World’s best should be better than this

IT IS tough at the top, they say, but not this tough, surely? Not as tough as England have made it look here this week in Dubai. Not as tough as it seemed for the No 1 Test team in the world, as they slumped to defeat in three measly days against Pakistan.

England made the summit look so tough it was hardly worth the hassle of getting there. No sooner had England planted their flag when the rock began crumbling beneath their feet. It is a long way down from here and, without care, England may be taking the quick route, head first.

Andrew Strauss, the captain, said this Test was lost by lunch on the first day when England's batsmen left the field with the score at 52 for five and nobody disagreed. The second day was better, and England's bowlers were determined in adversity, but yesterday was as disastrous as Tuesday and there the contest ended.

The local immigrant labourers who had hoped to head to the DSC Stadium today and tomorrow – the weekend in these parts –- will now have to find another distraction. Pakistan could not hold punchy England up a moment longer.

Their openers, Muhammad Hafeez and Taufeeq Umar, did the necessary in knocking off the pathetic second-innings target of 15 runs required to win the game and it was time for presentations and recriminations.

Little more than a year ago, England were completing an Ashes Test series in which the record books were rewritten. This time the same players were buried beneath a barrage of altogether less pleasant statistics:

143, the combined number of runs across both innings made by England's six top-order batsmen.

39, the second-innings score from Graeme Swann that amounted to more than the match totals of Strauss, Alastair Cook, Kevin Pietersen and Ian Bell put together.

Undoubtedly, it was the batsmen who let England down, but the fact remains that for all the positive appraisals of England's bowlers, they too were eclipsed by their Pakistan counterparts.

Saeed Ajmal was a deserved man-of-the-match for his 10 wickets, while Umar Gul accounted for England's top four batsmen second time around, which is all that can be asked of an opening strike bowler.

Yet Pakistan were so much more devastating, cunning and shrewd in their use of the conditions. A visitor from space – who may actually have found the barren location of this stadium a home from home – would have been left in little doubt which was the No 1 team in the world. And he would have been quite, quite wrong.

In the wake of the Ashes victory last winter, Strauss said that a turning point for England was the moment when players felt comfortable enough with their teammates to express dissatisfaction with a poor display or a rotten shot.

There will be some tense dressing-room conversations in the coming days, then, once this sorry mess is picked over.

The first called to account, almost inevitably in such situations, will be Pietersen, who was out to a shot so unfathomably foolish it almost required an inquest of its own. There is absolutely nothing in Test cricket that looks worse than a top-order batsman holing out on the boundary to a rash shot when his team are in trouble.

The ball was banged in short by the superb Gul and Pietersen guided it obligingly into the waiting hands of deep mid-wicket. It was dumber than the dumbest act by the dumbest person from Dumbfordshire.

“When a guy has just come in after a bad shot, you don't expect your teammates to jump up and down telling him what a terrible shot he played,” said Strauss. “But it's also important we don't run away from facts and the truth. As batsmen we have to be honest and ask, ‘Did I play well enough? Was my gameplan smart enough? Was I switched on enough?’

“Those questions are important. But I also think at times like these it is easy to look at everything that went wrong and forget that as a side we've done a lot of good things over the last two years and will continue to do so.”

He has a point. It would be ludicrous to think of this match as typical and the fine year that went before as the aberration, when the reverse is true. England have shown themselves to be a very good Test team, who had an exceptionally poor two days with the bat in the desert.

Yet perhaps that is what feels so dispiriting about this defeat. Everyone thought England had left occasions like this behind. It is two years since the innings defeat in Johannesburg, the last time an England Test team suffered such abject humiliation on tour. A year earlier there had been a debacle in Kingston, Jamaica, when England were routed for 51.

This group were supposed to be more resilient. They were said to have heart and a winning way, a new England ethos under Strauss and coach Andy Flower.

“There is no need to press the panic button,” said Strauss, attempting to exude calm.

Most people had forgotten England still possessed one of those – until now. – Daily Mail