Thread: the middle allround order
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Old 19-04-2004, 09:36 PM in reply to Richie Benauds Love Child's post starting "I cant think (apart from thorpe) of a..."
Rachael Rachael is offline
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The Fairbrother-replacement issue seems to just run and run.. and for the time being I think we have to accept that Collingwood is the closest we can get. That said.. I've seen little of Strauss.. but he's supposed to be an "accumulater" not a "slogger".

What irritates me is that, Knight and Thorpe excepted, Fairbrother towers over recent English ODI batsmen.. and Bevan towers over world ODI batsmen... yet all the hype focusses on people like Flintoff, Clarke and Blackwell and the enormous hits that find the boundary.

ODI cricket seems to be evolving.

At first we just bumbled along.

Then the whole world woke up to the fact that one sme pitches... quality bowling gets despatched as ruthlessly as average bowling... wickets are given away not taken.... and any team that bats down to 9 or 10 is likely to be freer to keep the scoreboard moving than a team that only bats to 6.

More recently the world has moved on once again... focussing on keeping wickets in hand when batting (enabling a late push) and taking wickets with genuine strike bowlers (to stop the other team making a late push).

It seems to me that England selection is struggling to keep up.

It seems to me we need a top 5 who can all keep the scorecard moving without taking risks: guys who find gaps with gentle dabs and cute touches into inevitable gaps.. running quickly between the wickets.. and rarely risking a slog... and building a platform from which just one or two sloggers (say Flintoff and Read) can cut loose.

On that basis... Clarke and Blackwell just seem out of place: it's great if the top order do the job for 40 of the 50 overs.. because as we approach the death we have 4 sloggers to capitalise... but if we lose 3 of our top 4 before we've reached the 30 over mark we find ourselves up a creek without a paddle: either we ask the sloggers to keep wickets in hand (in which case they stop slogging and the scoreboard stops) or tell them we need runs (in which case they take risks and we end up 7-8 wickets down and praying that Gough and Harmison stick around).

Not good.