Can’t believe this is game on England odds on in this test for first time on tour ….
my 3-1 series prediction is back on !!!
Did you have money on it?
Nah , I gave up gambling years back , I’m 100% the worst in the world .
Did anyone have 4-0?
I did, both with Betfair and a mate who has tried to welch this morning. I saw weather helping us out at some point.
If my heart had ruled my head I'd have gone 3-1 but the moment Broad and Anderson were left out of that first test which was the only one I thought we had a chance to win without rain helping us I gave that up
Ian Botham had it right when he spoke to David Gower earlier, play red ball throughout the season rather than squishing it in.
White ball, specifically T20 is fun but is like a demo that gets people to buy the game. Its accessible and enables lads and families who don't really care for cricket to have a reason to go to St Lawrence and see some wild thrashing but test cricket is the antidote to that, for a few years England were bringing batsmen in (Pieterson primarily) who were playing one day shots in tests and seeing McGrath get smacked for six at Old Trafford was a glorious thing however the game in England is now dominated with these players who can clonk it but can't take a guard properly, understand how to see when a trap is being set by someone like Starc, no concept of protecting a wicket and worryingly how often did any of them go full one day mode and try to counter attack apart from Bairstow and maybe for a short time Stokes?
If I were Chris Silverwood I'd be trawling the South African academies again
I think T20 has it's place, its still the Hundred that is the problem, no need to introduce it as well as the T20. Both are not needed and the T20 is so much better than the doctored cricket that is the Hundred
Mate I completely agree, T20 and test cricket are my favourite forms of the game. Couldn’t give less of a shit for the 100 and one day stuff feels so long v T20. To think how excited we used to get over 1 day cricket!
I'm essentially repeating what people who clearly know a lot more about cricket than I do is that the white ball domination is dangerous especially for English cricket and as the only northern hemisphere team we have problems southern hemisphere nations don't. A lack of space, unfavourable seasons, a lack of cricket and cricket facilities in schools unless they are private schools, what @Addick Addict says about how batsmen are coached now is nonsense (not what he says, he has a son in the system, I absolutely believe him) I mean, surely the fundamentals of batting are to learn how to protect your wicket first then how to play shots (with a lot in between but for the sake of writing 1000 more words) and to hear lida are being coached to smash balls and to neglect positional awareness and how to play a situation scares me but also confirms what a lot of us suspect.
The ECB have to take some dramatic ownership of this, the UK is different to the carribean, the sub continent and any southern hemisphere country. They can pretty much play all year round and have an enormous talent pool to look at which is something we have to address and the test players who want to play T20 must be either financially dissuaded by the value of their central contract and not to feel like they are missing out by playing red ball cricket instead or we leave them out of the test side which I'm not in favour of, something has to change though.
Can’t believe this is game on England odds on in this test for first time on tour ….
my 3-1 series prediction is back on !!!
Did you have money on it?
Nah , I gave up gambling years back , I’m 100% the worst in the world .
Did anyone have 4-0?
I would have bet on 4-0, as I had no confidence in an undercooked and struggling England side who've been rubbish since spring 2021, but thought the rain would have helped us somewhere to save a game
I had 5-0, when you have a side where I can genuinely see all 10 wickets falling in a session, I didn’t even think the weather could save us.
I completely agree @carter apart from us being the only northern hemisphere team, India and Sri Lanka might dispute that along with the West Indies, but I am being a pedant we are the only test team in Europe and that does throw up different challenges.
I completely agree @carter apart from us being the only northern hemisphere team, India and Sri Lanka might dispute that along with the West Indies, but I am being a pedant we are the only test team in Europe and that does throw up different challenges.
Its a fair point and laziness on my part, I couldn't think of a more catch-all way of grouping everyone else vs us
Something that's made me laugh over the last few weeks is how much coverage Darren Stevens has got on the TV and how he feels about it
Can’t believe this is game on England odds on in this test for first time on tour ….
my 3-1 series prediction is back on !!!
Did you have money on it?
Nah , I gave up gambling years back , I’m 100% the worst in the world .
Did anyone have 4-0?
I did, both with Betfair and a mate who has tried to welch this morning. I saw weather helping us out at some point.
If my heart had ruled my head I'd have gone 3-1 but the moment Broad and Anderson were left out of that first test which was the only one I thought we had a chance to win without rain helping us I gave that up
Ian Botham had it right when he spoke to David Gower earlier, play red ball throughout the season rather than squishing it in.
