Welcome back, and great stuff Blaze. Pretty much agree with all of it.
I've also noticed that Bond's opening spells have been very unproductive lately. A year ago you could just about bet the house on him taking a couple of wickets in his first spell. Now, he's not swinging the ball as much and to the left-handers is bowling a lot of deliveries down leg side. Which leads me to a bit of a theory I've got about the way all our bowlers are operating. in the last few years, where we've been seeing Sri Lanka every year as well as playing sub-continental sides at the Champions Trophy, we keep on hearing about how they supposedly can't play short stuff. It's my belief that Bracewell and co have thus decided that we are going to bowl at the body of every Lankan batsman regardless of how good the pitch is or how many balls they pulled for four in the last game. I don't usually pay that much attention to such things, but if you looked at the wagon wheels of all the Lankan batsman this year I bet they would have a disproportionately high number of boundaries through square leg and singles in front of square. You don't usually see Bond err in line, he's normally very accurat.e and it makes me wonder if the management team are over-coaching our bowlers.
I sometimes get the feeling coaches and bowlers get carried away with bowling "into the wicket". They seem to concentrate a lot on banging the ball down into the pitch, but this is always to the detriment of the seam position. When the ball is new, swing is a far more reliable way of getting people out than banging the ball down and hoping for some seam movement. Look at Gillespie's bowling in Queenstown. 99% of his deliveries were banged into the pitch with a scrambled seam and he couldn't get a wicket. Then, suddenly, he bowled one ball with a perfect seam and the ball swung in a miles and bowled Jayawardene between bat and pad. That kind of thing should be happening more often.
Onto the batting: I also get the feeling we get carried away with batting "plans" and the like to certain bowlers. You often here batsman saying in interviews how they try to get a big stride in or get their pad outside off stump to reduce the likelihood of getting lbw decisions against you when you get hit on the pad. Surely the best way to not get out lbw is to not get hit on the pad in the first place, and the best way to do that is to not cast yourself in a front-foot-down-the-pitch position before the bowler (Vaas usually, though it's also happened in the past with Pathan, Zaheer Khan, Bracken etc) has released the ball. It's common sense.
). He is welcome to prove me wrong but I'm certain he will fail miserably come the Commonwealth Series and/or World Cup.
