Prior cannot do it alone

Dear ECB/England selectors,

You may have noticed that England are not doing so well after a prolonged relatively good period extending from about 2005.  As a concerned cricket fan, I would like to help you out with your selections for the India tour, since you seem to have made so many bad choices recently.  The main issue I want to point out is that you are expecting far too much of Matt Prior. He cannot be expected to carry the team on his own.  You have asked him to try to achieve something that has not been done since Strauss in June 2005 against Bangladesh.  That was the last test that England won with only one South African born player in the team.  Can it really be a coincidence that England's best stretch of form in decades links with the presence of between two and four South Africans in the team?  Is it any wonder that Sri Lanka beat this English team when Prior is on his own?  Indeed no English team has won with less than three South Africans since August 2008, and the majority of test wins since then have required four South Africans.  

I realise that there is a little shortage of South Africans qualified and ready to play for England at the moment, but I can suggest a couple to help Prior with the heavy lifting against India.  There seems to be a place opening up at the top of the order with the form of Cook.  Thankfully there is a South African ready to step in.  Compton is both South African and an opener.  It seemed last year that he was dropped for the sole reason that he did not fit well into the Flower-Cook style (originally the Flower-Stauss style), but this would no longer be a concern as Flower is gone already, and this way Cook would be gone too.  

To get to three South Africans, and thereby give England a fighting chance there needs to be one more.  With Trott still not back this means that you will need to look elsewhere.  There is a little known player named Kevin Pietersen who looks a handy sort of player.  I believe he could even score 10000 runs in test cricket if given a chance. To squeeze him in, he could replace Joe Root.  Yes, I know Root recently scored a double hundred, but he can safely be dropped from any test not played at Lords.  In three matches at the English home of cricket he has accrued 512 runs at 102.4 including a 180 and a 200*.  His other 14 tests have only amounted to 702 runs at 28.08 with a solitary century.  So for any test at Lords he is a walk up start, but KP is a better bet overall.  And once again his main (though perhaps not only) detractors in the team were rumoured to be Cook and Flower.  

Yours almost sincerely

An Aussie Fan

English Report Card

(For the Aussie Report Card click here)

It is hard to say where it all went wrong for England.  They have been outplayed in every area of the game.  Their batsmen scored a thousand less runs than the Aussies (2158 vs 3189 including extras).  Their bowlers took 23 fewer wickets (77 vs 100 including runouts), and they only took 20 wickets in Sydney where the Aussies were practically giving them away to hasten the end of the series.  They dropped more catches and missed more stumpings, and these errors cost them more than the Aussies' errors cost them.  Even their captain lost four tosses out of five.  

The problem is not skill or experience.  England have shown over the last four or five years that they have the skill.  They even (briefly) reached number one in the world.  They were also by far the more experienced line up that started the 'Gabba test.  Nor was age a factor.  Australia had the oldest players, and the higher average age.  No, test cricket is played as much between the ears as in the middle, and one suspects that it is here that the problem lies.  Perhaps the team is jaded.  Having just won the Ashes in England, it may have been hard to try to climb that mountain again.  Perhaps the pressure of the dressingroom culture is wearing thin.  Exacting standards are much easier to handle when you are in the ascendancy, but can become a burden when things are not working out as you would like.  Perhaps the team believed the publicity that had people like Botham predicting a 5-0 scoreline for England, not against it: They just needed to turn up, watch Australia roll over and collect their trophy - but were shocked when it was their team on the back foot (both literally and figuratively).  From shock came panic which compounded the problem.