Hussain: We need a Wilko

[anzac]

I will try to refrain myself from intitiating a flame war in response.....

While England may have implemented development programs re talent, IMO their basics of FC cricket under the County system are still fundamentaly flawed, as discussed on previous threads & outlined by LE.

The decision was not made as a result of Australia being in a ghastly situation, as they were more than competitive against most teams of the time. It was a direct consequence of the domination of the great WI side of the era, where Australia didn't want to play 2nd fiddle. Furthermore they wanted to dominate cricket in a way that was sustainable beyond the playing generation of any player or team squad, something that the WI were unable to do. The WI side dominated both forms of the game with basically the same players. The current Australian dominance uses a variety of players for each version of the game and has done so over an extended period of time.

Other recent teams have had world class players as per my reference to WI, RSA & Pakistan, yet none have threatened to challenge the Australian dominance. I have yet to see any indication that should England produce a world class player or 2 by 2006 or so that they will be able to do so with any more success than those teams.

Agreed that current Australian players like Warne & McGrath are world class and that their back ups are not of the same class. However the fact remains that while Australia may not be so 'invincible' without them, the 2nd & 3rd strings have still allowed them to continue their dominance - another sign that world class talent alone is not enough. Furthermore while Bichel may not be the most talented bowler, IMO Gough is the only recent English bowler to come close to him regarding his attitude for the game.

So far as MacGill is concerned his stats compare favourably to Warne for the same number of matches. Yes he is not as accurate & he usually has a loose delivery per over, but there are very few bowlers anywhere with Warne's skills. MacGill would walk into any other team and may have become the dominant bowler of his craft & era had not Warne been on the scene to raise the bar even higher!

Yes there are no apparent successors to the Warnes or McGraths, but as I also said the troughs in the cycles are levelled out at a higher level - hence the continued success with the 2nd & 3rd string attacks, again something no other team has been able to do.

Raw talent can not be made, but there are so many seriously talented players that never make the grade to world class - eg Hick. S Waugh is not a great batting talent in comparison to the likes of SRT,Lara or even M Waugh, yet his abilities as a batsmen are not determined by skill alone. IMO it is these 'non skill' factors that sets the Aussies apart in their system. In reality there is no genuine weakness in any of their teams.

The Australian dominance has been in place since the Simson era as Coach, and set in concrete since their defeat of the WI to secure the Frank Worrell Trophy in the mid '90s, which coincided with the arrivals of Warne & McGrath. They started their dominance by the end of the Border era and then continued it under Taylor. Under Waugh's Captaincy they have further elevated this to this current level of 'invincibility', which has as much to do with their tactics as it has with their player talent. Read the tributes to Waugh regarding his development of batting as a weapon and then mental side of his & the Australian game plan.

Waugh's retirement will signal the end of the playing career of any player at the start of this dominance, and Ponting will probably become the 4th Captain during this dominance of the game. Again, until people realise that this is more than just 'talent', they will never challenge the Australian dominance, let alone hope to emulate it.

A final point regarding the need for world class players - the NZ team is berift of players that dominate the individual rankings, yet they have achieved a level of success against teams that do have them, with the recent series v India being an example.

Far from feeling offended at the references to rocks in my head & being complacent, I feel saddened for the game by the blindness of those people, and only hope that the administrators do not share the same views. It is also interesting to see the number of Australians that are now involved in cricket beyond their borders, and I'm not referring to playing talent.

Perhaps it is the greatest compliment that can be paid to the Aussies & their approach to cricket that so many people are still obsessed with 'talent' alone. How does it go - The greatest trick the Devil ever made was to convince people that he didn't exist!!!!!

Oh and yeah Eclipse is right - I'm not an Aussie as I have said b4 to some of our sub continent friends.

My apologies for the length of this post.

8D

 

[Craig]

For me I really hate it when the English public who start hailing their new all-rounder talent as the next "Beefy", it ruins any chance of a world class player as they are affected by it.

 

[PY]

My apologies for the length of this post.

Why you apologising? An excellent well thought out reply which is actually easy to follow all the way through.

