The King Is Dead! Long Live The King!

 

The King Is Dead! Long Live The King!

February 6^th 2017

When the sages started to think that the lack of a puff of white smoke from the chimney of the family farm in Essex meant that Alistair Cook planned to hold on to the captaincy and with the England Lions about to leave for Sri Lanka, suddenly word came that the king has abdicated.

Cook’s position was not quite as bad as when he was forced out of the ODI captaincy – a decision that, to this day, he feels was unjustified – but it was going in that direction. When England lost 5-0 in Australia, the opprobrium was directed at others. When England slumped against first Sri Lanka and then India, the concern was about his batting form. Enough series wins came to paint over the cracks of some bad defeats – Ashes success against Australia, a win in South Africa, turning around the series at home to India – but far too many series wins were diminished or slipped away by losing the final Test of a series and series that could have been shared became heavy defeats in the same way. Cook’s win percentage has dropped steadily since he took over the captaincy with, now, a record total for an England captain of 22 defeats. This has become one of the riddles of the Cook captaincy: wins in India, in South Africa and two Ashes wins in England – one of them quite unexpected – have to be balanced against a 5-0 defeat in Australia, 4-0 in India, 2-0 in the UAE, a first ever home series defeat to Sri Lanka and a first ever Test defeat to Bangladesh. Cook has presided over some amazing highs and some pretty desperate lows.

The players speak of his decency. He makes new members of the team feel welcome. He has a strong sense of duty. Cook knew though that if he led the side out in the 1^st Test against South Africa at Lord’s on July 6^th, the deal would not conclude until the end of the 5^th Test at Sydney on January 8^th. In between times, twelve Tests, with a tour to New Zealand following close behind. Resignation half way through the summer, even if 3-0 down to South Africa, would not be an option.

Alistair Cook evidently let the wounds of India heal, enjoyed his time on the farm with wife, Alice and then sat down with her and asked if he had the physical strength to handle twelve Tests, including two very difficult series, before he would have a second chance to give up the captaincy without letting his team down, by quitting in the middle of the schedule of almost back-to-back series. Unlike in 2014, when Alice changed his mind about resigning, this time she evidently felt that he had had enough and that the tank was empty.

The timing of the abdication may be significant. It is well known that the selectors are nervous about the prospect of asking Joe Root to play in all three formats and captain the Test side. There is also the not inconsiderable diplomatic issue of the new captain of the Test side playing under a different captain (Eoin Morgan or Jos Buttler) in ODIs and T20s: that happened back in 2003 when Nasser Hussain gave up the ODI captaincy (no T20s in those days) to Michael Vaughan and, within months, had lost the Test captaincy to him too.

With no Tests to play until mid-July, there is, at least in theory, no hurry to appoint a captain, save in the sense of giving him several months to grow into the role. However, the new season is starting and we are told that a new captain will be appointed within two weeks. In other words, by February 20^th.

On February 12^th, the England Lions start a tour to Sri Lanka with two, unofficial Tests, followed by five, unofficial ODIs. Intercalated between the ODIs in Sri Lanka are full ODIs of the England side in the Caribbean. Junior and senior side return and, within two weeks, the official curtain-raiser of the 2017 County season starts in Dubai, with the North v South matches and then the MCC v Champion county and, on March 28^th, a full round of university matches start in England.

Joe Root will go to the Caribbean, very probably as the new England Test captain. However, the next time that Root steps onto a cricket field, half way around the world, Keaton Jennings will already be into his fifth match as England Lions captain, passing Joe Root’s lifetime captaincy experience of just four matches. At the same time, Durham have given him the captaincy for 50-over cricket (not before some arm-twisting from the ECB) and Jennings will also lead out the North against the South in Dubai. If Joe Root’s coronation is a done deal, why so much interest in cramming as much captaincy experience into Keaton Jennings in such a short time?

Knowing that the selectors really wanted to give Joe Root until summer 2018 before increasing his burden still further, there are a few pundits who do wonder if the selectors might come up with a really left-field pick and give the Test captaincy to a player who has had just two Tests and who may have to drop down to #3 – coincidentally, allowing Joe Root to move back to have favoured #4 slot – if he is even to continue in the side. There is a school of thought that the best captain in Australia might be the one who will make Australia least comfortable. Joe Root, apart from being England’s key player (any Australian worth his salt will think “decapitation” if they can make his tour miserable), has previous with Australia in the sense of an incident with David Warner in a Birmingham bar and would be still new to the job. The Australians will undoubtedly have a plan for him to destabilise him. Would a former South African U19 captain who has declared for England and who is not yet established in the side, bother them more and, in passing, deflect Australian attention from Root? It is an interesting question.

England v India: T20s, Not so Much a Reality Check, as an Invitation to be Mugged in the Future

 

England v India: T20s

Not so Much a Reality Check, as an Invitation to be Mugged in the Future

February 2^nd 2017

It has been a recurring theme for at least three decades: England batsmen cannot play spin. It is getting to the stage where if England were to play a game against Addington 2^nd XI – my erstwhile weekend team in Kent, many years ago – the skipper would look at the fixture list, give a knowing wink, pick three spinners, ask the groundsman to shave off the grass and feel confident of winning.

