Tag Archives: alistair cook

The three-year itch

08 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Unsurprisingly, there’s chat about Alex Hales and whether he should get another chance opening the batting. This debate is as premature as it is predictable. The man has played two tests, averages 25, scored a good 60 in one of his four innings, and with a strike rate of 37 he is clearly reigning in his attacking instincts in order to make a good fist of the test opening job. He averaged 50 in the Championship last year. It’s worth noting, too, that in each of his four partnerships with Cook, it has been the skipper’s dismissal that has come first.

With all the talk of Cook’s run of unsuccessful opening partners, my mind turned to Graham Gooch’s rather slow start to his test career. He managed 0 and 0 in his first test and soon disappeared back to county cricket, only to return with considerably more success three years later.

Saeed Anwar had the same experience, coming back from a pair on debut to score 169 three years later. And as any cricket aficionado of a certain age will tell you, Marvan Atapattu is the poster boy for ropey beginnings followed by sturdy careers. He made 0 and 0, 0 and 1, 0 and 0 in his first three tests (admittedly rather unhelpfully each about two years apart). This is a less than solid performance for a test match opening batsman. Hales’ average of 25 looks pretty good compared to Atapattu’s 0.16 (and even his one run was rumoured to have come off his pads not his bat). Atapattu was then dropped for three years before coming back to have a distinguished 90 test career that included 16 tons of which six were doubles.

It was only as I began to research this article, which was ostensibly to be about Alex Hales (with a side helping of self-congratulation on my previous post calling for Mo to be kept at 8, Compton to be recalled and Bell to be dropped), that it dawned on me that all the players mentioned above were dropped for around three years before they made their successful comebacks. I wonder what the significance of those three years is? Is this the amount of time it takes to refine your game or work out whether you’ve got the hunger to play for your country?

It worked for James Taylor too. Much as I believe he deserved his recall sooner, the fact is that he had a three-year hiatus from the team and has returned a transformed player. He says himself that not being picked drove him on. Are the selectors on to something here? Do they possess a psychological insight that we hadn’t credited them with?

Nick Compton’s absence was approaching three years too. Undoubtedly a better player now.

There must be something in this three years thing (I think I’ll call it the Campion Rejuvenation Formula©) because Boycott even dropped himself for precisely that length of time before his glorious return with a ton against the Aussies in 1977.

Then there’s Adil Rashid, who spent six years in the international wilderness and judging by his form in the Big Bash, he’s now twice as good as he used to be.

(If I’ve missed anyone you can think of in the three-year club, do shout up.)

It’s impossible to know whether being dropped was the right decision, of course, because we can never know how players’ test careers might have turned out had they been retained. Other teams, with scarcer resources, might be forced to find out whether a player could learn on the job. Certainly when England’s own options have been limited, they’ve had to be patient. Look at Gatt – it took him seven years and 54 test innings to make his first hundred. Hales has had four knocks in his test career. I reckon he should be allowed a few more.

Advertisement

Alistair Cook: slump in form or end of career?

21 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

I don’t know what it is about the Aussies but they always seem to back the right horse. A new player who looks like they’re never going to make it? Back them, back them, back them until they do – à la Steve Smith and Glenn Maxwell. Old player who could be finished but might just be in a form slump? Back them, back them, back them until they come good. Steve Waugh, Hayden, Langer, Mark Taylor. Other greats tend to have the happy knack of quitting while they are still ahead. Even Ponting, who I remember as a distinctly fading force towards the end, managed to average 43 in his last year of test cricket, with a top score of 221.

So, Alistair Cook then. Do we stick with him and hope for the phoenix from the Ashes? Or is his goose…ahem…cooked?

In the last two years of test cricket he has averaged 31.66 with just one ton in 20 matches. That’s 37 innings opening the batting with one century. Just to prove this is no fluke, it’s 27.70 in 28 ODIs over the same period, top score 64.

That’s a long bad trot. I’m all for loyalty but how long can he live on past glories? It can only be his highly distinguished career that saves him at the moment. The likes of Carberry (average 28.10 in the most recent five dismal Ashes tests against the best attack in the world), Robson (average 30.54 in seven tests) and Compton (average 31.93 with two tons in nine tests) must be biting their tongues so hard they’re drawing blood. All have a comparable average and all were just starting out.