White ball, specifically T20 is fun but is like a demo that gets people to buy the game. Its accessible and enables lads and families who don't really care for cricket to have a reason to go to St Lawrence and see some wild thrashing but test cricket is the antidote to that, for a few years England were bringing batsmen in (Pieterson primarily) who were playing one day shots in tests and seeing McGrath get smacked for six at Old Trafford was a glorious thing however the game in England is now dominated with these players who can clonk it but can't take a guard properly, understand how to see when a trap is being set by someone like Starc, no concept of protecting a wicket and worryingly how often did any of them go full one day mode and try to counter attack apart from Bairstow and maybe for a short time Stokes?
If I were Chris Silverwood I'd be trawling the South African academies again
I think T20 has it's place, its still the Hundred that is the problem, no need to introduce it as well as the T20. Both are not needed and the T20 is so much better than the doctored cricket that is the Hundred
Mate I completely agree, T20 and test cricket are my favourite forms of the game. Couldn’t give less of a shit for the 100 and one day stuff feels so long v T20. To think how excited we used to get over 1 day cricket!
I'm essentially repeating what people who clearly know a lot more about cricket than I do is that the white ball domination is dangerous especially for English cricket and as the only northern hemisphere team we have problems southern hemisphere nations don't. A lack of space, unfavourable seasons, a lack of cricket and cricket facilities in schools unless they are private schools, what @Addick Addict says about how batsmen are coached now is nonsense (not what he says, he has a son in the system, I absolutely believe him) I mean, surely the fundamentals of batting are to learn how to protect your wicket first then how to play shots (with a lot in between but for the sake of writing 1000 more words) and to hear lida are being coached to smash balls and to neglect positional awareness and how to play a situation scares me but also confirms what a lot of us suspect.
The ECB have to take some dramatic ownership of this, the UK is different to the carribean, the sub continent and any southern hemisphere country. They can pretty much play all year round and have an enormous talent pool to look at which is something we have to address and the test players who want to play T20 must be either financially dissuaded by the value of their central contract and not to feel like they are missing out by playing red ball cricket instead or we leave them out of the test side which I'm not in favour of, something has to change though.
One defence I will offer coaches who do offer cricket to youngsters is how difficult it can be to keep them interested. This coach, who was in charge of our District, wanted to engage as many kids as possible and I genuinely believe that this wasn't just from his own financial gain but that he was fighting against that boys play football in the winter who would rather be training and playing that sport than practising tennis ball drives with a bat. It had to be fun so the sessions were very much of a "see ball hit ball" nature rather than doing specific drills. As players got older they would do those drills in the District sessions if so selected.
But here's the difference with those from an Asian background. The Asian lads, typically, do session after session with their dads feeding giving them tennis ball bobble feeds and making sure that the bat is coming down straight. For the last eight years plus Seb has been at nets on a Sunday morning latterly just with me and formerly for 1-2-1s with a coach but, more often than not, the other nets were fully booked (certainly prior to Christmas until the various clubs starting booking them) with dads either in groups or just own their own nailing those basic skills. Theses boys aren't like a lot of their contemporaries who might well be playing football on a Sunday morning and at training on Saturdays or in midweek.
These boys are now starting to feed into the county system. For the first five years Seb was at Kent there was not a single black or Asian player in his squad. When one looks at the younger squads now, there are any number from those minority backgrounds. Which is great. And the reason that they are there is because they have got there despite the system and not because of it - although most of those are still privately educated. The issues then come if they do not have the ability to then score at say 120-130 in T20. A County such as Kent cannot financially carry red ball specific players but they can offer white ball only contracts which is why I have mentioned what I heard an age group coach said about those that can't hit 360 being dropped.
The hope is that the 12-16 year olds now coming through will be able to layer those alternative shots onto their sound technique as you would see, for example, the Indian batsmen have done. But we have to give them the opportunity to still practise and develop their batting against the swinging and seaming red ball otherwise they will go the same way as our current crop - able to hit 25 off 20 in white ball but when it comes to occupying the crease in red ball they are relatively clueless. Hence the need for the equilibrium to move from the ECB's obsession with winning white ball competitions to bringing red ball and ultimately Test cricket back into favour.
