England cricket news

How to bat in one-day cricket

Here is our one-day batting philosophy – take it or leave it. It is not scientific. We are not scientific. We’ve never even owned a lab coat.

To us, one-day batting works like this.

1. Try and hit a single
2. If it’s asking for it, try and hit a four

That’s pretty much it. If you follow those steps successfully for the majority of an innings, you’ll probably find yourself in a decent position to start doing the wild bat flailing thing that everyone thinks is ‘modern one-day cricket’ towards the end of the innings. Quite how many overs of bat-flailery you can allow yourself depends on how well you’ve executed steps one and two.

England continually balls-up both steps. They fail to force singles frequently enough and so eventually find themselves having to force fours and sixes instead – which is even harder and inevitably leads to them getting out.

English cricket consciousness

All Indians and Australians believe that everyone in England thinks the same thing. (Do you see what we did with that sentence?)

We’d just like to refute this.

If you see an article in the Telegraph that says England are going to dominate world cricket forever, it is important to remember that Graeme Swann hasn’t said this (unless it’s his name in the byline). We haven’t said it either.

If an article in the Daily Express last month said that England were going to win the one-day series in India by five matches to nil, Jonathan Trott didn’t say that and again, neither did we.

If you draw statements from a wide variety of English sources and piece them all together, that isn’t The English Manifesto. We really aren’t that organised and we really don’t agree about many things at all.

One particular quality that you can be almost certain isn’t shared by most people is “confidence”. If you detect “confidence” in someone’s pronouncements, you can safely assume that they aren’t speaking on behalf of the English as a people.

Three things that would help England win in India

For all their progress and despite all their resources, England still can’t compete in one-day cricket in India. We’ve thought of three things that would help their cause.

1. Hire a scientist

It’s staggering to think that England don’t have a scientist on their staff. We’re not talking about nutrionists or sports biomechanists. England should hire a proper scientist – a guy in a lab coat.

2. Develop a stealth capability

This one speaks for itself really. Quite why England haven’t invested in a cloaking device is beyond us.

3. Avoid being mauled by bears

We cannot emphasise this one enough. It is vital for performances in India that players aren’t mauled by bears. As well as the physical consequences, being mauled by a bear can really affect a person’s confidence. Any player caught goading a bear should be severely reprimanded and possibly even given a £20 fine.

Don’t expect much from England

How’s that for a rallying cry?

England are playing their least-favoured format in their least-favoured conditions. This series against India will show them at their very worst and as such, it will tell us a hell of a lot.

England’s worst is not yet ‘middling’. They should aspire to middling performances in one-day matches in India. If you’re a middling side at your absolute worst, you’re pretty damn amazing. One shaky win after India have completely cocked up with the bat would be a brilliant outcome from the five-match series.

That’s cricket. It is too broad to perfect every aspect of it. Building a side isn’t a science, it’s basically just an ongoing patch-up job.

It’s like cooking 400 different dishes simultaneously. Your omelette’s looking good, but your kofte bhuna’s starting to stick, so you need to give it a damn good stir. Just as you’re getting stuck in with that, you realise your spuds are boiling over.

England’s spuds started to boil over in Hyderabad today. They could choose to sacrifice the kofte bhuna, but it’s probably more advisable to lash out with the foot and hope that they can turn down the ring under the spuds a touch.

Sometimes you’ve just got to make the best of it.

England are playing India – again

It’s just a one-day series, but as it happens England’s home win and India’s World Cup win have made this quite an appealing prospect. Plus it’s only five matches, not seven matches like it will be next winter.

What’s that, you say? Seven one-day matches next winter? You don’t mean between England and India, surely?

Yes, we do. After playing four Tests against India in November and December (probably in the space of four weeks), the two teams will then play a Twenty20 and seven one-dayers in January 2013.

Why are they doing that? It’s more ‘why are they playing this series?’ – and you know the answer to that. [Bites bottom lip and screws up face as if he's just swallowed a mouthful of vinegar while rubbing thumb and forefinger together to form 'the money face'.]

2011 County Championship players to watch review

Suppose we should take a look at how our 2011 County Championship players to watch fared.

Adam Lyth, Yorkshire

553 runs at 26.33

Yeah, that’s pretty shoddy.

James Hildreth, Somerset

893 runs at 38.82

That’s okay.

Ben Stokes, Durham

628 runs at 48.30 and 17 wickets at 33.00

Three hundreds, five sixes in five balls against Hampshire and selection for England. We’ll have that one.

Adil Rashid, Yorkshire

556 runs at 24.17 and 39 wickets at 43.38

Less than amazing, but we’re not losing faith in him, even if we’ll have to ignore him next year because he’ll be in the second division. Life isn’t slow, steady progress, it’s fits and starts and going backwards and forgetting where your car keys are and having a pain in your knee and not knowing whether that hoummus is okay to eat or not – THAT’S what life is.

Adil Rashid is 23-years-old. Writing off leg-spinners or batsmen when they’re 23 is moronic. Shane Warne made his Test debut at 23 and took 1-150. Rashid still has a long career ahead of him.

Paul Horton, Lancashire

1,040 runs at 37.14

That doesn’t read all that impressively and nor did Horton hit any hundreds, but it’s worth looking at the context. Horton scored the most runs for Lancashire this season. Being as Lancashire won more games than anyone, clearly Horton was making runs that mattered, it was just that they were low-scoring games.

