It would of been nice to have Pollard, Gayle and Roach there!!..i'm sure the first two would have made a difference to that ridiculous top order.Some end of series musings:
- These two teams were clearly pretty evenly matched, all 3 matches were very close. I do think England deserved to win though as they were marginally the better side. Their top order batting was far superior to ours.
- Lumb looked pretty good, certainly better than I've ever seen him before (in an England shirt anyway). Ali was effective but I'm not sure how successful he will be long term with a technique like that (early days though, he might well prove me wrong). Joe Root is clearly a very good young batsman, but I guess we all knew that anyway.
- The pitch today was much better, but I thought it was sub-par for the first two matches. We have a huge problem with the standard of pitches in the Caribbean, Imagine talented young batsmen having to learn how to bat on pitches like that and worse?
- Kieron Powell, Dwayne Smith and Darren Bravo were seriously disappointing. You could quite reasonably argue that they are the reason we lost this series.Gayle returning will obviously help loads but otherwise we have a big top order problem. I thought the selectors missed a huge opportunity to experiment with some young batsman, particularly Jonathan Carter. As Tony Cozier said, the current selectors really do lack any sort of imagination. Carter could have batted at 3 quite easily, this was effectively a meaningless series, why not give him a go?
- Denesh Ramdin has been such a boss over the last 2 years. Averaging 48 in tests, now this monstrous knock. We've finally got a consistent wicket keeper batsman.
- The umpiring was awful. Specifically the TV umpiring which really irritates me as their is simply no excuse for mistakes and inconsistency when you are looking at the same footage as the audience. We had Butler's mis-stumping in the last game and today the inconsistency surrounding Butler's overturning and Samuels dismissal It's beyond a joke that we are still seeing that sort of mistake in this day and age.
Indeed, but the replacement is pretty dire. Mind you more bowling for thebeardwhomustbefeared, so let's look on the bright side.Root's going home. Injury bad enough to send him home, deserves a lot of credit for that innings considering
Wright as 'average' and 'unathletic' is a new one. He's a fantastic fielder, pretty sure he was being used as a specialist one a few years back when he was hanging onto a place in the side. And Lumb's a few years past his best but he's still pretty decent as far as I'm aware.Wright, Lumb, Tredwell, Bresnan, Dernbach are all average, unathletic and don't generally move well. Ali is pretty slow and with a weak arm. Didn't see enough of Parry but didn't seem bad. None of them are particularly skilled at batting or bowling either unlike past indian teams that have got away with average fielding because they had quality bats.
Too many openers? 5 in the squad already in Wright, Moeen, Root/Bell, Lumb and Hales.Bloody hell that's a point that completely slipped my mind. What on earth did Carberry do to get shoved so mercilessly out of the picture? And why are we back to giving players a small handful of games to prove themselves before dumping them? 5 ODIs against a wrecking ball-version Mitch is hardly a fair shot. And yes t20 is his best format these days, so at least give him a chance at that.
He's not injured is he or this post will look silly.
Lumb I was kind of meh about. Wright has struggled with knee injuries for a few years and moves pretty slowly around the outfield these days imo. They're not bad fielders in terms of their groundwork but by international standards they move pretty slowly these days imo. I'd say average and given their limited output with their batting it makes the squad look really weak in all facets. A Team is going to have average fielders but I feel the squad has a few too many average fielders.Wright as 'average' and 'unathletic' is a new one. He's a fantastic fielder, pretty sure he was being used as a specialist one a few years back when he was hanging onto a place in the side. And Lumb's a few years past his best but he's still pretty decent as far as I'm aware.