There can and is an appetite for both forms of the game but four competitions, with three of them white ball and the red ball fixtures fitted around them, simply won't allow that to happen. And rather than the ECB offering financial incentives, as they do, for counties to produce England qualified players, perhaps there should be an extra one for bringing on potential Test players - those players that are successful at playing white ball will get their rewards through the various franchises anyway so we have to find a way of keeping the future Alastair Cooks in the game. Let's face it, if he turned up now might even have been dropped by Essex at the age of 15 or 16 because he only really had two or three run scoring shots. And that might not be considered enough.
I can't see him being a good enough red ball batsman to be a long term player in the side BUT if Billings keeps his place in the side for West Indies series, does well and becomes established as England's Test keeper, he would be in a good position to take over as captain, seeing that he actually is a current county captain, speaks well and has less of the baggage of Stokes
I am with you on this and would love it from my totally bias viewpoint for him to get the gig but I just have a few things that potentially will make it hard for him to do so:
(1) Is he still offering himself up for the IPL auction? Up to four players were allowed to be retained by their franchises but only Mooen Ali and Jos Buttler of the English players kept their places. But those players can, of course, still be picked up in the Auction and with two extra teams there will, potentially, be extra places. Let's not forget that Billings doesn't even have an England Central Contract which, once again, demonstrates the folly of them - Burns might not play another match for England in 2022 but will still have his underpin whereas Billings would only get his match fee. Is Billings prepared to give that and other opportunities up? He might because his family are loaded. But he might not.
(2) I'm wit you in questioning whether Billings a Test batsman. The jury has to be out on that one as much because he has never shown any real consistency in the CC but also because, like many other players either because they are playing franchise cricket or in and around England squads, he has played so little red ball cricket - just 4 matches last year, batted 5 times and scored 149 runs in total
(3) There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Billings is one of the best keepers in England. By that I mean that he makes everything look easy and natural. Unlike Buttler who is robotic. But he only kept in one or two CC matches last year so only had to captain whilst keeping for a limited number of games. The concentration levels needed to keep, take the ball from the bowler, constantly run to the stumps to take throws are really draining. To then have to think between balls about bowling and field changes is a real challenge and that's without thinking what to say to the batsman to unsettle him! With all due respect, doing the job at Kent is also a relative piece of cake - Stevens will always dictate what field he wants and the rest of the bowlers will, invariably, be seamers too so there isn't that much to think about especially with the ball ruling the bat as it tends to do in the CC. How does someone who is not certain of his place as a batsman at Test level, let alone as a skipper, handle that? Think Paine. Think 8 defeats in 23 matches. And then think absurd and panic reviews that cost the Ashes. It is so difficult in those circumstances to have a clear mind. Which is what you do need to have to be a successful Test captain.
That said, the cupboard so far as alternatives is bare. For that reason I would keep Root (but not Silverwood and the current England set up). He has made some poor decisions but the reason we have lost the series is because we cannot as a team score enough runs - Root has proven that he can do so and captain the side. The rest can't even do the former.
However Billings could succeed one other England captain and keep - Eoin Morgan
Ireland beat the West Indies 2-1 in the 3 game series of ODI in the Caribbean.
Great result for Ireland but also an indication of how far the Windies have fallen - Ireland aren't power houses in the game and they wouldn't have beaten, twice in three games, the side of a decade ago that had the likes of Gayle, Russell, Sammy, Samuels, Bravo (x2), Pollard and Narine at their best. Lord knows what that side with Haynes, Greenidge, Richards, Lloyd, Marshall, Roberts, Holding and Garner would have done to Ireland.
The ECB are in discussions with Novak Djokovic ahead of our next Test series. The selectors were impressed by how long it took for the Aussies to get him out.
I believe there was quite a bit of traditional Irish hospitality the night before...Clyde Walcott was part of the management team for that tour so I am assuming he was called in at the last minute
You get all sorts of solutions but surely the issue is that the game has changed and maybe that needs to be accepted. Unless we are going to forget the shorter forms of the game which isn't going to happen. Seeing as our 50 over team are World Champions and find it reasonably easy to score highly in that format, I don't know why we play back foot test cricket other than that is the way it has always been played. Why don't we play test cricket where we try to get a score and forget about trying not to get out? Surely it would have been worth an experiment on this tour seeing we were getting trounced every game and we knew it was going to happen.
