I'm afraid that we might have to face the reality that Broad has been rested rather than dropped.BTW,at the BCC's reporting there. People just don't want to admit "Broad has never looked like taking Test wickets" do they?
Not really. Broad's not really a Test bowler yet - he's a one day bowler. Collingwood has shown he can cut it at Test level, I don't really know why his place as a batsman is under threat all the time when basically all of the top 6 bar one are as bad as each other and Colly has the best fielding and bowling. Even if his bad run continues he'll be there or thereabouts in the team/squad.
As I said - if England are serious about levelling the series (which you'd hope they would be) then the pitch does need to be geared for seamers. If it is, Broad is useless anyway so you might as well drop him for a batsman, who (in theory) will score more runs, as you don't need Broad's threat-less bowling anyway.
I don't doubt plenty of people will want to believe that due to their over-inflated ideas of his Test bowling skills, but I hope the reality is that they've realised he was picked for Test cricket when he shouldn't have been. We'll never know for sure - but we can hope that he doesn't get picked again until something has changed.
I agree there are no reasons to drop him now. However, Anderson has quite a history of not living up to expectations. Maybe you are right. Possibly Anderson was brought into the test arena too soon, too young. This year, he's indeed doing fine.
I know averages aren't everything, and his figures do often flatter him. I usually find myself on the other side of this argument with regards to Panesar when his figures lead some fools to say he's in the same league as a bowler as Daniel Vettori.
Surely a turning pitch is what would REALLY favour England? A typical South African pitch, even without Steyn, is surely as likely if not more likely to induce a result in SA's favour as it is England. A cracked and broken up pitch brings the spinners into play, which is the only area where England have a clear and obvious advantage over SA IMO.
I hardly got a chance to watch a thing of the first two tests and got most of my info from BBC and/or cricinfo. I had the impression Broad bowled some good spells but got a bit unlucky not to take more wickets.BTW,
I'd never remotely countenance picking Harmison ahead of MSP either. I was merely making the general point. Hoggard now appears to be out of the picture and I've thought that for quite a while. Jones still appears to be deemed to have not proven his fitness satisfactorily.
No. He bowled line and length (no swing, a little bounce but nothing extravagant, no express pace) at about 80mph. When he got it right, he kept it fairly tight, when he got it wrong he went for runs. At no stage did he looked particularly threatening.
I don't think it's really possible to deliberately prepare such a surface at Edgbaston though. The soil type just doesn't allow it.
Disagree.
And there's few on this board who'd disagree.
Kinda the point I was trying to make in my reply to that post.
It takes more than a week of sunshine (which does indeed seem to have been around throughout the Isles) to prepare a turning pitch though. Sure, it might change it from impossible to vaguely do-able, but that'd be about it. As I say - if the soil type isn't right, there's really not much you can do. Preparing a pitch, especially a turner, takes months if the soil type isn't favourable. Preparing a green seamer is relatively straightforward though, even if you do have three weeks of sunshine.
SA's batting should cope better with it (though I'd not be surprised to see both sides struggle) but I still think Sidebottom-Flintoff-Anderson(-Collingwood) offers slightly more than Nel-Ntini-Morkel-Kallis. SA's is almost exclusively seam-based; England's can use both seam and swing (which once more I hope we'll get a good enough ball to see some of).
