The one that springs to mind immediately is the England side under Flower that beat India and Australia home and away in 2010-12 with some huge margins but fell apart completely in 2013.
Staggeringly crap sequence of results. Played 40, won 3, drew 18, lost 19. Still won the Ashes though, so this team weirdly gets off the hook compared to the 90s sides.
So other than that Ashes tour they won just one test over that period. Lol.
Absolutely right. People who talk about how bad the 90s were must have been too young to follow the game in the 80s. Or maybe just blocked it out from their memory due to how depressing it all was. The wonder is that anyone from my generation stuck with the game at all.
Yup, and that was one-off test at home to the emergent SL side in 1988. Part of the problem was the ridiculous number of players that the selectors picked during the home series; from memory, 26 in 1986, 28 in 1988 and 29 in 1989. Unfortunately the rules only allowed them to pick eleven for any given game, so the side was less than settled.
Yep but on the flip side when Strauss and flower took over Eng were bowled.out for 51 in the West Indies and ranked 5th (I think) in the world. Inside 2 years they'd beaten Aus away and whitewashed India and were ranked no 1
I reckon it happened sooner than that, with the 2012 win in India being the outlier. Going to play Pakistan in UAE as the number 1 side in the world and losing all 3 tests, and subsequently being well beaten by SA at home was the ultimate case of England's test team being unable to maintain their performances due to hubris and in-fighting.
That's right as we'd been thrashed by Pakistan and South Africa and only drawn in Sri Lanka in between.
Over the long run, the descent of West Indies cricket during the 90s and the failure since to resurrect itself, T20 superstars aside, has to be the most profound fall.
