Pakistan v England- The post mortem

Well obviously England's batsmen let them down completely, although i'm guessing Eoin Morgan will be the only casualty. They could either go with the 'pecking order', and bring Bopara into the XI, and Taylor into the squad, or think a bit more adventurously, and bring someone like Jos Buttler into the side as a counter-attacking number six who has shown he can take on spin bowling in the Sub Continent.

Please let it be the latter.

Is there any alternative to Strauss at 1?

Henry, Henry, Henry.... are ye serious? Never, ever will happen. It's Bopara and that's that. Just like I knew they wouldn't bring Bops in for the final game, I know that he's at least got until the end of the WI series. Heads probably won't need to roll, anyway. Strauss is captain. He's a shoo-in. Cook will get enough runs in easier conditions against poorer attacks. He's a shoo-in. Trott's never been good at playing spin, but he's good enough overall to retain his place. Shoo-in. KP will be kept for the good times he has, his worst is as English as the rest of them. He's probably the 2nd most likely to go because of A Flower. And Ian Bell was unlucky throughout the series what with that pesky doosra, terrible misjudgements and jittery nervousness akin to a lot of his career.

There's no real post mortem to be had, IMO. We're as gash as ever at playing 'mystery'. I posted the figures on another page, to little comment, the fact is we can play spin bowling. We just can't particularly play good spin bowling.

Luckily for us there isn't loads around.

Yet, I can envisage pitches in SL to be like they were in the 1st Aus Test last Julyish and that Herath is a different prospect at home. And that their batting line-up have shown they can be resolute against our bowlers in benign conditions. And they'll no doubts bring in a leggie.

So, it's an interesting time for us.

JGK wrote:Is there any alternative to Strauss at 1?

Hmm, probably not. I think a few of us would prefer Michael Carberry but he's sort of a carbon copy of Strauss in ways... left-hander, gash against spin bowling, only really got cross-batted shots unless in top form. Other than that, they're wanking about some greenhorn called Joe Root, nice shots and all that. Has in no way done enough, for me, to be anywhere near the first team... he's only 20. Don't let Gary111 hear me say that though. Other than that, it's Alex Hales, who has done well in seaming conditions but probably not well enough overall. And... wait for it... he's pretty gash against spin.

Do you guys want Phil Hughes?

No, we should be OK. If we need such wishywashiness, we'll just promote Bell to open.

botham at the end of the match said england will not change their test team just because of 3 poor matches. he may probably be right for the lanka tour

though i would be extremely surprised if we did not see at least 2 changes in the batting by the time they come here

JGK wrote:Is there any alternative to Strauss at 1?

The worst thing about it is, he outscored 3, 4 and 5 in both innings of this match.

Lanka should be an easier tour, they are a bit rank apart from Herath themselves.

Hopefully, Buttler in the team for Morgan, even put him at 5. Who'll come in to replace Belf in the future?

tricycle wrote:Who'll come in to replace Belf in the future?

Just about any # 3/4/5 or 6 in the CC (16 counties) ......
That's a choice of 64 players ....
Should be an easy pick ... but Dusty likes Belf ... so no change really.

Post Mortem - England died unnaturally.
verdict : Suicide.
Result : The End.

tricycle wrote:Who'll come in to replace Belf in the future?

the new new belf. continuing with his quest to be the number 1 batsman in the world

England will have it tougher in Sri Lanka. It doesn't matter who is in their attack, if Sri Lanka post big scores then England are done for. We collapsed in South Africa trying to bat out games against JP Duminy. We got no chance.

Pakistan was probably the easiest of the sub-continental teams. Weakest batting line up and mild weather conditions. I also think we made their spinners look much better than they really are, but that's life, or that's England. Sh!t.

tricycle wrote: Who'll come in to replace Belf in the future?

Alex "Sex" Wakely.

krikri wrote:England will have it tougher in Sri Lanka. It doesn't matter who is in their attack, if Sri Lanka post big scores then England are done for. We collapsed in South Africa trying to bat out games against JP Duminy. We got no chance.

Pakistan was probably the easiest of the sub-continental teams. Weakest batting line up and mild weather conditions. I also think we made their spinners look much better than they really are, but that's life, or that's England. Sh!t.

Good golly, I don't think one can agree with you on this outlandish forker! Tougher in SL??? Pak have easily the best pair of spinners we can face. Yeah, a weak batting line-up but so are the other teams in essence once you take out one or two players. As I say, it may be tough because they're blatantly going to produce raging turners but tougher than these two, I'm not sure.

Funny one on the JP Duminy thing - now THAT was bad times.