Then there’s Adam Lyth, selected for England as an opener after spending the whole of 2014 as an opener for the Division 1 County Championship winners and scoring 1,489 first-class runs at 67.68 with six tons. Now he’s carrying the drinks for Cook and Trott.

With Cook, it’s not just the stats that are troubling though. It’s the fact that he looks like a walking wicket. Where before he was natural and fluid, now he looks as if his body is made of entirely of sharp angles and limbs that don’t quite move together as they should. He pokes at the ball from a distance, hands thrust out in front of him. It’s mechanical, awkward, unnatural and painful to watch.

Then there’s Trott. To be fair to him, he’s stacked up a pile of runs since his return but rushing him back in when his position wasn’t available was unfair on him, on us and on Lyth. Clearly Trott still has challenges to overcome with his technique – you just can’t be ambling across the stumps so spectacularly as an opener, hitting on the move and still expect to score consistently.

If you were an opening bowler lining up these two, you’d fancy your chances. It’s not like they’re going to get off to a flier either…

England just seem to be so uncertain in their selection – and their default is safety first; for example choosing Tredwell over Rashid for the first Windies test. It’s a similar selection to Trott’s – he seemed to have been selected solely because he’s familiar.

Somehow England need to find this sixth sense that other countries have when it comes to identifying someone who’s going to come good (fingers crossed for Stokes…) – and also being bold enough to call time on a career when all evidence points to terminal decline.

Return of The Prince?

18 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

*At the time of writing, KP may or may not have signed for Surrey. But he has certainly indicated his desire to play county cricket and win his England place back.

Unless I’m very much mistaken (a distinct possibility), KP is, with Machiavellian cunning, playing the political game with the ECB to great effect and setting himself up to be the wronged suitor – again.

Let me first just make one point so old arguments don’t interfere with this one – the ECB’s dropping of KP was a shambles and an embarrassment. KP’s comments in his book burned his bridges spectacularly. I can’t see any way he could play again with people he wrote about in the way he did. For me, this whole situation is not solely the fault of one or the other – both parties can take their share of blame.

Back to the present situation. What KP is doing here is taking one single remark by Colin Graves, which was as far from being a definitive statement as it could be, and basing his career choices for the 2015 season on it.

This is what Graves said a couple of weeks ago. And remember, this is the Graves who is not yet even in post…

“The first thing he has to do if he wants to get back is start playing county cricket. The selectors and the coaches are not going to pick him if he’s not playing, it’s as simple as that.

“At the end of the day it’s down to the selectors and coaches and what they feel is best for English cricket. They will make the decisions and I will support their decisions.”

That doesn’t sound to me like the red carpet is being laid out to welcome KP back into the fold. It sounds like a bloke giving a personal view about something that might have to happen before something else might happen – and before he’s really thought about how it might sound or how it might impact on his ECB colleagues.

What KP appears to be doing (again, I reiterate, I may be wrong; there are other commentators with far better inside knowledge than me) is deliberately giving huge weight to this throwaway remark and apparently basing his entire season (and potentially career) on it. By employing this spectacularly passive-aggressive straw man, KP will be able, when this all inevitably ends in tears, to say, ‘But I acted in good faith. I gave up lucrative T20 contracts to play in England because I was told I could get my place back. This is nothing more than the ECB persecuting me..’ etc. You get the idea.

Let’s remember that the managing director of the ECB, the chairman of selectors, the coach and the captain have all said that there is no way back for KP. Cook even said it today! They have also not implied it, wondered about it or queried it – they have said it clearly and unequivocally.

I simply can’t see any way back for KP unless Graves ditches Downton, Whitaker, Moores and Cook. So either KP is playing a masterful political game or we’re in for one hell of a summer.

We’ve got all the ingredients but need to sack the Cook

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

Peter Moores’ rather equivocal ‘support’ for Alistair Cook after his, and England’s, failure a couple of days ago (not to be confused with their failure today)  was an unexpected speck of light at the end of the tunnel.

Though Moores and now Downton keep insisting publicly that Cook will lead at the World Cup, it must be only them, the selectors and Cook himself who believe he is the right man to lead England into the World Cup. The problem is that the selectors and Moores have gone down a Cook cul-de-sac and can’t find a way out.

They backed Cook and continue to back him largely because they backed him before, and each time they do it they make it harder to go back on that decision. It’s a self-annihilating circle demonstrating the utmost lack of self-awareness.

