Cricket

This technical flaw has existed for a while has it not, remember McGrath and Clark probing away with a similar tactic in 2006-07 Ashes? I think it's mental, when he's going well he normally leaves a whole lot better outside off.
 
I can't help but feel sorry for Compton. Dropped for being too cook like in how he opened up and yet ultimately replaced by one of the most tumescent accumulators on the county scene (good player that he is).
 
Plunkett's bowling beautifully again this morning. Kind of shows how stupid it was from Cook not to bowl Plunkett before lunch yesterday.
 
This has been awful cricket from England since the last wicket - I think Cook has to take 90% of the blame for it with overbowling the seamers, not trying to even get Mathews out, refusing to bowl the spinner, and a stubborn refusal to change a tactic that's not even close to working. Terrible terrible last 2 hours from England.
 
But having said that, Mathews has been absolutely terrific and it's well deserved for him.
 
At this stage a test loss to Sri Lanka is about the best thing that can happen to England.

Cook is a broken, clueless, man who has no future as a test captain. Anything that hastens his demise is beneficial in the long run for English cricket.

Sri Lanka have played very well, but England have played dreadful cricket since the back end of day 2.
 
Nonsense, everything has been fine up to the first hour today. Since then it's been terrible and if they lose, the last couple of hours will be what will have cost them the Test and the series.
 
eddiebb said:
Nonsense, everything has been fine up to the first hour today. Since then it's been terrible and if they lose, the last couple of hours will be what will have cost them the Test and the series.
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No way, the collapse after Bell's fifty was dire with bat in hand. Since then, England wasted the first new ball by bowling too short. Have misused/underused Ali all of yesterday, waited too long to bring on Plunkett yesterday morning and then basically everything today has been shite.
 
Well fine was the wrong word, but there haven't been any really glaring strategic errors from England until today. The first three days were at a good enough level to win the Test but if they lose it, the second hour this morning (the first hour was fine ffs!) and this afternoon session are really costing England.
 
eddiebb said:
Well fine was the wrong word, but there haven't been any really glaring strategic errors from England until today. The first three days were at a good enough level to win the Test but if they lose it, the second hour this morning (the first hour was fine ffs!) and this afternoon session are really costing England.
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I don't know about fine. IMO, he started off far too defensively and allowed Jayawardene and Matthews to score far too easily.
 
As I said, fine was the wrong word. But it was alright until the turd of this morning/afternoon.
 
I guess it depends on your expectations, for me at 3-311 to go to 365 all out and then proceed to let another side accumulate 385 against you shows things going wrong before this morning/afternoon, which has been exceptionally dire to be fair.
 
Had TMS on at dinner and I agree with Jonathan Agnew, if we still had Graeme Swann to toss the ball to, I'm sure they'd be at least 8 down by now.
Having said that, there's still been a lack of adventure with our approach to bowling them out and with each run the match slowly falls away from us.
I can't see England reaching a much higher target than at what it currently stands.

Edit: WICKET!! Too little, too late?!
 
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If we had had Graeme Swann in the team the Sri Lankans would probably have managed a 100 lead or so max. Even if we had tossed the ball to Moeen Ali at some stage before Mathews was close to 150 we would probably have bowled them out long ago, for fecks sake. He persisted with the 4 exhausted, overbowled seamers for so, SO long when it wasn't working. And now he's captained England to one of the worst sessions of cricket I've ever seen us play, right up there with Adelaide 2006 so congrats on that. It was fecking brutal cricket from England.
 
It's actually a good point. Has Cook trusted any spinner not named Graeme Swann?

I'm trying to think of who he's captained, from the top of my head its Ali, Panesar, Treadwell, Kerrigan, and Borthwick.

He captained Kerrigan horrifically at the Oval (although he didn't play well when he was called upon), he's forced to bowl Treadwell because of the bowler restrictions in ODIs, was forced to bowl Panesar in India because of conditions but don't think he used him particularly well in New Zealand, don't really remember Borthwick in Sydney, he only bowled 11 overs though and took wickets at 20.50, expensive though.
 
