England (and Wales) gloom, doom and recriminations thread

[Shri]

ok

 

[karan_fromthestands]

Way too simplistic. Take away the 9th wicket partnership and we're still chasing 190+ with a batting line up of one man and not even his dog. I wouldn't have put tuppence on us getting any nearer that total than we did.

I would't really argue about the batting as it is something that surely needs to improve, but it takes time. Some of the guys are really promising and will only improve with exposure. A lot will change if a couple of guys start contributing at the top. Maybe the rotation policy should be on hold till the team gets a little more stable?

And ECB can arrange a good number of A tours to make sure that the coming generation of batsmen get enough exposure before they play for the country.

 

[Spark]

To me (and I agree with you), it's also the fact that they haven't been smart about the way they've done it. They're growing, and accentuating, muscle hitters who do so with poor shape. There's not a base of solid technique to build this T20 ability from. I haven't been in England for near on 20 years but I imagine young players are coming up trying to clear the hip and belt holy **** out of it, hoping to catch a selectors' eye. Whereas they should be building a foundation of technique that they can adapt their games from.

That's what the greats (ABV, Kane, Kohli, Rohit, Babar, Warner) do. That's why they're still in demand for T20 franchises and in the top 10 of the ICC Test rankings. The way England do it, they'll never have anyone who can do both.

This is spot on. There's no inherent reason why such talented players can't learn to play a decent forward defensive shot, nor that they're too mentally weak to bat for three or four hours. It's fundamentally a coaching problem, IMO.

 

[Starfighter]

Thing is it's a coaching problem at a level well below that of which the ECB has any sway over.

 

[Adders]

Thing is it's a coaching problem at a level well below that of which the ECB has any sway over.

Don't think that should be the case at all (if it is) The biggest sell by the ECB for England internationals being on pay TV is because of the money the SKY contracts bring to grass roots cricket.

If the ECB has no sway over oaching standards/practises at these lower levels they should have......they're funding it.

 

[Starfighter]

Don't think that should be the case at all (if it is) The biggest sell by the ECB for England internationals being on pay TV is because of the money the SKY contracts bring to grass roots cricket.

If the ECB has no sway over oaching standards/practises at these lower levels they should have......they're funding it.

They may be funding it, but I'd say practically they're limited in how much they can guide it, as coaches etc at the grassroots level aren't under their close control. In my own admittedly very limited experience the limited-overs mindset where people judge on things like 'bat speed' is quite hard to overcome, especially with the more limited length of matches at that level. You need to coach the coaches first.

You're also not going to stop people copying what they see, and kids aren't necessarily going to focus on 'elbow up, straight bat' when that's not what they see the pros doing.

 

[Manee]

ok

How dare you?!

 

[Uppercut]

I would love a relaxation of away players to be honest, nowadays, would give a real bite to County cricket to have a lot of class Test players who can't get into T20 franchises. About 3 per team would do.

This is a great idea.

 

[Lillian Thomson]

I'm all for improving the grass roots, but I still think the Test players need to play more First Class Cricket in the short term. Jos Buttler is one of the greatest white ball cricketers ever but he rarely plays red ball cricket outside of the Tests. He doesn't even appear to know where his off stump is when playing for England. He leaves stuff way too close to the off stump (including get bowled shouldering arms) and just prods at wide stuff (good word that). There was never anything more inevitable at Lords in the second innings than him thin edging a wide one after hours of almost strokeless prodding.

I agree on getting more foreigners in as long as their good enough and not third rate Australian allrounders. I never agreed with the argument restricting Counties to one overseas player. In the days just before the rule came in Hampshire had Barry Richards, Gordon Greenidge and Andy Roberts, Gloucestershire had Proctor, Zaheer Abbas and Sadiq Mohammad, Warwickshire had Kanhai, Kallicharran and Gibbs, Sussex had Imran and Miandad and Garth Le Roux..... and so on through the Counties. The idea that they were blocking great young English talent from coming through is nonsense, if young English players were good enough they got a chance.

 

[Starfighter]

I agree on getting more foreigners in as long as their good enough and not third rate Australian allrounders. I never agreed with the argument restricting Counties to one overseas player. In the days just before the rule came in Hampshire had Barry Richards, Gordon Greenidge and Andy Roberts, Gloucestershire had Proctor, Zaheer Abbas and Sadiq Mohammad, Warwickshire had Kanhai, Kallicharran and Gibbs, Sussex had Imran and Miandad and Garth Le Roux..... and so on through the Counties. The idea that they were blocking great young English talent from coming through is nonsense, if young English players were good enough they got a chance.

Disagree. Firstly, the quality of players coming out of English cricket didn't improve after overseas players became a thing and the eighties when the quality of overseas players was arguably highest were execrable for England. Secondly, young players usually need time to establish themselves. In comparison a lot of overseas players were coming in with significant experience in their own domestic competition and often significant test experience as well. A young player would not have had the chance to become good enough if an overseas player was in their prospective position.

Overall it's a what-if, there's no counterfactuals, but I look at the quality of players England has produced over the years and I simply cannot see that allowing overseas players has increased the quality of English players, even though they should have increased the quality of the competition.

