Key events
Show only key events
Please enable JavaScript to use this feature
“I think the summer revolution has been interesting,” begins Ali Gordon. “Essentially, it’s the same team. I remember Root, while he was still captain, said that we are not far off with this group of players. Turns out he was right. They just needed to handle them differently. I never understood the decision to leave Anderson & Broad for the West Indies tour. It was a low point for me. The players looked miserable; cricket ranged from antarctic to ugly and embarrassing. I am full of admiration for how Root has just started doing what he does best, batting. And while I’m still not convinced about our openers, you can see great progress. Add Jofra Archer to the team, develop a world class spinner in Leach or (another) and this is a daunting team. The future looks very exciting.”
Part of the fascination of it all for me is that, as you say, it’s pretty much the same crew of cricketers. As Anderson has said several times, though, it feels so different in the locker room that it might as well be another sport. Considering everything he’s seen over the course of two decades, he seems worthy of mention. But I disagree with Jimmy/Broad and the West Indies. Or rather, privately, I suspect they wouldn’t care how it all went now. That trip could have ended them. In contrast, over the summer, Broad finishes with 29 wickets at 27 and the old man of world cricket took 27 at 17.6. How are you guys doing?
“Hey Adam, keep up the good work OBO!” I probably didn’t need to keep the second half of that sentence going, but it’s the last day of school, what are you going to do? Hi CJ on Twitter and thank you. “What do we feel is in Baz and Ben’s ‘tray’? I’d like to think we should always be looking to improve; a bit of extra pace? the spinner? opening bat?”
Having spent a month in Pakistan with Australia’s Test tour earlier this year, I have seen up close the concrete surfaces that will surely await them in Rawalpindi, Karachi and Multan. Because of its proximity to India, the lazy assumption is that the fields there will be rags. From what I’ve seen, they don’t. You play multiple spinners to control the tempo and play with the batsmen’s patience. What is lethal is the movement with the old ball: the reverse swing. To do this, as a rule, you need to be an absolute master (James Anderson) or enjoy an express pace (someone like Mitchell Starc). It’s a grind.
So in the very short term, given England’s upcoming allocation, I think they have to get their selection for Pakistan with a high degree of difficulty as they won’t have Jofra Archer or Olly Stone. There is an outside chance that Mark Wood will get through the T20 run well enough to play in it, but you can’t bet on it.
My smoker for this trip is Tom Helm. He gets generous movement with the old ball and looks (to the naked eye) a meter quicker than most when you see in county cricket. He will get a chance to prove the latter point in Pakistan on the T20 tour.
Well, I’m at The Oval now. Overcast but lovely, it would be perfect for a chase of 200 on the final day, which is how it looked at lunch on Sunday before South Africa lost 6/77 in the middle stanza. There are a lot of stats in this series, which I’ll be looking at as we go along, but the fact that there have only been two 200-plus innings throughout shows how much the ball has dominated the middle-order batting line-ups.
“Good evening from Brisbane,” writes Phil Withall. Hello. “The financial impact of the various T20 competitions cannot be ignored. A cricket career is a finite thing, which could blame them for securing their financial future.”
There’s a lot to this and I don’t want to start today in an overly effusive or silly way. But consider Will Smeed’s batch. Are you ever interested in accepting a national contract, which will deny you the opportunity to earn life-changing sums of money without any restrictions? I suspect not. So the real question becomes how the ECB (and like most boards) find a way to take advantage of the talent that arrives when it matters most, recognizing that they won’t be available often.
Remember, this has already started for South Africa with a number of their biggest stars, including Kagiso Rabada, choosing the IPL over a home Test series against Bangladesh just a few months ago. This is the world we are moving into.
preamble
Adam Collins
Four months ago, it looked like England’s men had a horrible summer ahead of them. Over the winter, their thrashing in Australia was the worst in a bad group in 20 years. In the Caribbean, after a mini-reset, it was little better. Joe Root said enough. There was no coach, let alone assistants. Off the field, the chief executive was a lame duck (and would later step down) and there had been no chair since the previous summer. High performance head. No selectors. All the genuine fast players have been injured. No batsman has averaged 40 since Root’s debut a decade earlier.
New Zealand were first, having hammered England when they were in town the previous summer before winning the World Test Championship final, also in that country, against India. A couple of changes since they lifted that trophy but basically the same team. Then India, to complete their strange series, returning with the same bowling line-up that routinely wrecked England in 2021. Then South Africa, a quietly rising Test team under Dean Elgar with a fast bowling group who seemed born to play on sports surfaces. Everything was so sad.
When the county season started, at the height of all this flux and still a couple of months away from the Tests, I advanced the view that, given all the above, the best move would be for Stuart Broad and James Anderson took over. as patron janitor of sorts. The argument went that given they’re likely to be thrashed, don’t screw up the next captain and let this be one of the veterans’ parting gifts – help England get over themselves without getting their pants pulled down so embarrassingly .
Well, we know what happens next. A series of inspired quotes, from Rob Key to Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes, all in the space of a couple of weeks in May. Days later, they began their impressive streak of four successful chases in a row, all setting records in their own way. And this morning here at The Oval, about 20 minutes from the restart on this third/fifth morning, they will end the season having won six out of seven in emphatic fashion. There must be a book.
So that’s where we’ll start our conversation in the time we have together on the last day of the test summer. Of course there is shadow and light; there is an argument that this is the least competitive series, in terms of balance between bat and ball, that we have ever seen between bigger nations. This is not good, nor is South Africa not returning to England for the entirety of the next period of the Future Tours programme. Fears for their Test future in the medium term, recognizing the extent to which they are about to be influenced/funded by the IPL owners, are not without justification. Anyway, let’s run while we can. Drop me a line or a tweet.