Yes. He could be a real disaster in England - we need to be really weary that he has earned his place before even taking him on the tour. The fact is that we have swing bowlers, who should get preference in England over Ishant/Mithun's hit the deck style. Inaccuracy in England seems to really get punished too and so we cannot afford any bowlers who cannot land the ball in the right place, either. Anyone slightly out of form needs to be discarded before the tour.
Yeh, he was one I forgot. In the coming Ranji season, there is about half a dozen bowlers who need to be in competition to take over from Ishant/Mithun and even Sreesanth, if he falls out of form.
It sounds stupid, but it all depends on whether the Indian bowling line up is selected correctly, is badly affected by injuries and can even moderately get their act together. I'm sure that the Indian batting line up can outbat England; however, England may simply outbowl India so much, that it becomes irrelevant.
Praveen Kumar won't get the job done. Amir and Asif are making this look easy. It's not. You can't just turn up in England having never played a test before with nothing but the ability to swing the ball and waltz home a month later with a bucketload of wickets. Zaheer is absolutely essential.
Praveen does not have nothing but the ability to swing the ball (ah, so many negatives). He is very accurate and also has various slower ball and cutter variations. Moreover, he has an excellent FC record (166 wickets at 23.16) based on the swing that he receives in Indian conditions with the new ball, imagine what he could do with the new ball swing in England as well as the potential for conventional swing with the 20-50 over old ball, something that rarely happens in India. People under estimate Praveen's speed too, he may mainly operate at 120kph, but not only is that not slow, but he can crank it up toward 130kph on his day too, which is Mohammad Asif speed and also the speed of Watson when he took five wickets.
I expect India to have the better batting lineup, but by how much? It's quite likely that Dravid won't be there by next summer, and even if he is, he'll be well past his peak. Will Tendulkar still be around? Will he still have it in him to succeed in England? You'd like to hope so, but it's far from a given. No one can go on forever. Laxman? Will he even be any good in these conditions? Can you expect much from Raina? I have more confidence in the opening partnership than most, but even there there's question marks.
I'm sure that Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman will not have retired by this series. England in England is a very big series due to England's obvious dominance in their home conditions and the fact that we have proven ourselves capable of winning such a series once before. Dravid is past his peak; however, I still value him greatly at performing in difficult conditions with a role to steady the innings and grind out a fifty or hundred. He has been in bad form recently, but has just come out of an extremely fruitful 2009, showing that success is not beyond him in his later years. Tendulkar has repeated time and again that age is just a number and for him, this would seem the case - he shows no signs of slowing down his prolific run scoring and looks a better batsman than came here in 2007. Laxman has dominated county cricket Division One every time he has been here, he is used to the conditions and he is the batsman that I have the most faith in. As for the Raina/Yuvraj spot, this is something that I worry about and hope we can resolve in the series' against South Africa and New Zealand that I believe (could be wrong) precede this series. As for Dhoni, he looks ugly when he bats, but has come on greatly as a batsman and can do a fine job batting at seven and keeping, in England.
With big question marks over the form of Cook and Pietersen as well as a smaller question mark over the form of Broad, I wouldn't say all is peachy in the England Test camp, either.
I'd be very, very tempted to play Praveen Kumar in England, or at least have him in the squad.
Contrary to popular belief, the pitches in England aren't that helpful. It's more the atmospheric conditions than anything, and Sharma doesn't really swing the ball much so I'm not sure that'd be of great assistance to him.
Well, he got quite a bit of swing early on in his career, but that seems to be gone now.
Did he? I remember him getting decent reverse swing in the series vs Australia in India. Can't remember much conventional swing.
Bowled inswingers on debut against Pakistan. Gave it up in Australia though, and it's never really been seen again. He bowls too short.
Went and looked at some h/lights from his first series vs Pak and your're right he was bowling some sharp inswingers. But from India's perspective, we've long missed a 'hit the deck' bowler (for example in the second test vs S.Africa when India toured there) and have only had purely skiddy swing bowlers. Also the main weakness of Indian batting is on wickets conducive to that sort of bowling. So I'd say it's good he turned out this way.
True but on the flipside Zaheer is awesome against lefties. He troubled both Cook and Strauss in 07 and he is a much better bowler since last time. So if Zak can get rid of both or even one of them early then the rest of the English batsman are right handers and I feel Ishant can really come into play then. Not to mention Ishant has had to bowl on some absolute featherbeds since 09 (napier, Ahemdabad, SSC) so it's only fair he gets to play in English conditions.