The only thing I would disagree with is the fact that England aren't on the way to being stronger mentally. I think our younger players are beginning to get the picture at the Academy with Rod Marsh. Pity we have to use an Aussie to instill this in our players but mental toughness is the key to the future IMO.

 

[JohnnyA]

For me I really hate it when the English public who start hailing their new all-rounder talent as the next "Beefy", it ruins any chance of a world class player as they are affected by it.

Thank God Freddy isn't the next Beefy ... because the best part of his career would already be over, and his career would be winding down Beefy wasn't called Beefy for nothing. He did most of his training in the pub and burger joints.

And England have never really had a test class all rounder since Beefy (Stewie apart ... and not really the same type), so the idea that a generation of cricketers have been burdened by this label is a myth. Holllioake, Cork ... come on .. decent cricketers ... and no, they haven't been held back by the comparisions, because there never was one.

Freddy will make it because he has the talent ... the comparisons with Botham are irrelevant. Make them all you like. Shouldn't matter one iota.

Jon

 

[marc71178]

And England have never really had a test class all rounder since Beefy

Has World Cricket as a whole?

 

[Tom Halsey]

Kallis?

 

[JohnnyA]

Has World Cricket as a whole?

I guess Shaun Pollock is the closest modern player. But he's not in the same class as Botham in his prime. In his heyday Botham was a one man wrecking ball. His final stats (impressive as they are) don't even come close to his peak ability in the late 70's and early 80's.

Botham had a long decline as a cricketer which was due to his lack of conditioning.

But in terms of career stats, I think Pollock can put himself "among" (stress among) the greats (Kapil, Botham, Sobers, Hadlee ...). He has a Batting average of over 30, and an incredible bowling average of about 20.

 

[Tom Halsey]

Agreed. He was the quickest ever to 100 wickets, in 19 tests, at an average of under 20, if my memory serves me correctly

 

[Richard]

I can agree, but for one thing they already have Andrew Flintoff, who could be a potential match winner (OK, he's not now, but he certainly could be), same goes for James Anderson. Also he backs it up with a very strange argument about Shane Warne being the Australian equivalent. Now, I agree that Warne is a good player (though he's made some awful decisions off the pitch) but he certainly isn't the star in the same way that Jonny Wilkinson is for the English rugby team. Australia have Hayden, Punter, McGrath, Lee, who are all in the same class as Warne although a different type of players.

Lee in the same class as Warne?:O

 

[Richard]

Agreed about the Warne/McGrath thing, it is irrelevant how a player behaves off the pitch, and I personally believe that Warne is a very slightly better bowler. But it just seems to me that Hussain always has something negative to say. If England won the Ashes 3-2, instead of celebrating like everyone else, he would probably say that we should have won 5-0.

If you settle for 3-2 you're an apologist for mediocrity indeed.
There is never no room for improvement. Note John Buchanan after WC2003 final:

I really think we could look at every department of our game and say we could improve

 

[Magrat Garlick]

Re: Re: Hussain: We need a Wilko

Lee in the same class as Warne?:O

Why not? Lee is a bit more inaccurate and uneconomical, but you have to admit, he gets the wickets for Australia, and his strike rate is superior to Warne's. And you don't get a much faster bowler than Lee, who is besides only 27 and still has time to get that average down.

 

[Neil Pickup]

If you settle for 3-2 you're an apologist for mediocrity indeed.
There is never no room for improvement. Note John Buchanan after WC2003 final:

No.. but for crying out loud, if we won the Ashes 3-2 if you aren't looking on the bright side then there isn't an ounce of national pride in your body.

 

[badgerhair]

I will try to refrain myself from intitiating a flame war in response.....

While England may have implemented development programs re talent, IMO their basics of FC cricket under the County system are still fundamentaly flawed, as discussed on previous threads & outlined by LE.

The decision was not made as a result of Australia being in a ghastly situation, as they were more than competitive against most teams of the time. ...

Oh and yeah Eclipse is right - I'm not an Aussie as I have said b4 to some of our sub continent friends.

My apologies for the length of this post.