I think the telling thing is that you can tell the bowlers don't trust Cook from the constant questioning of his fields and looking at him whenever the plans don't work (which is often!) and that's pretty damning. If it were me I'd drop him from the team completely to be honest, even just for the India series as a kick up the backside. I wasn't a fan of him as captain in the first place but I wasn't totally against him, but I think he's proving more and more that he's just not the man for the job. The problem is, who is that man? Anderson's the only one that springs to mind but we all know that bowler captains hardly ever work.
 
Really poor from the umpire not to give Eranga out, clear nick even without a review. I take the point of the commentators saying "well if they hadn't wasted a review" which is true of course, it was an utter waste of a review but even still, the umpire has to see that as an out. Also brings up the old debate "why isn't he walking?"
 
eddiebb said:
I think the telling thing is that you can tell the bowlers don't trust Cook from the constant questioning of his fields and looking at him whenever the plans don't work (which is often!) and that's pretty damning. If it were me I'd drop him from the team completely to be honest, even just for the India series as a kick up the backside. I wasn't a fan of him as captain in the first place but I wasn't totally against him, but I think he's proving more and more that he's just not the man for the job. The problem is, who is that man? Anderson's the only one that springs to mind but we all know that bowler captains hardly ever work.
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Yeah, I'm the same.

I honestly think they should 'Finn' him. Just tell him to go back to Essex, preferably letting Foster continue to captain, tell him he's not being considered for selection at the minute and just to concentrate on scoring runs.

As for his replacement, it will be Bell, I've never seen him captain but George Dobell (who is relentlessly positive about anything England, it must be said) rates his captaincy very highly.
 
England don't need to worry about out of form batsmen. Indians are coming to sort that out, we will help you guys regain their best form.
 
Has to be the end for Cook as captain. He should be dropped from the test team in general, he's averaging 25 with the bat over the last 12 months and he just looks broken.

He should go back to Essex and just concentrate on sorting out his batting. His two dismissals in this match have been desperately poor.
 
Why did Billy Bowden get put back on the elite panel?

He's been appalling, as he has been most times I've seen him in the last 3 years.
 
NinjaFletch said:
Why did Billy Bowden get put back on the elite panel?

He's been appalling, as he has been most times I've seen him in the last 3 years.
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He's a joke. People seem to like him because he's eccentric and a bit of a character but the fact is he's a terrible umpire. He's made so many mistakes today.
 
Absolutely pathetic, embarrassing in fact. Take nothing away from Sri Lanka but England have been dire today with bat and ball. Expect the test to be over before Lunch tomorrow.
 
2 main problems for me are that Cook is both in terrible form and a really poor captain, and that if you're going to bowl a 4 man pace attack there needs to be a lot more variety to them than there is. England could really use either a real gun bowler, or a left hander, or a much shorter skiddier bowler for some variety. Anderson, Plunkett, Broad and Jordan are all very good bowlers and all would make it into most Test teams in the world, for example, but they're all 6ft+ and strong with similar pace. Sri Lanka have extracted so much from this pitch that looked so flat when England were bowling, in both innings too.

The problem is that Plunkett has done really well while Anderson and Broad pick themselves, so how would you change it and who would you bring in?
 
They've picked the fastest English bowler, which would be Plunkett, so I don't know if you can really blame him for not being as fast as Mitchell Johnson.

I don't think the composition of the attack was the problem they just bowled like garbage, consistently over two or three days.

That said, I think Cook does need blame. I thought they were using Plunkett really well at Lords, and then they went back to bowling him for longer spells. He ridiculously over bowls Anderson with the new ball with 9-10 over spells and didn't bowl Ali for literally no reason meaning he ran them all into the ground. I don't think it helps that Jordan isn't test quality yet, mind.

Anderson's a concern though, he has games where he bowls really well, but over the past 3 years I've seen him outbowled a lot in 'Anderson conditions', such as against New Zealand. It doesn't help how many overs Cook demands of him though.
 
Thought that would happen when I saw Sri Lanka were still in by lunch. Surely the questions about Cook's captaincy have to become louder and a little more serious now? It's just not good enough.
 
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