If our bowling in SL perform like they have done against Pakistan, then I think/hope we should do better. But if Jayawardene and Sangakkara get going and they post some biggish totals then I just don't back our guys to handle the pressure, even against worse attacks.

I agree with you on that point, I just doubt our batsmen will have a sterner challenge this year. That's not detracting from the WI and SA attacks, we're just more used to those sort of attacks and the pitches we'll face them on.

The bowling should take care of itself, IMO. Teams average 264 per innings against us for the last 18 months.

I can sort of understand Morgan being all at sea against spin - as he's played relatively little f/c cricket compared with the other players - ironic theen that it will be him who will probably lose his place.

I am not persuaded by the argument that there are droves of players in the county game who would have performed better. Bairstow for one looked all at sea against spin in the ODI's against India.

Well you want to remove British citizenship from two of them and send them into exile, have another commit ritual suicide and administer a naked public flogging to the rest.

Not a single one of them (one to eleven) managed to come close to their career batting average.

Truth is there's nowt in the locker- just some young lads who have hit a healthy but unspectacular amount of runs in div. 2 county cricket. There's no indication that any one of them will do much at all at international level. No-one has any confidence in Bopara. This is the impending crisis of English cricket- there's no depth, especially when you need to find players who can play decent spin.

Bowling's looking OK - two decent spinners and about 5 half decent quicks. Go beyond that though and two words: Jade Dernbach.

I thought we did okay. Everyone over-reacts each time we lose a series. It's easy to blame the batsmen, but how is it their fault? If one or two of them had failed, I could see how we might play the blame game. But they all failed. That shows that there's a malignant problem within English cricket as opposed to any individual inability to address a woeful technique against spin. We are like every other non-subcontinental nation in that we don't have good spinners to play on on spinning wickets. I remember Ohja rolling Northamptonshire over in one spell last year in a county match, and that's just a reflection on how poor our players are against spin. Pakistan weren't much better but they have the experience of playing against mystery spinners (chuckers) domestically, so orthodox spin is something they can dig in against. They still struggled woefully against Monty, and unlike us they at least have a top quality batsman in the form of Younis Khan.

If we all accept that English cricket is incapable of producing good players of spin in its current form, we can better reflect on the series. Our bowlers were exceptional and our wicket-keeper was good. If we want to address our long term problems against spin bowling then we need to attract the best quality spinners to the county game and get them bowling for our better teams against our better young players. Or else we need to send our best young players to play first-class cricket in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India. Otherwise, no chance. We can blame the individual all we like, but English batsmen don't get enough experience of cricket on different surfaces, they're just on the international rock-n-roll tour from the moment they're picked. Put them outside their comfort zone and they're simply not equipped to cope - through no fault of their own. They've improved a lot in the past two years with most of them scoring big fairly consistently.

This tour was a failure of English cricket and a failure of the management team. I guess, going to Sri Lanka, we will see three spinners in every Sri Lanka squad. Ajantha Mendis may reappear by virtue of the fact that English batsmen can't pick any variation.

How come Australia and South Africa are normally competent against spinners? They don't have decent domestics spinners by and large and their pitches are hardly sub-continental. What's their secret?

Aren't England normally competent against spinners? We're talking about high quality spin on pitches that have not encouraged high-scoring. Neither team made a hefty score in this entire series. I've seen Australia rolled over for under 100 against mediocre spin on pitches suited for it (usually by Harbhajan Singh), and South Africa lost a match to Rangana Herath one Test Match ago. I love this attitude with Englishmen, coveting everybody else when we're actually pretty alright at the minute. The only thing I'd change is the comfort zone that some of these players are in. Realistically, nine or ten of them are the best players we've got. We just have to make them better. That's down to the coaches.

So now England are competent against spin?

Basically England are not a bad team. Unfortunately you believed your own press and got mugged. You were expecting the roads SA got last time round and got shocked. After the first test you were she'll shocked and couldn't come back.

Regrettably that's true to a great extent - although I'd suggest "we" don't count.

Despite what Strauss said post the Banindian thrashing back in September about "not letting the #1 spot get to our heads" (or words to that effect), I'd say that it did, certainly the press heralded it.

That, together with their lack of 3 to 5 day cricket for something close on 4 months, coupled to their inability to play spin almost immediately after their 4 month rest and little time to "recover" ... all did for England.

That's not an excuse ... piss poor batting never is ... and this series was riddled with piss poor batting by England's batsmen.

If they're going to compete in SL then two of the top six should get the bullet ... Belf and Morgan for me.

What's new. The SA team do the same thing regularly. Of course idiots like Red call it choking.