Would like to know what our cricketing experts think about his suggestions ....
We've read the article through several times & are non the wiser !
Either JA has been drowning his Ashes' sorrows or the Fanackapans are thicker than they thought !
Answers on a pc , please.
Basically he seems to be advocating that the highest level of red ball cricket is franchised - the same teams as The Hundred but add two more sides so, presumably they will play nine matches. Then the counties would play in a three day competition and act as the "feeder" for the franchise tournament. Counties would still play in The Blast and the Royal London.
The question I would pose it his. What is the incentive for counties to produce red ball players? They struggle to get decent crowds with just the one long form comp so why would they, with their academies and age group sides, bother doing so for what will be a second rate competition and not just continue to concentrate on white ball as they do now? The franchises won't have any pathways and will still be reliant on the county system to produce the players but unless the ECB incentivises them to do so I fail to see why this would happen. Equally, quite how counties would be able to hand cuff players to two or three year contracts I do not know unless compensation is paid to them by the ECB for the loss of those 10 or so players to the franchise comp. The counties would be scrambling around to find players themselves who would have to come from the local leagues and a lot of those players would not be willing to give up full time jobs that are paying them as much, if not more, for what might only be a one year contract. So that would dilute the quality even more and probably the pipeline of young players too.
Of course, the other unintended consequence of what Agnew is advocating is The Blast and Royal London disappearing as mainstream competitions and possibly even going all together - what's to stop the franchises starting a 50 over comp and a 20 over one too so they have a full set? Then counties would, effectively, become on a similar level to the minor ones. This would though destroy all cricket as we know it - however, if the counties aren't prepared to have the three division set up I advocated (six teams - 10 games) then they might find this sort of idea imposed upon them.
Would like to know what our cricketing experts think about his suggestions ....
We've read the article through several times & are non the wiser !
Either JA has been drowning his Ashes' sorrows or the Fanackapans are thicker than they thought !
Answers on a pc , please.
Yes, fine words from Aggers in terms of advocating change ... but, as a cricket enthusiast (just like Atherton before him), he misses the point ... or chooses to miss the point.
Cricket people see Test match cricket as the pinnacle of the game. County cricket is there to support that.
But only a handful of people want to watch it.
The paying public wants instant gratification ... hence T20, hence the Hundred.
So, the format of the game that brings in the money is not conducive to developing the skills required for Test match cricket.
Only old-school lovers of the game bemoan the situation ... Atherton, Agnew, me, you etc. No-one else is bothered.
Would like to know what our cricketing experts think about his suggestions ....
We've read the article through several times & are non the wiser !
Either JA has been drowning his Ashes' sorrows or the Fanackapans are thicker than they thought !
Answers on a pc , please.
Agnew is promoting yet another change to the structure of English cricket. Why? Because he has been embarrassed by England's poor showing in Australia. However, poor management, poor preparation and poor decisions by the captain, (choosing to bat on a green pitch in Brisbane and omitting our best seam bowlers in favourable), are the main reason. If it was the England football team, the manager would have been sacked by now, the captain would of resigned and the FA Chairman would be under pressure to move aside. But we are blaming the marginalisation of the County Championship, which is a secondary reason, so we have to change everything.
The solution is simple. Move the Championship to the middle of the summer. And play the T20 Blast on Friday nights/ Saturday afternoons. If County players want to play in the Micky-mouse Hundred comp, then fine, but you can't play in the County Champs.
I've been a member at the Oval now for 48 years, so maybe a dinosaur. But I'd rather watch Surrey v Kent over 4 days, than a Test Match. England will have successful periods and lean periods. So what? If the outcome is to follow Agnes's line and introduce a franchise 4 day competition, then that's me done. I have no allegiance to the Oval Invincibles in any format they decide on.
The 100 franchises are hardly a starting point for a franchised red ball game anyway, as many of the best counties like Essex and Somerset (and other than 2021 Kent) aren't based at Test grounds, while Glamorgan are rubbish
Hobart isn’t exactly Newcastle or London - it’s literally about the same size as Tunbridge Wells. It’s a bit naff for a night out. Just embarrassing end to an embarrassing series.
