Was the expectation of England winning in India based more in hope than in pragmatic reality?
Only those inside the team will know what their ‘private talk’ was about, while the rest of us are left to consume ‘the public talk’ which is often put out to project a positive mentality in a team or squad departing on an overseas adventure. Managing expectations is a critical aspect of senior leadership. Raising a group’s confidence is a vital skill, but so is keeping confidence in check, if it is mis-placed or premature.
Assessment Overview:
Re India/Bangladesh tours – did we learn anything we didn’t already know? We were competitive (at times), but fell short on quality in the key areas of batting and spin bowling. Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar were masters of their respective art – such craftsmen don’t get replaced easily, unless the breeding ground is really healthy.
Managing Expectation:
The management of expectation is essential in sport – it is not being negative to acknowledge you are a strong candidate to come second best in a two-horse race unless you perform to the maximum and your opponent under-performs. Such a possibility exists every time two opponents come together, so there is always reason to be optimistic in the struggle.
Quality Reflection:
But, a sense of perspective is always needed when reflecting on poor results – in this instance, India had superior players in Indian conditions to England. Thus, England’s focus should be to address the issues that will continue to affect their own team evolving from good to great in the next four years.
England’s Deficiencies:
All the talk about Alastair Cook resigning the captaincy (or not) is a bit of a sideshow to the real problem since he became Captain – his batsmen don’t consistently make enough runs, especially when it really counts. Captains don’t affect batsmen in the way they can impact a bowler’s performance. Individually, batsmen must front up to their responsibility of making the lion’s share of the team’s runs, and England’s top order has failed too often.
On the Indian tour, Cook’s spinners lacked the ability to take wickets AND have control over the scoring rate on a consistent basis – especially against very good players. But, in fairness, Zafar Ansari, Liam Dawson and Moeen Ali are batsmen who bowl – it is wrong to expect the kind of returns a front-line spinner like a Panesar or a Swann have achieved before.
Adil Rashid did as well as most wise observers could have predicted. Leg-spin is a difficult art to master, but I suspect he is unlikely to gain selection as a sole spinner in a Test match bowling attack unless he improves considerably in the coming 9 months – and how can he with such little scope to bowl in English conditions, even for his domestic team Yorkshire. The India tour will have added to his confidence, and part-time coach Saqlain Mushtaq appears to be a positive influence on him too. But despite Adil being a very useful lower order batsman, England need a top-class specialist spinner to play a major role in a bowling attack in every innings. When a pitch doesn’t spin, he needs to bowl maidens, just like Derek Underwood, Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar did in previous eras of successful England teams.
Being the sole spinner is a different job from being a twin or a member of a trio. I would love to see Adil grow into the role but for now, I just can’t see him providing the control that 3 or 4 seamers need in England when they are operating from the other end on ‘seam-bowling friendly’ pitches, and need their spinner to ‘bowl dry’ (go for no runs).
In England, we can succeed against most cricketing countries without a spinner due to quality seam/swing bowling from the likes of Stuart Broad and James Anderson (for how much longer?) Ben Stokes, Chris Woakes etc. And, the proof of the pudding is that only South Africa has beaten us convincingly at home recently.
The batting is more of a problem. For too long, England’s batsmen have cashed in on flat wickets, and struggled when the ball has moved. Whether it has spun (regular sub-continent heavy series defeats), seamed, or bounced (eg Perth) there have been numerous collapses down the years. But, if we are to be a consistent force in world cricket, the development of the system to produce English cricketers needs to do more than produce ‘good’ batsmen – Joe Root (and other emerging players) must join ‘the ‘greats’. Can Haseeb Hameed and Keaton Jennings do so? Both have started well – but so did Sam Robson (recently), and John Hampshire, Frank Hayes, etc (from yesteryear). Let’s hope an obvious passion for the game and dedication to their craft will enable both Jennings and Hameed to fill the two major gaps in the team at numbers 2 and 3. If they can’t, we will be in trouble in Australia next winter. If Root reverts to his best position at 4, he may play his very best cricket over the next few years.
Developing Future Talent:
The big challenge in the future is can we (as a cricketing nation) develop batsmen who average 50-60, not 40-50 and bowlers who can take 10 wickets in a match? Such high-level individual performance makes the difference in Test cricket. History says so.
Recent cricket history has seen batting averages go through the roof. The best players are very dominant. Sri Lanka has produced Jayawardene and Sangakkara; West Indies Gayle, Lara, Chanderpaul; South Africa Smith, Kallis, AB De Villiers; Australia has Smith, Ponting, Hussey, Hayden, Waugh; India has produced Tendulkar, Dravid, Sehwag, and Kohli, Pakistan has produced Younus Khan. But England’s ‘home-grown’ batsmen have not got close to these top players stats. However, I do acknowledge that our batsmen play predominantly on English pitches in May/June and this may be a factor in a lower career average. But, most of our Test pitches are flat these days and covered, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to excel if you have developed a technique and a mindset to be superior in all conditions to your opponent. And to think in the days of yore – top players like Hammond, Hutton and Compton still dominated the opposition in bowler-friendly conditions!
The Ashes 2017/18 Will Be The Benchmark to Measure England’s Quality:
Very few experienced cricket people would have predicted England success before the plane left London, so it is important to maintain a balanced perspective with regard to where the England journey has reached under Trevor Bayliss’s guidance, 11 months in advance of the next Ashes series. England are a good, young, emerging team – they just need two young batsmen to mature (possible) and find one quality spin bowler (unlikely) if they are to become more competitive than they currently are.
