tooextracool said:
You seem to be following the Duncan Fletcher school of selection. What is the point of picking a player who has absolutely no limited overs experience? If you pick players based solely on how good you think they might become, you end up with a team like Bresnan, Mahmood and Plunkett all of whom are not ready/good enough to play ODI cricket and they do no one any favors by going at 8 runs an over. Jones may very well be more talented than all of them, but if he is to be given a chance in ODI cricket, hed be better off bowling in 20/20 and list A cricket, proving his worth and then making his way into the side. Unfortunately as you said, it doesnt look very likely that any of the above will happen.
As far as Hoggard is concerned, hes been given enough chances in the ODI side, ODIs are not about pitching the ball up and asking the batsman to drive you. You need to have variations in your bowling, and Hoggard simply does not bowl the right line or have enough variations to be successful in ODIs.
See a lot of people are moaning about Yardy's selection recently because of his poor domestic record. Yet how on earth is Cook supposed to be any different? He has never scored a list A century, hes only played 2 20/20 games yet hes supposed to be good enough to play for the England ODI side? At least Yardy has been scoring runs and taking wickets in 20/20 cricket. Yes Cook can score big runs but guess what, so could Michael Vaughan and Nasser Hussain and we all know how those 2 turned out. I think we're better off picking solid domestic players like Ramprakash and Hick over Cook to be honest.
BIG difference between what I'm advocating and what the English selectors are doing.
Hoggard, Jones and, to a lesser extent, Cook are all proven test cricketers that are all still improving (at least Jones was until his injury). Importantly, they have the basics right and can therefore be relied upon to perform consistently in any form of cricket.
Whilst I'm not Hoggard's biggest fan, there is no denying his recent successes at test level and to suggest that he cant perform adequately in ODIs is nonsense
Unfortunately, Mahmood, Yardy etc had never had success at ANY reasonable level of cricket. Introduce promising players selectively from time to time by all means but putting them all in the team at one time with virtually no experienced back-up was doomed for failure.
As for experience in domestic comps, so what really? There is a massive difference between A-list and ODIs, let alone test cricket. The fact is that Eng has rarely produced a decent ODI team despite playing more domestic short format cricket than anywhere else in the world. Based on that stat alone, they should completely ignore the performances in these comps anyway.
Blind freddy could see that Yardy wasnt up to it no matter how successful he'd been at lower levels.
Likewise, the same guy could tell that Lewis was a better bet at this stage than Plunkett etc because he has all the prerequisite fundamentals.
Eng have rolled the dice with a plethora of selections based on hope and irrelevant experience and come up empty.
