England

Some other reasons why England were knocked out of the World Twenty20

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Articles about Kevin Pietersen are very boring and entirely overlook all England’s other mistakes and problems.

Dropping the captain who won the tournament

Paul Collingwood is a bit of a forgotten man, but we do wonder why there was such haste to ‘build for the future’. We’re not saying that dropping him was necessarily the wrong decision, but it did have a faint aroma of trying to be too clever by half – particularly when Stuart Broad’s the beneficiary.

Everyone in the team is eight years’ old

At least Collingwood’s a grown-up. Youth is good, but there’s no point picking an under-21s team when you don’t have to. Twenty20 cricket is not a young man’s game. Pietersen, Gayle, Tendulkar, Dilshan, Jayawardene, Watson, Kallis, Hussey – these are the batsmen who score runs in the shortest format.

You’ve got Virat Kohli? Fine, pick Virat Kohli. You’ve got Craig Kieswetter, Alex Hales, Luke Wright, Jonny Bairstow and Jos Buttler? Choose two. At most.

Variations

Ooh look, here comes Jade Dernbach with his eye-catching variations. Oh dear, he appears to have conceded 1-45, 1-38 and 0-42 in successive matches. Not much variation there.

Captaincy

Stuart Broad says the team has learnt a lot from the experience. Hopefully they’ll make the most of their knowledge the next time there’s a World Twenty20 in Sri Lanka featuring the exact same players.

DON'T BE LIKE GATT!

Mike Gatting wasn't receiving the King Cricket email when he dropped that ludicrously easy chance against India in 1993.

Coincidence?

Why risk it when it's so easy to sign up?

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25 comments

    1. We didn’t LITERALLY mean an under-21s team, just as we didn’t literally mean that everyone is eight years old.

      27’s not young, but nor is it ‘senior player’ territory.

    3. Sorry, we should have said: 27′s not young, but nor is it senior player territory when the player in question was brought back into the side about a fornight ago.

  2. Everything is summed up by the decision to play Bopara today. I don’t know what kind of ingenuous twerp thought that Ravi was the guy who would go out there in the worst form of his life, in front of a hostile crowd and a really good attack in their home conditions, and score runs. I don’t know, but I know he must be a real asshole.

    2. Exactly, but how could it even be necessary? Bopara’s recent run of scores before today was 1, 3, 2, 16, 0, 6, 0 and 6, and he hadn’t played in Sri Lanka yet even in a warmup game. It was bad luck that Ravi hit such awful form immediately after having been named in the squad, but it hardly seems a reason to punish him so sadistically.

  5. Aren’t the next 2 t20 world cups in the sub-continent?

    I’m sure this is all art of the plan for those.

  6. Only a little bitter there KC. The most eye-catching think about Dernbach is his ink. Like Mitchell Johnson I suspect he would benefit from less time in the chair getting ink and more time bowling.

  7. my highlight was at the post match conference.

    Broad, hands on his waist to look sage-like, says how much they have learned from from this tournament.
    Nasser pounces like a tiger & asks him what did he learn?

    Broad ums & ahs before giving a tepid response.

    I don’t buy into the bollocks of “inexperience, young, lose wickets in the first 6, the surfaces, need to adapt”
    They just needed Bell & KP.

    Playing Patel up the order was the only postive that England can take back from this tournament. Briggs should have a decent career too. Had a chat with him during the aus practice match & he seems like an intelligent & composed dude.

    p.s. Broad’s corporate speech gives me flashbacks of Pontinga final tenure as
    captain. Instead of admitting that one had been beaten to a pulp, they divert attention
    with lots of double speak, buzz words & optimism.

  11. I must say I agree heartily KC. There were times when I looked at the team sheet and thought England must have been entering a B team for some unknown reason.

    I can’t stand Broad as captain (mind you I don’t like him much anyway), Dernbach is overrated (why doesn’t Anderson play (Steyn does for SA why not the worlds other premier swing bowler for us…), Wright was okay in the end and Samit looks good, but Hales, Bairstow and Buttler together is too many.

    Also Kieswetter is poor. Whats the use of hitting a boundary if the other 5 balls in the over are dot balls!

    I’m just a little bitter!

    England need to stop experimenting and go back to that revolutionary tactics of the best players in the country. Bell for example.

    Rant over.

  12. The only reason I can think of for Bell and Anderson being omitted is that they’re resting them because they play too much cricket.

    Unfortunately I think the real reason is that the selectors think Test players – proper, traditional, good, experienced Test players – can’t do Twenty20. They don’t seem to have moved on from the idea that the format is all about batters who can hit the ball hard and bowlers who can bowl yorkers and slower balls.

    That’s right. I said batters. That is what it has come to.

    1. And you berate me for falling standards, sam.

      My entire breakfast came back to haunt me just now.

    1. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

      Bell is a very good one-day player. And experienced, which is what we were desperately lacking in this tournament.

      On a separate note, why aren’t all the final Super 8 matches being played simultaneously?

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