gordon bennett. in the old days, there used to be at least a few warm up games for touring teams to get their eye in. that's history now that the accounts department insists on packing the schedule with hundreds of meaningless mickey mouse baseball games to lure in the dolts with spare cash and attention spans of goldfish. 49 for 7 is what you get.
It's the same cause but another effect is modern batsmen's inability to dig in when needed. We just needed someone to drop anchor and get to tea.
I couldn't quite believe it at first when I saw England were all out for 77, this teams batting is either really good or amazingly bad, there doesn't seem to be any real consistency.
We looked so under prepared and short of match practice. None of the wickets where great balls, all of them 'decent' balls but no-one could really blame the pitch. Maybe Bairstow but other than that there where all down to Batsman errors. Like I said West Indies bowled well, but nothing you shouldn't expect in Test cricket. It was just good test match bowling, and one of the commentators had it spot on. Whenever we come across good bowlers bowling well we collapse, we don't dig in and get our away to 220 and keep ourselves in the game. We collapse. We got the team wrong, I can see why you played Curran and Rashid but clearly that has gone wrong. But you can pick whoever you want if batsman don't have the ability to see off some good test match bowling we are never going to be a consistent test match side. My biggest gripe is, the 11 players selected (And the other 5 in the squad) are actually really talented, there are some potential great players in there. But they need to step up.
You can argue about team selection and preparation and the state of the pitch all day long but 77 all out, then their nos. 7 and 8 both scoring 100's suggests that we might not have taken it seriously enough?
See I disagree, it's like when people say footballers don't care. I don't think it's them not taking it seriously it's the fact we constantly have a collapse in us and don't have the mental state and potentially technique to halt. Once you have a team in that frame of mind it's hard to stop.
It does appear their confidence is fragile, as soon as they lose 2 or 3 quick wickets they collapse. Test sides still need a belligerent twat like Boycott that can just stick in there and bat to steady things. This is the result of the shorter games influence, players now just want to score runs as fast as possible, but you need an anchorman in there to steady the ship.
I take your point and mostly agree but after a pretty successful 2018, with more or less the same group of players, their confidence should be high. All of those batsmen have shown they can score runs and all the bowlers can take wickets. Yes we have a tendency for the odd middle order collapse but in this instance 77 all out is more like total capitulation and then to not take a wicket all day bowling against nos. 7 and 8? Not taking it seriously is probably the wrong expression to use, I'm sure the players think they're doing their best but, at least to me, they clearly are not. The view from the Clapham Omnibus is that WI cricket is in decline, and they did have a poor 2018. That might have been in the minds of the England setup more than their potential for a batting collapse. The next test will be more revealing. If England step up to the plate it will show that either they have a brilliant sports psychologist on board or that they've had a kick up the arse.
Sadly we still are no nearer finding a Cook, Strauss type opener that will stick it out for a day taking the shine off the ball whilst scoring a solid 60/70. Going into the Ashes we are still always 70/4 before the midlle order come to the rescue. Too much County cricket in April and september when batsmen don't stand a chance.