 

[Lillian Thomson]

I don't believe it makes English players better having more overseas players, but I don't believe it blocks genuine talent either, and it makes the cricket a better standard for players and spectators. If 18 Counties had to have 8 English qualified players in any 11 that would be 144 players. Whether getting a decent pool of 20 Test class players from that is too high a percentage I'm not sure.

 

[wpdavid]

Such an interesting topic for debate. One the one hand, it was great to turn on the telly during the 1970s to watch the JPL matches each Sunday or the mid-week knock-out matches in the Gillette Cup and B&H Cup and see so many of the world's best players. Just brilliant. My memory of those days is seeing one of the Richards every Sunday, which probably isn't quite what happened, but that's how I remember it. And. theoretically, young English players should have benefited from playing alongside or against them. And yet, as Starfighter quite rightly points out, by the 1980s (and I think the unlimited number of overseas players started in 1969) England's test team was at its lowest ever standard and the talent flow of English players had almost completely dried up. Quite why that happened is open to debate. As LT said, there were still plenty of opportunities for young English players who were good enough. Maybe their default setting was to reply on the overseas players to perform rather than take responsibility for upping their game. And the counties seemed happier investing in ready made overseas players, not all of whom were world beaters, by any means, instead of actively developing home-grown talent. My feeling was that good English players came through despite the system rather than because of it.

I thought one overseas player per team (maybe from the early 1990s?) was about right. We still still saw the best of the rest of the world, but we also began to see more English players coming through. Maybe the switch to four day cricket also helped, but I don't remember exactly when that happened. Ditto two divisions. And there's the difficulty, identifying which factors were actually relevant to what we're discussing. One other argument was that overseas learnt more by playing in England than our youngsters did by playing alongside them. Not that it seemed relevant when Australia started dominating with hardly any of their players having taken part in county cricket. Perhaps having one overseas player per team worked better before central contracts, since when we don't see much of England's best players in the CC anyway. Grecian's & LT's point about having three overseas players for each of the 18 counties sounds good, but are there actually 54 guys out there who aren't playing T20 for franchises and would genuinely up the standard of our domestic game?

 

[Furball]

but are there actually 54 guys out there who aren't playing T20 for franchises and would genuinely up the standard of our domestic game?

Was it not also the case that back in the good old days, the English calendar pretty much stood apart from the rest of the cricketing world so overseas players could commit to a full season of county cricket safe in the knowledge that doing so wouldn't clash with their home domestic or international responsibilities?

Whereas right now, any top West Indian talent would be a no-no because they're currently playing Pakistan and have recently played South Africa.

 

[grecian]

Disagree. Firstly, the quality of players coming out of English cricket didn't improve after overseas players became a thing and the eighties when the quality of overseas players was arguably highest were execrable for England. Secondly, young players usually need time to establish themselves. In comparison a lot of overseas players were coming in with significant experience in their own domestic competition and often significant test experience as well. A young player would not have had the chance to become good enough if an overseas player was in their prospective position.

Overall it's a what-if, there's no counterfactuals, but I look at the quality of players England has produced over the years and I simply cannot see that allowing overseas players has increased the quality of English players, even though they should have increased the quality of the competition.

We have plenty enough counties nowadays that young players will get their chance if good enough, yes the 80s were bad but the 90s were too, and we didn't have 3 then.

Anyway, as I say now with franchises and England contracts, and constant injuries, 3 would be fine, we don't have Kolpak anymore, so it really needs to be a bit higher in quality as we are clearly regressing in this regard. Players that aren't getting in franchises have decided to be strokeless wonders, it's clearly going drastically wrong. This has been going on for awhile, and we do pick the best from county cricket, and it's clear when they step up they are wholly un-prepared for quality bowling.

The 3 would of course be floating, different players, and I'm sure many counties wouldn't utilise them all through the season, for financial reasons. Unfortunately bog-standard Oz all-rounders, would improve our game, some Afghans would too, and obviously Pakistani's don't play IPL and they have tons of talented players.

 

[Noumenon]

What happens to this thread when ENG heroically administer a turnaround in Headingley?

 

[Manee]

What happens to this thread when ENG heroically administer a turnaround in Headingley?

Change the first word in the title.

 

[Prince EWS]

What happens to this thread when ENG heroically administer a turnaround in Headingley?

People will stop posting in here for a little while.

 

[grecian]

In the end, if were to turn it around it's going to still mean our bats have been sub-standard for a long time, we've had false dawns with Crawley, Sibley and Lawrence very recently, so not sure if we were to have a good match or too, it would stop the fundamental problems.

 

[weeman27bob]

There's an interesting interview with the ECB's managing director of cricket here around the structure of domestic cricket in England

 

[Blenkinsop]

I think part of the problem is the fact that English cricket is so dependent on private schools. Quite a few players with relatively limited natural talent get to the fringes of the first-class game simply because their parents could afford to put them in the nets with a good coach for hours and hours every week. Those players are playing right at their ceiling by the time they get into county cricket. Meanwhile there are genuine talents in club cricket who never play cricket at school and never get the same level of coaching, so never get to iron out the flaws in their technique.