England's winter -the post-mortem

Played - five
Lost - four
Won - one

And this from the world's number one side?

The bowling was world class with Jimmy at it's head. Swann's getting back to where he was eighteem months ago and Monty's place as number two spinner has been consolidated. There must however be concern at Broad's increasing physical fragility - so much for strengthening and conditioning! For the Summer I would guess that England will start with Anderson, Broad, Finn and Swann - that's a pretty tasty attack and good luck to anyone scoring a ton against it.

What can be said about the batting though - witless for the most part. It's collective failure apart from this test just finished is unfathomable considering they's all been scoring runs for fun for the last two years or so. Strauss has, I think, done enough to silence his critics for now - I just wish he wasn't so damn conservative in the field. Jimmy was down to two slips before lunch on the first morning even though he had ripped out three wickets.

Apart from one innings - Bell had a horror. All batsmen get them I suppose but it just reinforces the sense that he doesn't score enough "hard" runs.He's lucky that the number six spot is up for grabs otherwise his place might have been in jeopardy. Talking of number six - who's going to get that gig then? My guess is that Bopara will get first dibs this Summer - this might be his last chance at having an extended test career. If he falls by the wayside I suppose the selectors might have another look at Patel, but in all honesty I don't think he cuts it as either a batsman or bowler at test level.

If not those two - then who? My nomination would be Jos Buttler but only of he scores a shed load of runs for Somerset in the championship first.

OK, some player ratings for the winter Test tours as a whole:

Strauss 4 - Lots of starts but no big score to silence the doubters on his batting. Captaincy cautious as ever.
Cook 6 - More failures than usual, no century but a couple of 90s. Found his form eventually to play a major part in SL.
Trott 6 - Very similar stats to Cook, again not his best tour but still provided some backbone to the innings on occasions he got in.
Pietersen 5 - 4 matches of dross, one matchwinning performance. Kind of what you expect from him now, but you can't put a price on real matchwinners.
Bell 2 - Pretty dismal effort after his spectacular 2011, the doubts are back. Needs a good summer to re-establish himself.
Morgan 2 - Looked out of his depth and was the obvious one to face the axe after the UAE tour. May be restricted to white ball appearances for the time being.
Prior 6 - Keeping generally decent, perhaps batting not suited to conditions but contributed on occasions.
Patel 3 - Yet to prove he's anything more than bits and pieces at this level.
Anderson 9 - Led attack superbly in unfavourable conditions. Now has that reliability to go with his unrivalled ability when the ball swings.
Swann 8 - Showed in Sri Lanka he is still clearly England's top spinner. Expected to take wickets here but did the job. Batting a little too reckless.
Broad 7 - Good foil to Anderson before injury intervened again. Also chipped in with the bat when top order failed.
Panesar 7 - Proved himself a decent second spin option once again. Batting and, in particular, fielding efforts could count against him though.
Finn, Bresnan 5 - solid backup performance in their one appearance each.
Tremlett 4 - little chance to contribute before injury struck yet again.

Anderson could've had as many wickets as Swann over the five Tests. He was exceptional. He finished with 18 @ 24.72 which signfies how unlucky he was on such unresponsive pitches. Broad did very well too, although it is a concern how much he gets injured.

Well the batting probably showed that the likes of Cook and Trott are learning something, because their method against spin has been pretty abject at times. KP just needed it all to click, reckons a couple of months off didn't help his rhythm. But overall they were very poor indeed.. here's their overall aves in batting order:
26.4, 35.11, 35.40, 32.55, 14.88, 29.85. Not good at all. Funnily enough, most of the averages are 15 runs below their career ones.

We did well in coping with the conditions throughout and apart from the first UAE Test were excellent in the field.

Has Monty's fielding improved? His bowling seems to be coming-of-age, but those two dropped catches you feel might have been the tide that turned the Test series.

Sri Lanka would have wilted like a Lancastrian rose if Monty had held on. Mahela was their beacon allowed to shine through a batting drabness.

DJ_Smerk wrote:Has Monty's fielding improved? His bowling seems to be coming-of-age, but those two dropped catches you feel might have been the tide that turned the Test series.

Sri Lanka would have wilted like a Lancastrian rose Leek under the mighty pressure of Fox wee if Monty had held on. Mahela was their beacon allowed to shine through a batting drabness.

Correction.

The batting in Sub Continental conditions can be extremely frail, but to be honest I think it will be ok in England this Summer.

Yes, Strauss's place is still not entirely secure, but there aren't many openers banging the door down at the moment.

It was a learning experience.