The other day I mentioned that John Lewis had questioned Robinson's fitness. Now I don't know whether this was him but it appears that one of the players refused to have a skinfold test (a predictor of the amount of body fat) and then claimed he was being "fat shamed". I'm trying to think of who else in the squad might be out of shape but struggling to put forward too many candidates. Certainly none of the batsmen come to mind.
What we do know is that Robinson was left out with a "shoulder niggle" for one Test. In the last one he was unable to bowl due to back spasms. But he was able to play golf the day before the Test. Not the best of preparations especially if you haven't been playing golf regularly as that can definitely cause back issues. Equally, given how poor he's been with the bat (since his debut 42 he's averaged 6.39 in 13 innings) surely he would have been better served spending a couple of hours hitting cricket balls anyway?
Not saying that he is responsible for our defeats because he isn't. He's generally bowled well. When fit to do so. But when the bowling coach is mentioning he lack of endurance and we see his pace drop to 70mph and that he was only able to bowl 19 overs in the last Test as opposed to Broad's 43 (with eight years difference in age too) there has to be questions asked about what the root cause of his lack of fitness is. I also wonder what he was doing to maintain his fitness in the three months between September and December.
Some of this is speculation of course. But one of my criticisms (and this is now being picked up by other commentators) is that Central Contracts offer players opportunities to basically dictate what they are and aren't prepared to do, when they are happy to play, to refuse to test for their fitness levels and still get paid their £700,000. That can't be right.
Totally agree with Tutt-Tutt. County cricket for me is where my interest is.
Make it harder for the bowlers to get wickets by playing more games in the actual summer and if that means playing more games in total, so be it. Actually have a proper season, rather than having pros spending all their time in the nets "honing their skills...."
Keep The Blast (it's good fun) and scrap The 100.
Bottom line though is money. The IPL has fucked everything up and made it difficult to attract the top players to The Championship. We don't even get to see (or play against) the top England players very often due to their contracts. How can young opening batsmen hope to do well in Test cricket if they never get to face James Anderson, Stuart Broad etc in county cricket? And if they do, it's in April when they don't stand much chance of surviving.
Agnew is a good bloke and I like to hear his views but on this one, I definitely don't agree with him. The ECB should've used some of that 100 money to book a few extra weeks' away, so England could have played some State games before the 1st Test. The players might not have fancied it at the time but I bet they wish they'd played a bit more early on, now that they've taken such a thrashing.
Comments
I'm essentially repeating what people who clearly know a lot more about cricket than I do is that the white ball domination is dangerous especially for English cricket and as the only northern hemisphere team we have problems southern hemisphere nations don't. A lack of space, unfavourable seasons, a lack of cricket and cricket facilities in schools unless they are private schools, what @Addick Addict says about how batsmen are coached now is nonsense (not what he says, he has a son in the system, I absolutely believe him) I mean, surely the fundamentals of batting are to learn how to protect your wicket first then how to play shots (with a lot in between but for the sake of writing 1000 more words) and to hear lida are being coached to smash balls and to neglect positional awareness and how to play a situation scares me but also confirms what a lot of us suspect.
The ECB have to take some dramatic ownership of this, the UK is different to the carribean, the sub continent and any southern hemisphere country. They can pretty much play all year round and have an enormous talent pool to look at which is something we have to address and the test players who want to play T20 must be either financially dissuaded by the value of their central contract and not to feel like they are missing out by playing red ball cricket instead or we leave them out of the test side which I'm not in favour of, something has to change though.
Something that's made me laugh over the last few weeks is how much coverage Darren Stevens has got on the TV and how he feels about it
One defence I will offer coaches who do offer cricket to youngsters is how difficult it can be to keep them interested. This coach, who was in charge of our District, wanted to engage as many kids as possible and I genuinely believe that this wasn't just from his own financial gain but that he was fighting against that boys play football in the winter who would rather be training and playing that sport than practising tennis ball drives with a bat. It had to be fun so the sessions were very much of a "see ball hit ball" nature rather than doing specific drills. As players got older they would do those drills in the District sessions if so selected.
But here's the difference with those from an Asian background. The Asian lads, typically, do session after session with their dads feeding giving them tennis ball bobble feeds and making sure that the bat is coming down straight. For the last eight years plus Seb has been at nets on a Sunday morning latterly just with me and formerly for 1-2-1s with a coach but, more often than not, the other nets were fully booked (certainly prior to Christmas until the various clubs starting booking them) with dads either in groups or just own their own nailing those basic skills. Theses boys aren't like a lot of their contemporaries who might well be playing football on a Sunday morning and at training on Saturdays or in midweek.
