England fans: look away now

There’s been a lot of moaning over the last month from English cricket’s top brass. National selector Geoff Miller and England MD Hugh Morris believe that English counties should not employ Aussies in the lead-up to the Ashes as it is, basically, unpatriotic.

Kent have signed Stuart Clark; Hampshire Marcus North and Middlesex Phil Hughes. The argument goes that in giving these guys six weeks practice in English conditions, the counties are stabbing English cricket – and their own long-term interests – in the back.

They have a point.

England’s Ashes fortunes may well depend on Stuart Clark having six weeks build-up with Kent.

Then again, they may depend more on the fact that England currently have a team that could not give the Brondesbury Park Women’s Institute a proper game.

Maybe Miller and Morris and co should stop bleating about the opposition getting little 5 per cent advantages and wonder why, after 18 months in their respective jobs, England have failed to win a game all winter. (I’m not counting the West Indies’ off-field suicide in the first ODI Guyana.)

England were bowled out for 117 in the third ODI in Barbados on Friday. The Windies knocked the runs off in less than 15 overs.

Afterwards, Andrew Strauss said it was the worst performance for a long time. Presumably 48 days is a long time in cricket: it was only on February 7 that his side were bowled out for 51 to lose the Test at Jamaica.

Let’s not forget that West Indies have for a long time been the lowest-ranked major team in world cricket.

Miller and Morris want it all ways: if they really do believe that six weeks’ practice in local conditions gives Test teams an advantage, why does their own England team never – even after the 2006 Ashes ‘undercooked’ debacle and the Schofield report recommendations that followed – have more than six days’ match practice before an overseas Test series? Is it just a coincidence that England always lose the first Test in a series?

Ian Bell took the bullet for the 51 all out. Who will take the bullet if England now lose the ODI series?

I am sorely tempted to see the England team as more like a government. The team has failed, so let’s vote all of them out. After all, how much worse could England’s zero per cent win record be if they brought in 11 new players?

Perhaps instead of selecting England teams player by player, they should simply stand and fall together? Players say that scoring a century is meaningless if the team doesn’t win. Why not take that thinking a stage further?

Quite honestly, as captains always say in victory, it would be wrong to pick out individuals. You can’t drop KP and Flintoff, can you? James Anderson gives his all. We all argued for Owais Shah and Ravi Bopara to be given a go. Are there really two batsmen more deserving of their chance? Even Steve Harmison – who was absent on Friday but whose underachievement seems to sum up the whole squad’s – even Harmison: he can’t bowl 92 mph hostility with accuracy anymore. But who can? Saj Mahmood?  

There’s a case for keeping everyone.

Of course, before calling up the England Lions to take their place, we might want to bear in mind that Rob Key’s side didn’t win a single game on their recent tour of New Zealand. They drew two warm-up games, drew the two Tests, then lost both ODIs and a Twenty20.

So while the ‘sack the lot of them’ route appeals, we may have to face the fact that the 15 players England have with them in the Caribbean are, roughly speaking, the best available. I’d like to see Adil Rashid get a game, certainly ahead of Gareth Batty. But there are no magic solutions.

England fans and media may just have to face the fact that the Ashes win of 2005 and the other minor successes since – ODIs series wins in Australia and Sri Lanka, that 4-0 thrashing of the Saffers last summer – were blips and the natural state of English cricket for the last 30-odd years has been marked by underachievement and wasted resources.

And – primarily – by an insane belief that we are still the greatest cricket nation in the world and that the last decades have just been some kind of bad dream.

England fans still, for some reason, like to think they’re Manchester United: well-resourced, well-led, a team for whom any defeat is a surprise. In fact they’re more like Newcastle United: great fans and plenty of them and massive expectations built on nothing more than blind hope.

There’s no sensible reason to expect England to turn things round suddenly and go on to win the Ashes 5-0; still less to hope that they won’t simply be embarrassed at the ICC World Twenty20.

England might, belatedly, turn things round in the Caribbean. A 3-2 win would be hailed as Ashes-winning momentum, when really it will be a case of too little too late.

It’s plainly too much to expect England to be world-beaters. But is it really too much to expect them to give the West Indies – officially the worst team in the world – a game that lasts beyond tea-time? 

Messrs Miller and Morris might want to address this question before bleating about the counties’ recruitment policies.

Because right now, the only legacy of 18 months of these fellas being in charge is a shambles of a team. 

That the Aussies think they might even need to prepare for six minutes – never mind six weeks – to take on England is, surely, an act of pure flattery rather than practical need.

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