- Despite being desperately unlucky in the Test series with the amount of ****ing inside edges onto pads, Anderson still averaged 27 in the Test series on pitches that offered him very, very little.
- One day cricket is not Test cricket. Bowling long 20+ overs a day with the red ball and fielding all day with the batsmen looking to play each ball on its merits is different from bowling 10 overs with the white ball under lights.
- Even if the format of cricket was the same, bowling well now and bowling well a few weeks ago are not the same thing, as Broad is finding out.
- Anderson is ****ing better than Finn and given he's proven himself to be World XI candidate over the past few years, leaving him out would have been beyond stupid, no matter how much foresight they had about how well Finn would bowl in pyjama cricket.
- Even if Finn could've improved on the apparently disgraceful average of 27, England would've lost anyway, because it was their batting that was ****. That was the problem. Their bowling was genuinely good and anyone who thinks they were in any way culpable clearly didn't watch the cricket.
This is pretty standard poor retrospective 'logic' (if you could call it that) after a loss. "Oh they lost, which means they probably selected the wrong side - if their next best player had been playing it might have been different, irrespective of what actually happened during the series and what the role of that player is". The only reason England's bowlers are getting any attention is because they lost 3-0; not how they bowled, which is ridiculous. If England's batsmen were as good at playing spin as Finn is at bowling then they would have romped it in, but cricket doesn't work like that - England unfortunately have much greater fast bowling depth than they do batting depth at the moment, which means their best eleven players won't be playing in their side for balance reasons. It's hardly the first or last time something like that has or will happened so the constant re-visiting of the matter is growing increasingly tired.
It's not even the silly logic that's annoying me because well you get used to that; it's the fact that someone comes in here every time Finn takes a wicket and brings the topic up again, as if the facts have changed. They haven't; no-one's said Finn wouldn't do well with the ball in the one dayers, so no amount of him actually doing that is going to change any of the other debates that we've already have five times over. Please lets leave it at that and not dredge it back up every time Finn bowls a good delivery ffs. I can just picture CW in the year 2016 when Finn is leading the England attack; every time he takes a wicket there will still be some incessantly annoying entity popping up saying "he should've played the 2012 UAE Tests!!11!!"