These boys are now starting to feed into the county system. For the first five years Seb was at Kent there was not a single black or Asian player in his squad. When one looks at the younger squads now, there are any number from those minority backgrounds. Which is great. And the reason that they are there is because they have got there despite the system and not because of it - although most of those are still privately educated. The issues then come if they do not have the ability to then score at say 120-130 in T20. A County such as Kent cannot financially carry red ball specific players but they can offer white ball only contracts which is why I have mentioned what I heard an age group coach said about those that can't hit 360 being dropped.
The hope is that the 12-16 year olds now coming through will be able to layer those alternative shots onto their sound technique as you would see, for example, the Indian batsmen have done. But we have to give them the opportunity to still practise and develop their batting against the swinging and seaming red ball otherwise they will go the same way as our current crop - able to hit 25 off 20 in white ball but when it comes to occupying the crease in red ball they are relatively clueless. Hence the need for the equilibrium to move from the ECB's obsession with winning white ball competitions to bringing red ball and ultimately Test cricket back into favour.
There can and is an appetite for both forms of the game but four competitions, with three of them white ball and the red ball fixtures fitted around them, simply won't allow that to happen. And rather than the ECB offering financial incentives, as they do, for counties to produce England qualified players, perhaps there should be an extra one for bringing on potential Test players - those players that are successful at playing white ball will get their rewards through the various franchises anyway so we have to find a way of keeping the future Alastair Cooks in the game. Let's face it, if he turned up now might even have been dropped by Essex at the age of 15 or 16 because he only really had two or three run scoring shots. And that might not be considered enough.
(1) Is he still offering himself up for the IPL auction? Up to four players were allowed to be retained by their franchises but only Mooen Ali and Jos Buttler of the English players kept their places. But those players can, of course, still be picked up in the Auction and with two extra teams there will, potentially, be extra places. Let's not forget that Billings doesn't even have an England Central Contract which, once again, demonstrates the folly of them - Burns might not play another match for England in 2022 but will still have his underpin whereas Billings would only get his match fee. Is Billings prepared to give that and other opportunities up? He might because his family are loaded. But he might not.
(2) I'm wit you in questioning whether Billings a Test batsman. The jury has to be out on that one as much because he has never shown any real consistency in the CC but also because, like many other players either because they are playing franchise cricket or in and around England squads, he has played so little red ball cricket - just 4 matches last year, batted 5 times and scored 149 runs in total
(3) There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Billings is one of the best keepers in England. By that I mean that he makes everything look easy and natural. Unlike Buttler who is robotic. But he only kept in one or two CC matches last year so only had to captain whilst keeping for a limited number of games. The concentration levels needed to keep, take the ball from the bowler, constantly run to the stumps to take throws are really draining. To then have to think between balls about bowling and field changes is a real challenge and that's without thinking what to say to the batsman to unsettle him! With all due respect, doing the job at Kent is also a relative piece of cake - Stevens will always dictate what field he wants and the rest of the bowlers will, invariably, be seamers too so there isn't that much to think about especially with the ball ruling the bat as it tends to do in the CC. How does someone who is not certain of his place as a batsman at Test level, let alone as a skipper, handle that? Think Paine. Think 8 defeats in 23 matches. And then think absurd and panic reviews that cost the Ashes. It is so difficult in those circumstances to have a clear mind. Which is what you do need to have to be a successful Test captain.
That said, the cupboard so far as alternatives is bare. For that reason I would keep Root (but not Silverwood and the current England set up). He has made some poor decisions but the reason we have lost the series is because we cannot as a team score enough runs - Root has proven that he can do so and captain the side. The rest can't even do the former.
However Billings could succeed one other England captain and keep - Eoin Morgan
https://www.espncricinfo.com/series/west-indies-tour-of-england-and-ireland-1969-61885/ireland-vs-west-indians-301112/full-scorecard
Would make an amusing film
3 more at Sydney (Root, Buttler and Wood)
3 more at Hobart (Burns AGAIN, Broad and Robinson AGAIN)
Robinson has 6 ducks in 9 Tests and 16 innings. Indeed in the 4 Tests he played on this tour, he has 4 ducks in 8 innings
We've read the article through several times & are non the wiser !