I thought we did okay, to an extent. We lost a lot of Tests, but in the past, we've been uncompetitive in the sub-continent without ever threatening to win a Test. In these last five Tests, though we lost four of them, we were in a position to win a number of them going into the last few sessions. The problem was with the batting, and their approach to spin. Some would call it lack of talent, and general uselessness against good spin, but that really is only applicable to Ian Bell. There was a mixture of fear, lack of preparation, and lack of a coherent plan for approaching spin. Most of those things were slowly addressed as the winter wore on, but it was difficult to address those problems within the backdrop of a top-level sporting arena, and that was reflected in the slow progress.

Unfortunately, at the end of it we are faced with a dab of realism. Andrew Strauss and Ian Bell simply cannot play accurate spin of any kind. They have made no progress whatsoever. Cook, Trott and Pietersen should be commended for their gradual efforts to improve. Strauss spent the winter playing off the back-foot, waiting to be pinned lbw, or else giving the ball as much time to deviate and outwit him as he could possibly allow. His last innings was history repeating itself and goes some way to proving the adage that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. He should suffice for the summer but if he cannot make immediate improvements against spin, he's doomed as a Test batsman looking forward to India.

The bowling, thankfully, was consistently excellent. I completely disagree that Finn should be the third seamer going into the summer. He was okay in this last Test, but Bresnan's perfect record, plus his ability to bat and therefore considerably shorten the tail, makes him the third seamer behind Broad and Anderson. Swann is obviously the spinner. No way on earth would I give Bopara his umpteenth chance - if Patel isn't to be given another go, then it's onwards to Bairstow.

Rubbish performance considering the status of the team...

4/10 for me.

I think, ironically, England played the spinners best in this last Test, on probably the most spinny deck of the winter.

It was all in their heads against Pakistan. Once Cook, Trott and Pietersen realised they just had to carry on playing their normal game, give or take, the runs returned.

Strauss has never been able to play spin, so his crapitulation and inability to find any response to it was no surprise.

I thought Bell was a better a player of spin - but when there's mental fragility running through the camp, you can be sure Ian Bell will be at the front of the cue, in his tiny incontinence trousers, throwing his head back repeatedly as though having a seizure.

Prior was pretty robotic and inflexible too, against half decent spin, if I'm honest. Kept well, but you wouldn't say he looked a top six batsman on this winter's evidence.

Patel shouldn't be persisted with - there's nothing there. Not of any quality.

I've never seen such a potent England bowling attack on the Subcontinent. All of the seamers offered a threat and Anderson was once again excellent. Monty and Swanny had there ups and downs but when they were good they were very good.

Previous England tours our bowling has looked toothless whereas the batting really scrapped. Whenever we were able to take 20 wickets we won - Giles' match in Karachi, Gough's finest hour in Sri Lanka 2001 or the Udal Ring of Fire match. Its just we usually were battered into submission.

So it was weird to see just how inept and collapse prone our batting turned out to be. In the past, when Sri Lanka had better bowlers our batsmen really grafted it out:

Eg 2001 you had Hussain batting 5 hours for a (god ugly) ton in Kandy with Thorpe and Stewart contributing 4 hour fifties, or Thorpe undefeated for 317 balls at Colombo.

2004 Vaughan made a 7 hour match saving ton after Gazza Batty had batted for 50 overs in the first innings. Or the other draw Butcher made two of the slowest , most agonising fifties to help us draw.

2007 Cook was prepared to bat time and anchor the innings, and even Bell was dogged.

If any of our batsmen had shown anything like the same levels of application this time round we'd have won the first Test and a couple of the UAE Tests.

anderson was amongst the top 5 most impressive seamers i have seen in the sub-con, along with mcgrath, gillespie, steyn and donald

Stating the obvious, but the sole and major concern is the failure of the bowlers to cope with spin in South and South-West Asia for four whole Tests - and even worse, an inflexibility of tactics, as if they were sleepwalking, over those twenty days of play.

Everything else is secondary to that (including Strauss's captaincy, and errors in the field once the team got rattled).

The bowling was fine, much of it excellent. Reasonable strength in depth, though it would be good to have Tremlett back competing again as well.

I am not sure I would do any marking of NTPFEA on Sam's file yet, but he didn't make a big impression in his first two outings (the second being better than the first, as it was for five or six others in the team). Bell has become a worry again.

PeterCS wrote:Stating the obvious, but the sole and major concern is the failure of the bowlers to cope with spin in South and South-West Asia for four whole Tests

Hmmmmm, I'd warn against thinking anything is good, even at home. In terms of the bowling attacks we're facing, I'd put them both in the top 3 for our conditions (excluding us, of course). A different, just as difficult challenge lies ahead before we reach India.

Yeah, even the Windies look like they might put up a fight this time around. Still, I reckon we'll beat them 2-0, and draw with the Saffies 1-1.

Well, I obviously had no clue as to how we'd perform in the UAE/SL as I thought we'd prosper. So, I don't think I'm brave enough to even make any predictions. One thing I'll say is that the WI tail looks really quite weak.