Overseas series wins are rare in the game. They do happen, but they only consistently when teams like Australia under Steve Waugh or West Indies under Clive Lloyd have a team of players with the skill and the will to win under all conditions. Such results tend to be determined by batsmen making very big scores, and setting matches up for bowlers to strike the final blows. Big team totals must be dominated by contributions from front-line batsmen (not the middle-order and lower-order) if a team is to perform at its optimum.
In India, despite playing on flat pitches and winning 4 tosses, England were unable to create impregnable positions in a match and revert pressure on to the opposition because of the failure of their batsmen. And worst still, they were woeful when ‘the heat’ was turned up and match-defining moments appeared. When resilience is needed, ‘loose play’ is too often seen from too many England players. It has become the catalyst for the many England batting collapses in recent years. But, if the players learn from their errors and become more resilient cricketers over time then the experience is not wasted. If England win in Australia, all will be well..
County Championship Cricket:
County cricket often takes the blame for England’s ills – it is sometimes unfair. But, the purpose of a domestic structure that is funded by the national team’s commercial value is to nurture emerging talent by providing a breeding ground for the best to learn and progress to international selection.
Can the regular batting collapses, and ‘soft cricket’ played by England from time to time be attributed to the lack of a really tough domestic cricket competition? Would a ‘best versus best’ domestic competition reveal such ‘softness’ in advance of Test selection if it was in place? The mix of skill, and the will to succeed, must be honed lower down ‘the food chain’ if a sportsperson wants to enjoy consistent success in the highest form of the game.
County cricket is a professional ‘marathon’ over a 7 month season now, with 3 formats shoe-horned into the calendar. In recent years, it has encouraged better fitness, and a strong commitment from players to an increasingly professional approach to preparation. But, is it attending to other (major) factors such as the variety of skill, the ability to perform under pressure in ‘the big moments’, and the development of character? I would prefer to see a mid-summer shorter tournament with each match testing the players ability to perform against the nation’s best players. This possibility has been eradicated by ECB central contracts and by a County Championship played predominantly in April, May and September in bowler-friendly conditions. Does there need to be a 16 match championship, if the main purpose of the competition is to develop Test match cricketers?
And, many of the 18 county cricket clubs are doing themselves a disservice by signing Kolpak players on inflated salaries to cover for their own weaknesses in developing ‘home-grown’ players of sufficient standard to be a highly-competitive county team, despite being given plenty of financial support to do so. I believe the role of a coach is to develop local players, and not be a recruitment consultant mining foreign talent!
T20 Cricket:
Is T20 Cricket the reason for the current status of few Test players emerging from domestic cricket? Or can T20 be ONE of the solutions to developing better skills, and not just improving the county clubs’ finances?
Developing Specialists:
Evidence suggests County Cricket’s recent structure has ‘produced’ a shortage of top-class ‘specialist’ spin bowlers. Has the financial focus on ‘white-ball cricket’ averted players eyes from ‘mastering the basics’ of spin bowling such as flight, spin, use of the crease, and being tactically savvy against players capable of staying in for a whole day if you aren’t good enough to bowl them out? Containment should never be a spin bowler’s only weapon.
And recent evidence shows that too few ‘specialist’ batsmen with the technique and temperament to excel on the world stage are being developed. The golden period of the 50′s and early 60′s which saw Boycott, May, Barrington, Cowdrey, Dexter and co emerge seems a long way off today. And more recently, Gooch, Atherton, Gower, Gatting, Lamb and Botham represented England successfully against some of the world’s best attacks in the late 80′s and early 90′s.
I reckon the lack of batting experience/quality available to the Cook era of captaincy has been partly due to the indirect consequence of Andrew Strauss’s successful era of captaincy. Most batsmen played around 100 tests or more – Cook (139), Strauss (100) Trott (52) Bell (118) Pietersen (104) – preventing others from gaining experience. And, without top quality overseas bowlers (especially fast ones) and virtually no England bowlers playing regular county cricket, there is a shortage of experienced, top-class, top-order batsmen outside the Test team. The best way to learn is by ‘doing’ – and ‘doing it’ against/alongside the very best is the best preparation for top sport.
It seems to be a problem Australia is facing too – historically their Shield Cricket was a great breeding ground for wrist spin and fast bowling, toiling away on flat pitches, in the hot sun. Batsmen learned to make big hundreds too. Today, it seems a very different landscape. So few top players play domestic cricket today due to the crazy international schedule. This ends up devaluing performances, and dilutes the standard, as well as depriving the emerging players from the all-important inter-action through good conversation with the game’s best practitioners.
Team Development: Factoring In Phases of Maturity
Developing a professional sporting team to become top-class over time is much harder than most people imagine. If you don’t back the right people, the opportunity costs are significant to giving others exposure to the playing standard and the chance to reveal their quality. If you change the team too often, players don’t settle, and you can sometimes discard a player before time and end up going through the same process with an inferior player. Therefore, selection is critical to future success. Invest the right opportunities with the right people is fundamental to success. The challenge is to enable a group of players to mature, whilst also integrating emerging players so that the best players don’t all leave the team simultaneously. Sir Alex Ferguson was the master of this art – but he had a global transfer market to assist him. In international cricket, players are supposed to be developed from within your own domestic system – thus the need for a healthy system of organic growth is vital to long-term success.