Cricket: England’s batting woes
Rarely does a cricket team get bowled out in a single session, said Jonathan Liew in The Independent. It’s only happened to England three times in the past 80 years. That makes it all the more shocking, then, that all three of those instances have occurred since October 2016 – most recently on Sunday, in the first innings of the third Test against India, which they eventually lost by 203 runs. “Yes, the ball moved around. Yes, India’s bowlers were excellent, particularly Hardik Pandya.” Yet it doesn’t matter who they’re facing or where they’re playing: “if you can play cricket on it, England can collapse on it”.
It may seem churlish to complain about a team who had won their three previous Tests, said Ali Martin in The Guardian. But England’s batting problems were exposed in those matches too – they were just masked by “lower-order fightbacks and bowling excellence”. Sadly, too few of England’s batsmen “look capable of batting long and big”. There was a time when they could count on Alastair Cook, said George Dobell on Espncricinfo. com. He has scored more than 12,000 Test runs – far more than any England player in history. But it’s now all too clear that he is suffering an “inexorable decline”. True, it was only last year that he scored two double-centuries, but since then, he has averaged only 19.21. He has become the kind of batsman who’s “uncertain whether to play or leave”. By now, the explanations for England’s batting woes have become familiar, said Tim Wigmore in The Daily Telegraph. There is the prioritising of white-ball cricket; the lack of county cricket in the “heart of summer, when conditions most resemble those in Test cricket”. But that can’t “obscure the overriding sense” that England, the second richest cricket nation in the world, “should not be so prone to such debacles”.