8D

Apologies for the misidentification as an Aussie, and also for the length of this reply.

I would take issue with this "were competitive with most teams of the time". That's not my recollection of the 1985 Ashes, which *really* hurt them - witness AB's total change of attitude after it - and it's not as though Australia did all that brilliantly 18 months later against a touring team they dubbed "the weakest England team ever to set foot in Australia". We can obvoiusly have different opinions, but I seem to remember that it was losing to the Poms which hurt enough for Australia to seriously set about revamping their cricket.

And what they did was to start a proper Academy, centrally contract their best players and a few other things. They were fairly lucky that they had a domestic f-c structure which works very easily in a number of good ways.

And they rebuilt and renewed and after 6-7 years things had really swung their way. They had insinuated the first couple of waves of Academy alumni into their team and developed their aproach and changed the coach andthey challenged and then overtook the declining WI. It was not an overnight process and took time to bear fruit.

Six years ago, I agreed with everybody else that English cricket needed serious reform. Even the TCCB recognised that, and one symptom of the changes so far is that it is now the ECB and not the TCCB.

What bothers me about calls now to radically reform English cricket is that so many of the supposed ills have already been addressed, and I am not convinced that the reform-minded have given the changes sufficient time to take effect. I'd be interested to know, for instance, how long the Atherton/Willis CRG estimate it would take for their proposed revamp to bring tangible results. And if it's anything less than four years, I'd like to know how, and if it's four years or more, I'd like to know why they don't give the changes which have been proposed in the last 5-6 years and implemented in the last 3-4 enough time to work before embarking on yet anouther round of radical reform.

We have just completed our third season of 2-divisional cricket. One effect of 2-divisional cricket has been precisely what the doctor ordered: there are virtually no dead matches before September, and precious few even then. Coasting through and just making enough runs in August to keep the Committee happy to renew the contract won't do any more, as more and more older players are finding out rather painfully. The players coming in to replace them are the ones who will never have known the old days.

There's certainly a very different attitude amongst the teams to that of only 10 years ago. Then, it was still very common to see most of the players from both teams rolling into the pub by the ground after play and havng a jar or three. Nowadays, you might get a player dropping in for a quick OJ while waiting for his girlfriend or a chat with his benefit organiser, but that's it. They're not allowed to drink that much any more.

Of course, the usual accusation is that 18 teams is far too many and dilutes the talent pool. It's not all that easy to see why it dilutes the talent pool when we have the same number of f-c teams per capita as Australia, and ours are half-full of genuine overseas players and overseas players on EU passports who have no intention of ever playing for England, who are also alleged to be denying opportunities to the English youngsters who are presumably diluting the talent pool.

I don't actually think that having 18 teams is *necessarily* insupportable or *necessarily* spreads the talent too thinly (although it obviously could). The real disadvantage of 18 teams is constructing a meaningful, fair and useful competition. With only six teams, Australian teams can have 10 f-c matches a year, whereas we end up with about 16 whichever way we slice it. And similar numbers of one-day money-makers, obviously more than they have in Aus.

I've got some sympathy with those who would like to see some counties go to the wall financially in order to effect a reduction in the number of teams, but what's rather a fly in the ointment there is that the counties who most deserve to disappear on playing grounds are also the ones with the most fanatical support and the ones which manage to turn profits and have developed their business side to make themselves much more secure. Why should going concerns be sacrificed to save badly-run clubs who happen to have better players?

If one looks at the CRG proposal, what immediately stands out about the six elite teams is that it severely concentrates on a geographical level. You have two London teams, and the others are in Manchester, Birmingham and two more on the south-east coast. No west country teams, and the only one in the Midlands the one which has probably the worst record of attracting members and crowds from its catchment area. The clubs which are making a success of themselves as businesses, Hampshire, Durham and Somerset coming strongly to mind, are nowhere to be seen, while Middlesex is a financial basket case and Sussex have been teetering on bankruptcy for a decade.

