Sri Lanka need to put runs on the board for it to be an issue and I'm not backing them to really be challenging enough here. Lawrence is an unknown quantity at opener for sure, but Crawley is a bit too hit and miss for me. It is great when he comes off, but he can go missing. I do back the rest of the upper and middle order to do enough overall here.
Pennington has a hamstring injury, would be Stone coming in as a like for like replacement
Yep anyone guess who they back as the 8. Potts can be as low as 10 for Durham.
Think it goes to show just how useful Chris Woakes is, especially in England. He’s not going to be around forever, so we might have to get used to Atkinson up at 8, unless someone like Brydon Carse can force his way into the Test team
33, but that's kinda riding on his batting from a while back. Since 2019 it's 25, with three fifties in 17 home tests.
Or we could just play 6 batsmen like the Aussies have always done. A reminder that our best period was 6 batsmen (Bell 6 and Prior 7), and if Bashir continues to develop it makes it easier to do.
Well, number 8s will always be in the side primarily for their bowling, and if the batting is strong enough, it doesn’t matter as much if your number eight is a bit nine-ish!
I'm just not sure that replacing Stokes with a bowler would be the right course of action against a stronger team. It's not like Stokes is in the team primarily for his bowling.
I think it was always the road they were going to go down, bringing Cox in as a more like for like replacement for Stokes would have left us short of seamers, which is not ideal when one of them is Wood who isn’t going to be bowling long spells. Long-term, when Stokes and Woakes aren’t around, we’ll need to blood some new all-rounders or else we’ll be short somewhere!
That was the back end of your golden era, I know English conditions are very different to Sri Lankan conditions, but I’m surprised that you hadn’t won a series here before that!
We didn't have a very strong pace attack ..
I was lucky enough to be at Headingley on Day 4. Matthews was obviously imperious but also Prasad wrecked our entire top order in the evening session. Great day of cricket though rough from an England fan POV!
The main things working against you (apart from not having Jayawardene and Sangakkara!) are the lack of prep time and that draws have basically gone out of the game, I think I read on here that there hasn’t been a non-rain affected draw in England since the series you won here!
