricket but you should not have all three of them in your one-day team.

How could England select Chris Woakes, Chris Jordan and Ben Stokes together? They are all exactly the same: they bowl at a similar pace and have no variations.

After the match Cook admitted England selected them because all three can bat. It was a safety-first policy to get England out of trouble with late-order runs if the batsmen failed. We are still thinking in the old fashioned way from when I played, pack your batting and bowl fast medium line and length. That only works on seaming swinging pitches but the next World Cup is in Australia and New Zealand and will not have those types of pitches.

England need a fresh approach but they also need to be able to accept constructive criticism from ex-players like myself. They are guilty of selecting the ODI team on Test performances and central contracts, this is wrong thinking.

Just look how Cook responded when his “so-called friend” Swann made constructive comments about England’s one-day team and Cook got his “knickers in a twist”.

What he should realise is Graeme is now paid to give his opinions in the media. He and other former players like myself are not there to fawn over England or be cheerleaders for the captain and his players. We all want England to play well and win but if we think they have not got it right are we supposed to say nothing?

Well that is not going to happen. People like Graeme Swann and Michael Vaughan can see the format of the team could be bettered and so can I. Take your heads from out of the sand and into the modern era of one day cricket or else there will be more bad days ahead.
 
A lot of the young India players havent just developedthe mentality for tests. It sucks because Indian cricket fans fell in love with ODI a long time back. Tendulkar is in a way to blame for this, though its not his fault he was so good at it.

I love tests and t20 but absolutely hate ODIs and i cant see many Indian fans share their opinion with me...thats the reason for some of the players getting away with it in Tests.

But what happened earlier in the tour was beyond all that...the team collectively gave up when everything was still there to play for. If they were pissed off with the Anderson verdict then its a funny way to show it. I have never seen anything like it especially considering how young and inexperienced the players were .....they should have been eager to make a name for themselves....not surrender like that.
 
Cook's now presided over five consecutive ODI series defeats. There's faith and there's blind faith and I think they need to put him out of his misery and leave him to concentrate on Test cricket.
 
Cook scored 46 at as brisk a rate as you could expect of him in today's match. England 110-3 at the 25-over point. Root going well. I still put at bet on India . . . . I don't normally place odds-on bets, but India are so much better at the 50-over game I feel it's money for jam.
 
Yup although his strike rate in this series is better than most of the other batters!

Why we are playing these one dayers at 10.30 in September is beyond me. Fucking ridiculous and gives the side batting second a big advantage. ( i know it didnt help us in the second match!)
 
To think some people were calling for Morgan to captain the test side! Clueless

Yes, Michael Vaughan was putting the case for Morgan as one-day captain on Test Match Special this morning. It would be a reasonable proposition were it not for the fact that he is badly out of form at the momentl
 
A lot of so called experts were putting him forward as test captain material, during the Cook crisis. Funny how some of the media know fuck all about what is going on in domestic cricket. He hasn't been firing for a couple of seasons so needs dropping!
 
A lot of so called experts were putting him forward as test captain material, during the Cook crisis. Funny how some of the media know fuck all about what is going on in domestic cricket. He hasn't been firing for a couple of seasons so needs dropping!

It's annoying because I really like the lad. I've been witness to him when he's in full flow and there is not many better. Shame his form is so erratic though.
 
It's annoying because I really like the lad. I've been witness to him when he's in full flow and there is not many better. Shame his form is so erratic though.

Yup. The media go on and on insisting our players should be in the IPL. They should actually watch a bit of cricket and see what its done to Morgan coz it seems to have ruined him, he has been mostly dogshit since he last played in the IPL ( apart from his hundred in the game against Australia we threw away when Faulkner went apeshit )
 
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