Whether you think KP or Bell have done better or worse than Morgan is neither here nor there, the fact is, they have weight of runs behind them and proved even after a poor series they can come back and score runs.
Morgan was picked, even though he has next to no first class form or stats behind him, on his temperament and that he was touted as a very good player of spin because he played it well in one day cricket. So far in his career he's shown none of what everyone thought and it could be said that the experiment has failed.
The idea of dropping Bell & KP is as stupid as stupid can get, especially after 2 bad tests or one bad series and is never going to happen imo, if it was it would be like revisiting the 90's again and look where that got us.
What does "weight of runs behind them" mean,exactly? Do you actually think for yourself or are you just content to regurgitate tired old cliches that are actually pretty meaningless when you break down the individual words?
Garfield Sobers has weight of runs; perhaps the West Indies selectors could bring him in for the Australia series? More pertinently, Laxman, Dravid and Tendulkar have "weight of runs behind them"; all have proved that "even after a poor series they can come back and score runs"; does that mean they ought to be able to keep out Pujara, Rohit Sharma and others who clearly would appear to be of Test class - averaging as they do in the 60s in FCC - indefinitely? When the not-so-Young Turks are themselves in their thirties and still awaiting their opportunity, will people like you still be going on about "weight of runs"? When, pray tell, does the "weight of runs" argument cease to be tenable?
I have stated on a number of occasions that Morgan is neither here nor there. I don't even rate him and never have. If he's to be replaced, so be it, But
he should not be dropped as some sort of solution to a series in which players who are much better established than him are averaging 9 (Bell, no. 5) and 4.5 (Pietersen, no. 4)!
That would encourage the real culprits in their furtherance of the
real English disease -
pace the fellow who opened a thread on that topic the other day - of entirely unjustified complacency. For me, what is "as stupid as stupid can get" is having aspirations to being genuinely the best team in the world, like the 80s Windies and the late 90s Aussies, and keeping as a core member of your line up a player like Bell who has proven time and again that he is an utter liability whenever he is confronted by a decent balanced attack.
I have been a fan of Pietersen in the past, and fully accept that there was a time when he was genuinely one of the best players in the world. But this has not been the case for a number of years now, and I have to admit that he now falls into the same category as Bell. When you look at the pattern of the past few years you see that he continually fails against decent attacks and props up his average by scoring the odd daddy hundred or double against lame ones.
Amazingly, he is in some respects even more of a liability than Bell against spin; he is a walking wicket for any half decent international spinner on a receptive pitch, and even on unhelpful tracks he generally looks highly fallible against all types of slow bowling.
Fortunately the decision makers are less complacent than you, and it is a much more live question than you think the question whether both Bell and Pietersen will be in the starting line up for the coming SC challenges. In all likelihood they're fighting for the one place. Had England had foresight to begin blooding the next generation earlier, they might BOTH have been facing the axe after the next match - should they both fail again, as I fully expect them to. It seems that they might both fail to make even the modest series average of 15-20 I had them pencilled in for. World class, absolutely world class!
I ask you: Could Hildreth, Taylor and co have done any worse?