England should have won both the ODI series and the T20s. In every game they could say that they were in a winning position and in four of the six games it came undone. Sometimes you come up against some brilliance that you simply cannot plan for: an Indian seamer bowling a brilliant final over; a pair of batsmen rescuing their side from apparent oblivion with fine, attacking batting. That is just part of the game. Chasing what is no more than a par total on a ground famed for its huge scores in T20 games, including two of the ten highest scores ever in T20 matches anywhere in the world and having the run-rate well under control, with two well-set batsmen at the crease, is not usually a prelude to losing eight wickets for eight runs in nineteen balls.

That England left Indian spinner Yuzvendra Chahal, not a name that would have most touring sides breaking into a cold sweat at the thought of facing him, with the extraordinary figures of 4-0-25-6, is an indictment in itself.

Jon Agnew recounts how he was following the game in his car, England just two wickets down, with Root and Morgan going great guns and pushing the score along at around 10-an-over, parked, got out, walked indoors and discovered that the game was already over.

What made it all the more unexpected is that Chahal had figures of 2-0-19-1 when he came back to take the fourteenth over, having shared the new ball.

In reality, the problems started in the previous over, bowled by Mishra. Root and Morgan had just taken an experimental over from Suresh Raina for 1 6 6 w 6 1 1 – 22 runs that left England 114-2, with a quite comfortable equation of 89 required from 48 balls. With the wheels threatening to fall off the Indian wagon, Mishra bowled an superb over that went for just three runs, including a wide and that should have seen Joe Root out, caught. When Root escaped because Yuvraj and Pant collided chasing the ball, a more confident side would have made India pay dearly for the mistake. Instead, it seemed to induce panic.

After 12 overs, India had been 99-2, England were 114-2 and well ahead.

Even after the quiet 13^th over, England were still significantly ahead of India at the same stage. It was all set up to go down to the wire. Without England ever bowling badly, India had scored 70 from their last 5 overs, so the England had every right to expect that they would be capable of something similar.

Chahal’s first two balls were innocuous – a short, wide delivery and a flighted wide delivery – but, critically, they went for just two singles. So, a sequence of ten balls had produced six singles, a wide and a comedy drop. Pressure was mounting and you could almost see the mental calculation: “the next ball has to go, whatever happens”. It did. Googly. Straight up in the air from the edge of Morgan’s bat. Batsmen cross. Next ball. Flipper. Root makes the same calculation, misses and is pinned straight in front.

England have lost both set batsmen and, what is just as bad, the run equation has gone up to 84 required from 36 balls. Loads of batting to come. Buttler and Stokes at the crease. The problem now though was that they would need to swing like crazy  from the off and that every dot ball would be a tragedy that would simply ratchet-up the pressure. With panic growing among the batsmen it was a matter of the bowlers playing on that panic, which Bumrah and Chahal did brilliantly. Chahal alternated short balls and googlies on frazzled batsmen, to devastating effect.

The final killer was Chahal’s third-last delivery. Ben Stokes had just launched one through Long-on. The next ball was short, whacked hard and was almost a six. Ten from two balls would have put England back with an outside chance (albeit an unlikely 70 required from 26 balls, with four wickets left), quite apart from getting Ben Stokes’s adrenalin flowing. Instead, Suresh Raina jumped, plucked the ball out of the air, overbalanced, avoided the rope by millimetres and put the stake right through England’s heart. Instead of a six, England’s last front-line batsman was gone and, with him, the match.

The collapse was epic:

W W . . | . W 1 1 1 1 | W . 4 W . W | W . W

This will be added to the legend of England’s incompetence against spin bowling.

Of course, events last season may change things radically. The new regulation on the Toss in County cricket did see a resurgence of spin bowling and Somerset’s late-season charge saw county batsmen having to fend for themselves against rampant spinners on turning tracks. The fact that the equal-highest wicket-taker of the season was a county stalwart spinner in Jethan Patel, with Somerset’s Jack Leach just one wicket behind, gives hope that batsmen may yet start to come into the England side after a searching spin examination in county cricket. However, going further down the list of leading wicket-takers in county cricket in 2016 reveals just one more spinner – Middlesex’s Ollie Rayner – before thirtieth place in a list dominated by medium and fast-medium right-armers. Of the four spinners in the top thirty wicket-takers, three were veterans and two of England’s winter tourists did not even make it into to top fifty in the list.

The ECB either persist with their attempts to bring spinners into the game in the County Championship – a policy that will take at least five years to bear fruit -  or face the prospect of England batsmen being mugged time and again on spinning tracks all around the world. The response though is not encouraging. With the reduction in the Championship, the early-season, seam-friendly pitches will play an even larger part in Championship cricket, with an even shorter window for spinners to weave their magic on dry, sun-cured tracks. It may turn out to be an incredibly short-sighted policy in the long run.