As for as I can tell, they backed Cook for three reasons – desperate hope, convenience and a sense of him being the right kind of chap.

Desperate hope – he did score a few decent runs when he first took over as ODI skipper. He looked ok. However, he averages under 30 in 2014, has scored one 50 in his last 22 ODI innings, hasn’t scored a ton in 45 and has made next to no runs in this current series. And now he’s dropping catches. It’s not that he’s suddenly turned into Mike Brearley either. His captaincy doesn’t make up for his lack of runs. We’ve just lost this series.

Convenience – it really is ideal if one skipper does all the formats of the game or even a couple of them. But not if it’s all going so very wrong. It’s even counter-productive for Cook himself, who seems to be taking his increasingly shaky technique and crushed confidence into the test match arena.

The right kind of chap – he is the anti-Pietersen. He may be gauche, fumbling and awkward at times, he may be an uninspirational leader, he may to batting what Ed Miliband is to statesmanship but he’s a good egg.

Most infuriating of all is the realisation that the selectors, management and Cook are prepared to jettison England’s chances at the World Cup in order to save face on a poor decision to retain Cook as ODI captain. And ‘infuriating’ just doesn’t cover it if there is truth to the generally-accepted rumour circulating that Cook will quit as ODI captain after the World Cup.

Basically the selectors are saying, ‘We wait four years for this opportunity and players put their hearts and souls into getting in the squad and playing – and this year we’ve even planned six months of our international cricket schedule around it – but, hey, let’s write it off this time so Alistair can play in a tournament he’s always wanted to play in and the selectors won’t be forced to publicly acknowledge they’ve got it completely wrong.’

It makes me furious just thinking about it.

I’d love to dissect the 30 man England World Cup squad in minute detail, wondering what our best eleven is but it feels so pointless. Which is a shame because it feels like we have some players who are starting to show what they can do.

The bowling seems steady rather than spectacular but we can rely on Tredwell, Moeen and Broad when he’s back. Anderson isn’t a given in ODI cricket for me – if it doesn’t swing he gets tapped. Woakes is increasingly, and surprisingly, impressive; then there’s hopefully a resurgent Finn, with Jordan as back-up.

Batting line up should be Hales, Moeen, Taylor, Root, Morgan (assuming he remembers how to bat), Bopara, Buttler. I’d like to drop Morgan as his recent record is as unimpressive as Cook’s but I’d need to be confident that his replacement from the squad of 30 would definitely be better. There are no guarantees.

Having said that, I really wouldn’t mind if the selectors were bold for once and went for Ballance or Bairstow, Samit Patel or Adil Rashid. They won’t of course. (With quite a few dashers in the order I probably wouldn’t risk Jason Roy as well.) Stokes, unfortunately, has lost his way – probably not helped by the management not being able to decide if he’s an all-rounder, a batsman who bowls or a bowler who bats. I wouldn’t be averse to Vince getting a go, while Luke Wright is in there for old times’ sake only.

Unfortunately it looks like Cook will take up a valuable place in that order so some poor sod who deserves a game won’t get one.

There really are some exciting players in the squad – mainly batsmen – but I just feel utterly deflated before we even set off on our World Cup run-in.

The question is, will the powers-that-be find a weaselly way out of this – like Alistair Cook having a sudden flare-up of his back trouble. I wouldn’t put it past them. What they won’t do, of course, is admit they were wrong and actually drop Cook for the World Cup. Fingers crossed for 2019.

UPDATE: Info on the BBC’s live feed of the ODI today provides more crushing evidence:

England’s ODI captains have departed their roles after each of the last four World Cups. 1999: Alec Stewart sacked. 2003: Nasser Hussain resigned. 2007: Michael Vaughan resigned. 2011: Andrew Strauss resigned.

Since the Champions Trophy in 2013, England have completed 27 ODIs against Test-playing opposition (ie not counting Scotland and Ireland) – they have won nine of those, and lost 18.

And even more depressing…

Alastair Cook, speaking to Sky Sports: I’m working as hard as I can, I’m as hungry as ever to score runs, so I’ll go on. “I’ve always had an attitude to play cricket and compete. Yes, it hasn’t gone well over the last 12 months both personally with the bat and in one-day cricket. “I would feel very wrong to walk away from it. If it’s taken away from me, I’ll feel very disappointed, but I certainly won’t be giving it up.”

Pfftt.