Where I think the CRG have hit the nail on the head, though, is on the bloated playing staffs which most of the counties have. I'm not sure that a permanent roster as small as 14 is quite viable, but something like 16-17 could well be very manageable indeed, and would cost a great deal less. It's by no means clear to me that county second XIs provide much more meaningful cricket than strong club competitions can, and I think there's quite a lot of worthwhile exploration of ideas to be done in that area.

And of course they're right that the number of centrally contracted players should be the size of a realistic national pool encompassing most of the players liable to be picked - and cutting playing staffs generally would go a long way towards funding that.

But I'm now extremely cautious about proposals to massively revamp the competitions, whether one-day or championship, yet again. I'm not a Leninist and I don't believe in permanent
revolution. We have had a great deal of well-intentioned upheaval over the last 4-5 years, and at least some of the indications coming from the changes are positive.

Then we should recognise that it's only *now* that the first fruits of the vastly-improved development schemes and the newly-instituted Academy are actually ripening. I don't think it's entirely coincidental that there is more enthusiastic talk about more young players than I can remember buzzing about since the late 1970s. We are already in the position that if all our quick bowlers are fit, we have to leave someone out who we'd probably like to pick, and unless we do worse than having one in four of the talked-about batsmen make it, we'll be in that position with the batting too in about 2006-7, and it's been 20 years since weive had serious competition for places.

I have a small reform proposal of my own to help deal with that, which is to stop pansying about with pathetic matches for tourists against semi-second XI county sides, and have the tourists play their f-c games against regional A teams and such like, just as happens when we go to the sub-continent and they serve up Board President's XIs and Emerging Players' Select XIs full of aspiring young players ansxious to show selectors what they can do. And not allow the counties to say that their players are needed for some county competition - this should be seen as the half-step up towards real representative cricket, not an exhibition.

It's not my view that everything in the garden is rosy and nothing needs to be changed. What I have been finding frustrating for the last year or so, though, is that we are still having the clarion calls for radical change coming mostly from people who don't seem to want to recognise that there has already been radical change, that such changes take some time to work through into the system and that perhaps a bit of patience as we assess what effects those changes have so far had would be more constructive than tearing everything which has been worked for up and starting yet again.

Cheers,

Mike

 

[Craig]

Yeah but with EU Passport players, if they want to play in England, then a county cant say no unless they cant afford the player or something like that.

If you went by the laws of averages in ranking Test teams it would look like:

1-India
2-Bangladesh
3-Pakistan
4-Sri Lanka
5-England
6-South Africa
7-Australia
8-Zimbabwe
9-West Indies
10-New Zealand

 

[Neil Pickup]

Yeah but with EU Passport players, if they want to play in England, then a county cant say no unless they cant afford the player or something like that.

Of course you can say no if you don't want the guy...!

And I'm not sure what the heck that table means.

 

[Magrat Garlick]

And I'm not sure what the heck that table means.

I think it means that the teams are ranked by population in the country...though that doesn't really make sense (SL greater than England?), possibly members of the cricket federation in the country?

 

[Langeveldt]

There is the theory that having six sides instead of eighteen would snuff out mediocrity, I find that absolute rubbish...

For example, if "outpost" teams like Somerset and Durham ceased to play in a competitive county championship, then im sure thousands of followers would vote with their feet and simply cease to support cricket... I certainly wouldnt care about English cricket if I had to go to London to see the players play....

So our future Bothams, Trescothicks would be following Bath rugby and our Collingwoods and Harmisons would be playing football for Sunderland or Newcastle.... Its a bit like halfing the pool of talent available to English cricket....

 

[Neil Pickup]

Welcome to the world of Devon, Cornwall, Cumbria, Lincolnshire, Herefordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire...

 

[luckyeddie]

Welcome to the world of Devon, Cornwall, Cumbria, Lincolnshire, Herefordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire...

I always knew you had a downer on Staffordshire

 

[Neil Pickup]

India - 1,057m
Bangladesh - 139m
Pakistan - 152m
Sri Lanka - 20m
England - 60m
South Africa - 43m
Australia - 19.6m
Zimbabwe - 13m
West Indies - 5.5m (approx - think I counted all the bits)
New Zealand - 4m

Close-ish.

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/population/