I didn't have sky growing up so was saved the pain of watching England getting thumped away from home. The quality and competitiveness of test series in England that decade was actually pretty high. Ashes apart and forgetting the nadir of 1999, England fought pretty hard against them opposition - two wins over India, draw and a win v South Africa, two drawn series against the Windies.
Dismissing past players on the basis of technology, fitness and tactical understanding is risky. Those greats from the past, if at their prime today, would be benefiting from those factors and would hold their own against current top players.
this exactly, which is why comparing players amongst eras is a) kinda silly to some degree, but also, and arguably more importantly b) it's wiser to compare players by how they performed against their peers vs some stupid discussion on if mitch starc had a more accurate yorker than fred spofforth
England can hardly complain. NZ were by far the best team in the tournament and would've probably won it easily if Crowe hadn't been injured.
Can't really lump in the 90s and 2000s like that when both decades were so different for cricket. The new wc format is great but we've also only had one of it in the 2010s so it's not really representative of the decade.
Also the most gun allrounders since the 80s.
2015 had 2 pools of 7 (14 teams), then quarters, semis, final.
Those 2 are like Jack Hobbs when compared to many NZ openers of the 90s.
it's more the head scratching selections are being shared around, even to the cashed up bois.
Crawley is a head scratcher because he shouldn't even make his county's team but England did try out every competent domestic opener and they all sucked. Burns averaged high 60s before being picked but turned out he sucks too. The 2 tier CC system isn't conducive to producing test class openers imo. Australia had a golden generation from the late 90s to the mid 2000s but I'm skeptical of the quality of the back up batsmen because Lee was an automatic pick and Adam Dale played a test. Now they have way better bowling depth but limited batsmen so swings and roundabouts I guess. Marcus Harris was consistently the best Shield opener before Khawaja broke through too. I think people default to thinking the selectors are ****ing up when most of the time the options just suck. Mir Hamza sucked too.
I've come to the conclusion that Crawley is simply the antidote to Sibley. They're both equally as crap, but at least one won't bore you senseless in the process. He's McCullum's man it seems so I guess he's here to stay, until the youngsters come through like Haines for example.
I perhaps was a bit unfair on England in the 90's. I mean we had Gooch, Atherton, Stewart etc who were decent players. I guess they were just unfortunate to come up against the best fast bowling era of Test Cricket. It could be that NZ suffered similarly.