Either JA has been drowning his Ashes' sorrows or the Fanackapans are thicker than they thought !
Answers on a pc , please.
The question I would pose it his. What is the incentive for counties to produce red ball players? They struggle to get decent crowds with just the one long form comp so why would they, with their academies and age group sides, bother doing so for what will be a second rate competition and not just continue to concentrate on white ball as they do now? The franchises won't have any pathways and will still be reliant on the county system to produce the players but unless the ECB incentivises them to do so I fail to see why this would happen. Equally, quite how counties would be able to hand cuff players to two or three year contracts I do not know unless compensation is paid to them by the ECB for the loss of those 10 or so players to the franchise comp. The counties would be scrambling around to find players themselves who would have to come from the local leagues and a lot of those players would not be willing to give up full time jobs that are paying them as much, if not more, for what might only be a one year contract. So that would dilute the quality even more and probably the pipeline of young players too.
Of course, the other unintended consequence of what Agnew is advocating is The Blast and Royal London disappearing as mainstream competitions and possibly even going all together - what's to stop the franchises starting a 50 over comp and a 20 over one too so they have a full set? Then counties would, effectively, become on a similar level to the minor ones. This would though destroy all cricket as we know it - however, if the counties aren't prepared to have the three division set up I advocated (six teams - 10 games) then they might find this sort of idea imposed upon them.
Cricket people see Test match cricket as the pinnacle of the game. County cricket is there to support that.
But only a handful of people want to watch it.
The paying public wants instant gratification ... hence T20, hence the Hundred.
So, the format of the game that brings in the money is not conducive to developing the skills required for Test match cricket.
Only old-school lovers of the game bemoan the situation ... Atherton, Agnew, me, you etc. No-one else is bothered.
The solution is simple. Move the Championship to the middle of the summer. And play the T20 Blast on Friday nights/ Saturday afternoons. If County players want to play in the Micky-mouse Hundred comp, then fine, but you can't play in the County Champs.
I've been a member at the Oval now for 48 years, so maybe a dinosaur. But I'd rather watch Surrey v Kent over 4 days, than a Test Match. England will have successful periods and lean periods. So what? If the outcome is to follow Agnes's line and introduce a franchise 4 day competition, then that's me done. I have no allegiance to the Oval Invincibles in any format they decide on.
What we do know is that Robinson was left out with a "shoulder niggle" for one Test. In the last one he was unable to bowl due to back spasms. But he was able to play golf the day before the Test. Not the best of preparations especially if you haven't been playing golf regularly as that can definitely cause back issues. Equally, given how poor he's been with the bat (since his debut 42 he's averaged 6.39 in 13 innings) surely he would have been better served spending a couple of hours hitting cricket balls anyway?
Not saying that he is responsible for our defeats because he isn't. He's generally bowled well. When fit to do so. But when the bowling coach is mentioning he lack of endurance and we see his pace drop to 70mph and that he was only able to bowl 19 overs in the last Test as opposed to Broad's 43 (with eight years difference in age too) there has to be questions asked about what the root cause of his lack of fitness is. I also wonder what he was doing to maintain his fitness in the three months between September and December.
Some of this is speculation of course. But one of my criticisms (and this is now being picked up by other commentators) is that Central Contracts offer players opportunities to basically dictate what they are and aren't prepared to do, when they are happy to play, to refuse to test for their fitness levels and still get paid their £700,000. That can't be right.
Make it harder for the bowlers to get wickets by playing more games in the actual summer and if that means playing more games in total, so be it. Actually have a proper season, rather than having pros spending all their time in the nets "honing their skills...."
Keep The Blast (it's good fun) and scrap The 100.
Bottom line though is money. The IPL has fucked everything up and made it difficult to attract the top players to The Championship. We don't even get to see (or play against) the top England players very often due to their contracts. How can young opening batsmen hope to do well in Test cricket if they never get to face James Anderson, Stuart Broad etc in county cricket? And if they do, it's in April when they don't stand much chance of surviving.
Agnew is a good bloke and I like to hear his views but on this one, I definitely don't agree with him. The ECB should've used some of that 100 money to book a few extra weeks' away, so England could have played some State games before the 1st Test. The players might not have fancied it at the time but I bet they wish they'd played a bit more early on, now that they've taken such a thrashing.