Its like that series we had in NZ when both teams sucked against good seam bowling but we were just a million levels below the level that NZ sucked at..
I just can't believe that people are writing off a 3-0 whitewash as " oh it could have been 2-1 easily".. yeah, I can add that if India had a fit Zak and could bat properly, we would have at least drawn or even won the Lords test and so on.. England never looked like chasing down that 140, from the time they started their innings. If that is not cause for concern, I don't know what is.
Good thing is, the impression you get about Andy Flower and his staff, they will be a LOT more seriious and stern in their assessment of this performance than some of the fans, who, it just looks like, are having a hard time believing their team could be thrashed the way they were.
The double standards of some of the England fans on this forum is astonishing. And I say this as an England supporter. When Indian fans, BCCI officials, players like Ashwin, Gambhir, Kohli and Ishant, ex-players like Shastri - basically anyone even remotely connected to Indian cricket - make the sort of complacent comments that we've all heard since the recent England and Australia tours, to the effect that:
"It sucks, but we'll beat them at home and then everything will be alright",
they are widely mocked. Images of Saddam's propaganda minister are posted, threads are started and continue for pages and pages long after the comments have officially been denied, the names of crooks like Lalit Modi and the IPL are bandied about and used to muddy the waters and confuse what is a Test selection issue with something else altogether.
Yet even as they mock those Indians (sound like Tony Greig there), England's fans have been just as much in denial. There have been batting collapses in every match of this tour from the warm-up games till the third Test. Pietersen and Bell have not made a single contribution of note, even against part time bowlers. Yet rather than face up to the fact that drastic changes needed to be made to the middle order if England were to have any chance of succeeding, all we get is "we could easily have won 2-1" and other inanities.
No, mug, England could NOT have won 2-1, or in fact achieved any score other than 3-0 which fairly reflected the respective performances of the two sides. Why? Because England had incompetents batting in the crucial positions of 4, 5, and 6. Morgan is clearly not up to it, but he's the new boy so let's leave him out of it for now. The reality is that Pietersen and Bell are nowhere near as accomplished as they are made out to be on here, and this tour is the final proof, if any more were necessary. Yet despite the fact that it was pretty obvious as early as the end of the first Test that these clowns could not cope, management declined to change things around, and so England sleepwalked to a dismal and humiliating defeat that could have been avoided - given the quality of the bowling by Broad, Panesar, Anderson and Swann - if they had been brave enough to draft in batting reinforcements.
When you continue to rely on batsmen in the key positions of 4 and 5 who have proved quite conclusively that they are completely and utterly incapable of handling skilled spin bowling in anything other than their home conditions in an away tour when confronted with precisely that kind of bowling, then you have only yourself to blame for the whitewash.
HB is right, England never
looked like chasing down 140. Despite this so-called England fans on here are still reacting as if merely suggesting that Pietersen's and Bell's places ought to be reviewed is an indicator of mental illness. That juxtaposition says a lot about England fans. I myself have been scathing about the Indian fans in the past, but I am now starting to reassess. The "If Zak had been fully fit" crowd are at least clinging on to hope - if only a faint and diminishing one. Misguided as they are, they are worthy of a certain respect if only because of that. The "how dare you suggest Bell/KP should be dropped, moron?" crowd on the other hand, are much worse. They are not
living on hope, but stomping on it. The hope that England might some day fall
out of love with posturing mediocrity and unjustified hype, and fall
in love with sustained excellence.