A run doesn’t have a set value, it varies depending on the match. Paul Horton had a good season, although that would be a bit more obvious if he’d managed to add a handful to any of his biggest innings. At various points this year, he hit 93, 94, 95, 96, 97 and 99.

Oliver Newby, Lancashire

Eight wickets at 32.50

Didn’t break either leg at any point this season.

A pigeon being conspicuously indifferent to Rob Key

The Dawg writes:

I’m all for animals being conspicuously indifferent to cricket, but have you seen who is at the crease?

This is taken from a Kent v Surrey T20 game at the Oval. That pigeon should show more respect.

If you’ve got a picture of an animal being conspicously indifferent to cricket, send it to king@kingcricket.co.uk.

Marketing England one-day matches in 2012

The marketing men and women have got a tough task on their hands trying to generate interest in England’s 13 one-day internationals and four Twenty20 internationals next summer.

This is because:

1. There are far, far, far too many matches
2. No-one in England gives a toss about short-form cricket outside of the respective World Cups

Fortunately, we have a solution. Our 2012 England one-day cricket marketing masterplan is built on the twin pillars of rebranding and innovation.

The innovation comes in the form of England’s player selection. Rather than taking the tired old route of selecting the best 11 players eligible for England, why not instead select a team calculated to foster local interest?

Take the third one-day international against Australia, for example. This will take place at Edgbaston, so why not select a few Warwickshire players? Start with the captain, Jim Troughton, and then continue with a few more – about 10 more, say.

Next, the rebranding. Sticking with that same match, instead of the team being called ‘England’, it could be called ‘Warwickshire’. They could even play in different kit – the Warwickshire one-day kit, say.

The fixtures could also be rebranded from ‘one-day internationals’ to ‘tour matches’. This would help promote those that retained their full international status. It’s an old marketing trick: when something appears scarce, people want it more.

Conversely, when something appears commonplace…

Stuart Meaker and England selection

In years gone by, you wouldn’t have trusted the England selectors to identify the best cricketer on an episode of A Question Of Sport, but this batch, led by Geoff Miller, has earned respect. Even so, it doesn’t pay to get too clever.

Earlier this year, we said that Stuart Meaker was the only Surrey player we were interested in. We still are interested, but that doesn’t mean he’s England material right now this minute.

Meaker has been on England’s fast bowling programme for the last couple of years, so presumably the selectors feel they know him well enough. However, just as players shouldn’t be selected based on averages that can be skewed by a multitude factors, nor should they be identified based solely on their performances under lab conditions.

Meaker took 44 wickets at 22 in first-class cricket this season. Very good, but not exceptional and with that familiar proviso that he was bowling in the second division. However, he’s been selected for a one-day squad and he has taken just 19 one-day wickets in his entire career.

England’s selectors usually know what they’re doing, but we only hope they aren’t getting ahead of themselves. It might not seem like it with there being a match every other day, but international experience is a valuable commodity. It shouldn’t be spread around too liberally. Matt Dawson shouldn’t get a game, for example and Bill Beaumont DEFINITELY shouldn’t.

The English cricket backslapathon and what it means for Ravi Bopara

We sometimes experience this phenomenon where the girl driving the car behind seems to be the most beautiful woman in the world. This is true when we catch a glimpse of her for a fraction of a second, from a distance, while we’re both moving, but then she pulls up behind us at the lights and the illusion is over.

Given just a glimpse of something, the brain can be very generous when filling in the gaps. Perhaps fuelled by the optimism borne of strong performances by the national side, a lot of English people seem to be assessing young England players far too generously. That’s very kind of them, but it does no favours to the players we know rather better.

Ravi Bopara has three Test hundreds, 20 first-class hundreds, a one-day double hundred and a Twenty20 hundred to his name and he is only 26. Here are the men who are apparently going to leave him for dead because they’ve ‘grown up with Twenty20′ and are ‘full of confidence’.

Jonny Bairstow

Averaged 46 in a losing Yorkshire side this year and played a frankly jaw-dropping debut one-day innings for England against India. He’s looked amazing for all of 21 balls in international cricket, so why not make him captain? Has the nation accepted a job lot of jump to conclusions mats or something? Chill out. Gather more than four overs’ worth of evidence. Maybe he has a massive weakness against bowlers who are quicker than RP Singh.

Jos Buttler

Always scores runs when he’s on telly and averages 71 in one-day cricket, largely because he’s only had 24 innings (12 of them not out). Looks great so far – which isn’t very far at all.

Alex Hales

Put him up against a West Indies second eleven that’s been in autumnal England for about three quarters of an hour and he’ll have them for breakfast.

James Taylor

According to some, Taylor leapfrogged Ravi Bopara after outscoring him in the England Lions match against Sri Lanka. Those matches aren’t shoot-outs. They’re information gathering exercises. Those two fifties will be added to the one hundred that Taylor managed to score in the second division of the County Championship this season. He’s certainly a good batsman, but we don’t yet know how he’ll fare against teams who have more than two half-decent bowlers.

And back to Bopara

Much as we’d all like life to be constant progress with never a setback, it isn’t like that. It’s more like a near constant series of setbacks with occasional windows of stability. Ravi Bopara has had a couple of career catastrophes and has come back from them well. He has important qualities that we may not find in the players above.

A lot of the English currently seem willing to sacrifice something very good, but which isn’t perfect, in favour of whatever’s inside that cardboard box with a question mark on it that just got delivered.