Not really. I've no problem with people who just try to say "stats aren't important" and claim they make their judgements without reference to stats. But a team is either substandard or up-to-standard; no picking and choosing, as I said before, it either does or does not deserve Test status. There are all sorts of teams who might occasionally perform well enough to compete with a Test side, but the one-off occasion doesn't mean they deserve Test status on a one-off basis or long-term. What irritates me is how often enough the same people who'll claim that Adam Gilchrist and Stuart MacGill's performances against Bangladesh are meaningful but Graeme Hick's Test failures mean that his performances at lower levels are irrelevant. In my book if you want to make the distinction between Test and domestic-First-Class you have to act to purify that distinction to the maximum extent possible, and I fail to see how anyone can claim that Bangladesh's inclusion among Test-playing sides does anything other than dilute the purity of Tests' superiority. In classifying Bangladesh as Test you're blurring the distinction between what is supposed to constitute Test and what is supposed to constitute First-Class-only.
As for substandard pitches, there's in my book no such thing. A pitch can be poor for batting, poor for bowling spin, poor for bowling seam or whatever; it can, very, very occasionally, be dangerous. But it cannot be substandard. Disappointing, and producing a less-than-riveting Test (ie 600 plays 600), yes. Substandard, no.
Bopara's case merely shows the virtue of the first-chance average. He was dropped in each of those innings' and had the chances been taken he'd have scored nothing-much in any, disinterested WI or not. The disinterest, however, was symptomatic not of the fact that WI were substandard, but that the series in England simply should not have been being played at all.
