Prior as Keeper

[Rachael]

Originally Posted by Ernest

if England can't have Read the best, then stck with Prior, the best of the rest IMO.

Well.. the best except for almost all the other glovemen in County Cricket: I know there's not another Piper making an unanswerable case (excepting Simon Guy, sadly not even getting decent support from his club)... but at least Foster has turned himself into a vaguely passable heir to some of England's lesser stumpers.

[engssmoothcriminal]

Simon Hughes actually made an interesting point on TMS today about a possible reason for Prior's troubles in keeping to Sidebottom who 90 percent of his drops seem to have come off. His starting position is not far enough over to the offside which means he is infact unsighted at the point of delivery. Given Prior doesn't have the greatest footwork in the world he really can't afford to lose those few precious moments before he picks up the line of the ball and it's no surprise he seems to be in far worse positions to take the ball than he is off the right arm quicks.

I guess it's a bad habit picked up from keeping to Lewry who as well as being much slower and gets much less carry (which gives him more time to get into position) also swings the ball in considerably more than Sidebottom hence the tendency to favour the legside. Still it's a small technical detail that you really would have hoped that the two keepers Flower and Moores would have picked up on and rectified by now.

[Rachael]

Originally Posted by engssmoothcriminal

His starting position is not far enough over to the offside which means he is infact unsighted at the point of delivery [...] it's a small technical detail that you really would have hoped that the two keepers Flower and Moores would have picked up on and rectified by now.

That was a very interesting discussion... not least because if Sidebottom had passed that observation on to Simon Hughes the information was also, presumably, in the hands of the England management - which does rather leave one wondering why Prior and co have decided to stick with the obscured position.

Re: his keeping in general... the TMS crew have spoken about it on a few occasions without even once sounding very authoritative. In the discussion this morning they noted a missed stumping off Panesar in both the 1st match and in this 2nd Test... but felt he'd been otherwise tidy right up until letting that edge through.

One other issue they raised earlier does not necessarily reflect solely on Prior: it's the positioning of the slips... who do take their position off the 'keeper... but who are not incapable of taking issue with him if they think (as the TMS team did) that the entire cordon was about 6' too deep given the limited carry off the pitch.

With all that said... the most revealing discussion came between Roshan (Abeysinghe?) and Vic Marks: quizzed about the decline of specialist stumpers like Knott and Evans... Marks was quite clearly lost - he did argue that selections based on ability to bat go back a long way... and dragged Keith Andrew's name up as one he thought had been highly regarded... but he evaded the challenge to talk about the likes of Russell, Piper and Guy, proclaimed complete ignorance on the subject of Gilchrist not being the best Aussie gloveman of his generation and talked of the way Rod "iron-gloves" Marsh and Alec Stewart had improved during their careers to indicate a complete lack of interest in the decline of the craft.

Roshan was fun though: clearly has VERY limited time for Dhoni, Kamran Akmal and co!