NASSER HUSSAIN PAUL NEWMAN DAVID LLOYD
NOW READ THE DAMNING VERDICTS
England fans getting up in the early hours yesterday will have seen the scoreboard from auckland reading 27 for nine and wondered what on earth was going on. There were a few factors, I believe — but the bottom line is simple: this was nowhere near good enough.
England’s batting line-up has looked flaky for a while now. But that still doesn’t explain how they collapsed in a heap against two men — Trent Boult and Tim Southee — who are very good pitch-it-up, swing bowlers but not exactly all-time greats.
Yes, new Zealand bowled and fielded excellently, as you would expect them to in home conditions. But not to the extent that England should have been dismissed for 58.
Some of the technique on show from the batsmen made me doubt whether they really had been brought up on swinging, seaming pitches in England. It wasn’t even as if the movement on the first day in auckland was extravagant. The ball did a bit, nothing more.
There were times during my career at Essex when batsmen would walk off and say, “Blimey, the ball was swinging all over the place”. But the bowler is allowed to swing the ball, it’s part of cricket and it’s up to the batsman to find a way to deal with it.
as Kane Williamson showed later in the day, the key when the ball is doing a bit is to get right forward and play it as late as possible with soft hands. look at the number of times his defensive shots fell by his feet or rolled back one-day side but the away form of the Test team is becoming a big worry. Maybe it’s because Bayliss likes to encourage attacking cricket but I get the feeling that some of these guys are a bit gung- ho. Where’s the oldfashioned grit and determination to see off the new ball?
drop-in pitches can behave in funny ways and often get flatter as the game progresses.
That means scrapping for every run in the first innings.
I remember a Test in Christchurch in 2002 which started out as a minefield — we lost two wickets in the first over — but then became easier to bat on. By the end, nathan astle scored Test cricket’s fastest- ever double-century.
On the first day, I scored an ugly hundred which I was very proud of because it managed to keep us in the game and we went on to win thanks to the hard work on day one.
So let’s be clear — the players need to take a lot of the responsibility because they were the ones who couldn’t score a run and the coach needs to accept that he has made next to no impact on the Test side since he came in. If anything, they’ve gone backwards.
But I think the administrators also need to look at themselves.
If you count the recent one-day series in australia and new Zealand and the T20 triangular tournament inbetween, England spent 56 days playing 14 whiteball matches. That’s a hell of a lot of sitting around, especially when you can play four T20 matches in a week or less.
Surely the ECB could have crunched that schedule so those ose games were played ed in, say, 46 days — leaving an extra 10 days to prepare for the new Zealand Test series.
That way, England could have played two proper three or four- day y matches, not the e ridiculous pair of two- day games in Hamilton last week, when batsmen werere allowed to have two knocks in the same innings. That is no kind of preparation for a Test series.
not so long ago, the white-ball stuff would be tagged on to the end of a tour. nick Knight, England’s one- day opener, used to complain that it all felt a bit ‘ aftafter the lord MayoMayor’s show’. now, it seemsseem to be the other way rround. For me, the best England tour of recent times came in 2010-11, when they treated their warm-up games in australia as if they were mini-Tests. andrew Strauss was captain then and he’s the ECB’s director of cricket now. Surely he must realise that is the template England have to follow. Instead they selected Ben Stokes, who hadn’t played a first-class match since September and missed the first of those two farcical games in Hamilton because of injury.
What kind of preparation is that, especially with England so desperate to put things right after the ashes?
To make matters worse, we then had the sight of a one-paced England attack that looked as if it had learned nothing from the series against australia: lots of right- arm seamers of roughly the same pace, plus a part-time spinner.
The last few months have left England fans to draw some sobering conclusions. When the pitch is flat and Jimmy anderson and Stuart Broad are not firing, the attack looks toothless. But
4 SINCE the start of 2013, England have won just four of 31 Tests on the road — and one of eight series — with their only victories coming against West Indies, South Africa (twice) and Bangladesh