West Indies v England 2019 Tour

England were shown exactly how to bat in these conditions by the West Indies batsmen, especially Kraigg Brathwaite and Darren Bravo. Play straight, refuse to chase the ball and be patient. At one stage Bravo went 174 balls between boundaries but ended up with a score of 50. He faced 216 balls - or 36 overs - and the entire England team only managed to last 42.1 overs in England's second innings.

England have only one truly test class batsman and that is Joe Root, the rest are a bad mixture of hitters and bits and pieces players. The people who run english cricket have a lot to answer for, they have spent far too much time on the limited overs formats and not enough trying to produce quality first class players. They have persisted in giving the same people chance after chance despite their repeated failures which proves how badly off we are for quality batsmen.

Too many England batsmen almost treating it like a one day game. Test cricket requires Test cricket mentality, which means once you go in to bat you should be looking to stay in all day, for 30 runs if necessary, which too many of our players are sorely lacking in.

Credit to the West Indies though, another well deserved victory.

Over many years now we have had to endure countless batting collapses and failings.
This is not something that has suddenly reared its head.
England have mastered the art of self inflicted dismissals either by virtue of indecision, poor shot selection, leaving dead straight balls, pinning themselves to the stumps, not moving their feet, playing across the line, ridiculous run outs, swishing and wafting at balls outside off stump or leg stump, the list could go on and on.....
To me it is a fundamental lack of both quality and application.
In short this top 6 as a unit simply is not good enough for the demands of TEST match batting. Englands top order is too often getting skittled and leaving the tail enders to try and dig the team out of a hole.
There is seemingly little appetite of the top 6 batsmen to bat for long periods and in so doing grind the opposition bowlers into the floor.
Put lots of overs in the bowlers legs, make them struggle and suffer both short term and long. The match is 5 days not 3!!.
To my mind the approach is fundamentally wrong. Test match batting requires discipline, fortitude and good decision making. Too often England have demonstrated none of these qualities and as a consequence frittered their wickets away in embarrassing fashion with an endless catalogue of woeful collapses.
This series has highlighted once again the inability of our batsmen to deal with fast, accurate, consistent bowling on a lively surface.
But it is the manner of a lot of the dismissals that makes me so angry.
Spineless, pathetic batting time and again.
A complete inability to learn from previous mistakes at best.
A complete unwillingness to do so at worst.

And so what of James Anderson and Stuart Broad?
What are they meant to do?
Faced with a top 6 that seem incapable of giving the bowlers a meaningful amount of runs to play with in the crucial first innings and then completely fall apart again all too often in the second.
And then just to compound the misery the two of them end up having to bowl lots of overs for long periods to a much more disciplined opposition at least in part because members of the aforementioned top 6 drop catches off the Anderson and Broad bowling. How these batsmen can look Anderson and Broad in the eyes and repeatedly ask them to bail the batsmen out time and again is beyond me.
It is bare faced cheek of the highest order.

As i have said previously it is down to the people who run the first class game in England, they have become obsessed with the limited overs formats. Groundsmen have been told to produce featherbed pitches that provide little or no assistance to the bowlers while allowing mediocre batsmen to score a shitload of runs making them look like world beaters. There is no longer an even contest between bat and ball, any pitch that proves even slightly challenging is reported and home side docked points to discourage such things happening. Add to that more and more one day cricket and far less 3 and 4 day games and you have a recipe for disaster.

Never thought I would say it but what this team needs is a Geoffrey Boycott type of player. Yes he was a bloody slow scorer who was more interested in his own game than his team but he never gave his wicket away cheaply...well apart from the 1981 Barbados Test when Michael Holding clean bowled him for a duck in the first innings, then had him fending off a lifter which resulted in Garner catching him at gulley for 1 in the second innings.

Every team needs someone who can play the anchor role and bat for long periods of time, it recent times it was Cook, Vaughn, Hussain and Atherton. Before them it was the likes of Gooch and Boycott but now there is no one whose technique or temperament is up to the job.

(04-02-2019 21:09 )lancealot790 Wrote:  As i have said previously it is down to the people who run the first class game in England, they have become obsessed with the limited overs formats. Groundsmen have been told to produce featherbed pitches that provide little or no assistance to the bowlers while allowing mediocre batsmen to score a shitload of runs making them look like world beaters. There is no longer an even contest between bat and ball, any pitch that proves even slightly challenging is reported and home side docked points to discourage such things happening. Add to that more and more one day cricket and far less 3 and 4 day games and you have a recipe for disaster.

This isn't quite accurate; there were only 4 players who made 1000+ runs in the County Championship last year and only 2 in Division 1. The book ending of the Championship fixtures means that they are being played on green seamers in April and May or tired pitches in September, making batting extremely difficult. The better weather and the better pitches are being used for the limited overs formats, and whilst I understand that as the ECB has made no secret of the fact that it is making white ball cricket more of a priority, there has been a clear impact on the Test team.

Haseeb Hameed of Lancashire has gone from looking a potential rock of the team for years to come to somebody struggling to get into Lancashire's side and other potential contenders for the opening slots such as Jason Roy, Max Holden and even Joe Denly who opened in the last Test are batting in the middle order for their counties as it is so difficult to open the batting in England in the spring.

It will be hard to argue with the strategy if England win the World Cup in the summer and then play in front of full houses around the country in The Ashes which follow. But if they don't...

i would agree England have never really filled that anchor role properly We have relied on Cook for far too long and now he is retired the current team hasn't shown there is the player who is willing to take that role on. west Indies is always a tough tour as you are Island hopping much of time. When i look back to when Boycott's playing days, England had some great players who stuck around and we still haven't found that player in Derek Randall type mould either, and many have probably root as being the one to fill that role.

for too long the one day game, T20 has been the cornerstone of selectors selections, and the people running the game here and Test team mentality has IMO pretty much fallen away. yes, players have to be able to adapt to all formats of the game, but I have always felt Test playing mentality has the one that comes first. I'd love us to win the World Cup this summer but on the performances shown so far on this tour I would say we are nowhere near aa likely to win that let alone the Ashes.

Jennings is back for the third test - I didn't see that selection coming. It does however make the batting order more balanced, as Denly was never really an opener and batting at 3 is better for him, plus I always thought Bairstow was too high at 3 and will now bat at a more realistic 7. Foakes is the man to make way despite being a big success in Sri Lanka, and although he hasn't made many runs in this series he's hardly the only one.