Alex Hales Retires from International Cricket

[GIMH]

Going back to Hales I first saw him in about 2007 smash a 150 at Trent Bridge in a Pro40 game. I took particular joy in watching him launch Gareth Batty repeatedly into the stand. It was obvious the kid had something about him so no surprise he became one of our greatest white ball players.

Worcestershire still won the match, chasing 280-odd off their 40 overs, with Stephen Davies scoring a century. The Pro40 was a real precursor to the success of the England ODI side several years later. Quite a few of that side cut their teeth in the tournament.

Interesting. Do you think playing 40 overs helped then? As the feedback at the time on places like this seemed to be that we were poor at ODIs because our players rarely played 50 overs domestically. Certainly in the 00s there seemed to be a lot of 40 and 45 over cricket played.

 

[loterry1994]

Interesting. Do you think playing 40 overs helped then? As the feedback at the time on places like this seemed to be that we were poor at ODIs because our players rarely played 50 overs domestically. Certainly in the 00s there seemed to be a lot of 40 and 45 over cricket played.

Think you guys never evolved quick enough in Odis back before 2015 and the early 2000s and then fell even further down the order when t20s and ipl started becoming more popular. While teams like Australia, India, Sri Lanka adapted better and had more success during that period.

I remember 2015 World Cup England picked a team
With guys with lower strike rates and played odis the more old fashion style of batting slower earlier in the innings and saving wickets then going harder around the 35 over mark trying to get around 280-300. But most teams by then had left that style behind years ago.

England have now set the standard for the short forms now though with having two agressive openers that go hard early, and a stacked batting line up that runs to like 10 as well as aggressive all rounders. Trying to get like 350 scores

 

[Ali TT]

Interesting. Do you think playing 40 overs helped then? As the feedback at the time on places like this seemed to be that we were poor at ODIs because our players rarely played 50 overs domestically. Certainly in the 00s there seemed to be a lot of 40 and 45 over cricket played.

Well, there's a big attribution question with both others claiming England were crap because of playing 40 over cricket domestically and me claiming our later success came from the format. Correlation/causation and all that. I remember that domestically countries seemed to regularly score 6 or 7 an over in this format. Being shorter meant that the risk of going flat out but getting bowled out was sufficiently minimised. Then I think once you get confident at going hard for 40 overs, it's not much of a leap to do so for that extra 10. I quite liked the format because it eliminated the tedious middle over accumulation that was prevalent in the format back then.

I think England were crap at ODI cricket back then because at international level we just didn't take it very seriously. For a long time it was simply a means of blooding young players for test cricket and then under Giles/Moores we had death by spreadsheet (recall some weird conclusion England made that scoring 238 was the target because you'd win more than you lose). We were still picking the likes of Cook, Bell, Trott, Bopara, Ballance well into the mid-10s while Bairstow, Roy, Hales, Stokes etc were obviously better options.

 

[kevinw]

England aren't short of openers in this format. Bairstow may move up to open, and Jacks and Smeed are strong options going forward. It's hard to feel too sorry for Hales' predicament, but he got a form of redemption at least.

 

[Jumno]

Great aggessive player, played some wonderful knocks.

He has gone out on a high with a T20 world cup to his name

 

[trundler]

Great aggessive player, played some wonderful knocks.

He has gone out on a high with a T20 world cup to his name

Hales does reportedly love getting high

 

[Andy19]

Who is Alex hales?....

 

[Qlder]

I love how he retired from all international cricket. Hadn't played a Test in 7 years, last ODI was 4 years ago and last T20i nearly a year ago