England 121-1 at close. What price another miracle tomorrow? Anything's possible with Stokes in the side. Burns has played very well and Denly's in decent nick, but I don't think Sibley has the technique for Test cricket.
If you don’t prepare properly for test series, especially away from home, this is the result. I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a conspiracy to make Test cricket increasingly lopsided and farcical so it can be quietly dropped in favour of the more lucrative short forms of the game. There will only be a few old gits like me who care, and even I don’t enjoy watching a game where the majority of the players, especially batsmen, lack the skill set to play it properly. Steve Smith may be a cheating cry baby with the batting style of a demented crab, but at least he’s a proper Test batsman.
I thinks that’s harsh, half the team has been ill all week, and our match winner is visiting a dying dad in hospital, we’ll win the next one and test series is on
How would you define a proper Test batsman? I'd say England have two at the moment in Root and Stokes, both of whom are much better to watch than Steve Smith, if statistically less effective. There aren't many batsmen around nowadays that can bat all day like a Boycott, but then I didn't find Sir Geoffrey much fun to watch either. I probably would have hated watching Bradman too, but Lara, Tendulkar, Richards and Sangakkara (amongst many others) were all great batsmen that were entertaining to watch.
Cook and Trott were the last consistent Top 3 in the order batsmen that were up to it, we've struggled since they went although Cook's final year was below his best. Neither were expansive but knew how to grind out an innings that demoralised the opposition, that is the art of test batting laying the foundations for the strokemakers to plunder later in the innings. Sadly, the County Championship is a shadow of the Pre-Contract days for Test cricketers. There would be Test players plus overseas players of the highest calibre and young cricketers coming through would be playing at a higher level than nowadays so Test cricket wasn't such a massive step-up. These days batsmen in particular are playing on result pitches which aid bowlers and batsmen don't get the chance to learn the art of building an innings. Last season's decisive game in the CC was decided inside two days and Somerset will start this season with a 12 point penalty for a sub-standard pitch, what chance have players to develop all the skills needed when a pitch doesn't help the bowler? That's where we came unstuck on the NZ featherbeds...
Well that's important of course, but so is scoring runs at a reasonable rate. Famously, Bob Willis once sent Botham in to bat with orders to 'run the bugger out' when Boycott was more interested in protecting his wicket than scoring the quick runs that were needed to set a target. England have rightly discarded Jason Roy (temporarily, I hope) because he gave his wicket away too easily, but he's been replaced with Dom Sibley, who scored a mountain of runs very slowly in last season's Championship and got himself a reputation for being able to bat for long periods. Sibley, though, has a weird technique which precludes scoring runs on the off side because of the way his bat comes down. Not a Test batsman, I'd say.
I'd have thought that batsmen having to bat on bowler-friendly pitches ought to be good for their development. The problem in NZ was more that our bowlers didn't know how to get anyone out on a flat pitch wasn't it?
At test level the problem is you haven't got the players. One top ten batter, Root, no top ten bowlers and 1 top ten all-rounder Stokes. (ICC Rankings 23 Dec 2019)
They'll only learn on those type of pitches, if every game they play at home is on result pitches they won't develop the guile to get wickets on flat pitches, look how the NZ bowlers were able to strangle our batsmen with clever use of different angle of delivery and subtle movement, we were one dimensional in comparison...
It also applies to batsmen who don't build innings in County games where 250 is often a match winning 1st innings total. The standard of batting in the CC is abysmal compared to 20-30 years ago. You always used to get at least a dozen batsmen who had played at least 10 innings averaging 50 plus, this year it was five. There were only nine batsmen averaging over 40, is it any wonder we're unable to find batsmen who can cut it at test level?...
There are plenty of batsmen who were consistent, made the opponents sweat for their wickets and scored runs. Root used to, but has been in pretty steep decline for 3 years now. Stokes varies wildly from season to season, 2019 being his best year by far. I’m sure the current lot would be much better if they had more than a couple of nothing practice matches which are little more than extended nets before going into Test matches on unfamiliar pitches. But of course preparing isn’t profitable.
