We need coaches who can understand and deal with the nuances of Tests
This match was a shocker for England. Our batting was a shambles, our catching poor and the bowling was average.
Enough is enough. In football if the team is playing poorly and results are bad, the manager and coaching staff are sacked because they are not getting through to the players.
England can’t sack the players because we have not got any more decent ones in county cricket to replace them. Instead, the management and coaching staff have to change.
There are now two codes, one-day cricket and Test cricket, and they are poles apart. Trevor Bayliss has done great work with our one-day unit, but, I’m sorry, he has no Test match experience and his ways are not working.
Get somebody in who has played Test cricket and understands the nuances of the game and how different it is to oneday cricket. In future, they will have to split the codes, not just one coach overseeing everything.
I don’t think Andrew Strauss is brave enough to do it. He had his chance after the Ashes to make changes and all he did was bring in a new selector. When Yorkshire were relegated in 2011, Colin Graves was the chairman and told the coaching staff they all had to reapply for their jobs. We got new people in, were promoted the following year and went and won the championship in 2014. England cannot just carry on in the same old way. It is unacceptable. If Strauss won’t sack Bayliss as Test coach, then Colin Graves needs to do it. The problem is England are playing one type of cricket and not adapting to Test match cricket. We lack patience, concentration and discipline in batting and bowling. There is too much one-day cricket in our Test match batting. Too many of our batsmen throw their hands at the ball.
That is OK for hitting and scoring off every ball in Twenty20, but in a Test Match when your hands and bat get way out in front of your front pad, it leaves a huge gap you could drive a bus through. You ‘gate’ yourself.
Brains get scrambled
When our players, are put under pressure and don’t score for a few balls, their brains get scrambled and they flash at the ball, trying to score. For some reason, they feel they have to whack it somewhere, anywhere.
Joe Root is not only our best batsman but one of the best in the world. Yet, he got out in the first innings, playing a shot at a ball that was so wide it was a miracle he reached it. It happened because he had been kept quiet, scoring four runs off 24 balls. You could see it coming.
In both innings, Jonny Bairstow threw the bat at the ball. In the first, he played a big shot at the first ball after the break, and in the second, he gated himself and was bowled second ball.
Mark Stoneman can’t resist throwing the bat at wide balls. If he does not get a ball to score off, he starts driving good length balls. No wonder he is not having any success. I can see that Dawid Malan is trying, but he is stuck on the crease with no attempt to manoeuvre singles which would take the pressure off him. That is simple, basic batting in Test cricket.
If you are going to keep waiting for four balls in Test match cricket, then you will be waiting a very long time. It makes his batting more difficult because he does not score any singles.
If you can’t bat, then you can’t win. Batting dictates how the match flows. If you do not make enough runs, asking your bowlers to then play catch-up cricket, it is very difficult.
In that situation, the bowlers have to run up, not just thinking how to take wickets but worried to death about bowling a halfvolley and giving runs away because they have no runs to play with. Their wires get crossed.
They are tense, they know the team needs wickets, but they are conscious they cannot give any runs away. It is impossible to bowl well like that.
Bowlers need to be relaxed in a positive frame of mind to concentrate on taking wickets. Before the Test, Paul Farbrace, the assistant coach, said England had the best three days of practice and was confident England would do well.
If this is what England dish up after great preparation, then God help us when we don’t prepare!
Trevor Bayliss has done great work with our oneday unit, but, I’m sorry, he has no Test match experience and his ways are not working.