The selectors made a huge mistake playing Bopara at the expense of another specialist batsman. England's bowlers are good enough but don't bowl the right lengths. They can't seem to adjust from the lengths they habitually employ in England conditions.

Bopara is a specialist batsman... and has been consistently promoted as such: he bowls a bit in ODIs... but is first and foremost a batsman (as Collingwood always was). The England management did prefer him ahead of Shah... but it's always been clear that Shah and Bopara were the reserve batsmen on this tour and that Bopara was in favour with the management following his impressive displays in the ODI series.

In fairness to Bopara... he's looked like a fairly accomplished performer against spin: not as sophisticated and classy as Shah.... but quite at home (in a way that the likes of Cook, Strauss and Flintoff have never really looked at home).

Regarding the seamers: Sidebottom should have adapted a bit better than he did but was actually getting such prodigous and uncontrollable swing that (rather like Hoggard of pre 2004) he was unable to decide on an appropriate line - leg stump was perfect if it DID swing prodigously... but lousy if it did not... whilst off stump was perfect if it went straight on... but was a wasted delivery if it swung - pitching the ball up when you're dealing with such vagaries is not necessarily a great idea!

Troy Cooley got Hoggard to cut down the amount of swing he sought to solve that problem: someone's got to work with Sidebottom on the same thing... but let's not expect an overnight transformation - all concerned should be impressed if Sidebottom can master that inside 6 months!

ps. Harmison's only ever pitched the ball up when confident. He's got Caddick's tendency to bowl short when he is tight, and he has always tended to get tight on pitches that favour the batsmen - as true in the WI in 2004 as it is today.

You mean apart from gving the batsman less time to deal with the ball movement? No wonder those Sidebottom deliveries were so 'unplayable' as you mentioned earlier - the Sri Lankan batsmen didn't have to play them! Ask yourself why Vaas did so much better than Sidebottom in the second innings and I wonder if you'll figure out the length he was bowling as the answer. Somehow I very much doubt it.

The first job of a new ball bowler is to pose difficult questions in the opening over of the innings... and Sidebottom did that beautifully:Any seamer would take that opening over... and it's not as if that came as any sort of surprise: Sidebottom has shown himself to be an exemplary new-ball bowler. This was shown later in the same innings, with the second new ball:The notion that Sidebottom is toothless once the shine has gone is also nonsense:Sidebottom got Vandort, and created a straightforward chance with Dilshan and with Jayawardene: on another day he could have bowled to the same level and have walked off with a 5-for. He wasn't getting things absolutely right.... and has bowled a lot better in almost all his other outings for England... but it's indicative of just how good he's become that this performance is regarded as below par.

ps. Do you seriously recommend pitching the ball up when it's sometimes swinging 8" and sometimes not swinging at all? I doubt, somehow, that most impartial observers would agree: surely the first pre-requisite of pitched up bowling is ensuring the swing is predictable enough that a chosen line can be bowled with confidence!

pps. Every commentator I heard said the same thing: that England's bowlers did well enough to get Sri Lanka all out for 250. A combination of missed chances and Jayawardene's excellence in capitalising blew that: the bowlers should not need to create umpteen additional chances in order to take ten wickets!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Scott-Wozniak Bowling cutters? I despair. Is Hoggard a swing bowler or not? If he is, why an earth are you content that his fitness allows him to bowl cutters when his main strength lies in swing?

Marshall was an exceptional swing bowler... who frequently resorted to cutters on the sub-continent.. as did Gough and Cairns. Get the ball swinging lots (as it was at Trent Bridge in 2005) and Hoggard's as good an exponent of swing bowling as anyone: didn't stop him putting in one of the best seam bowling displays of the decade at Adelaide - bowling cutters.

But as a top class opening bowler you have to keep the pressure up and keep bowling jaffas. Theres more to being a good bowler than bowling 1 over with 2 good balls in your opening spell. Sidebottom and Hoggard didnt keep the pressure on and ultimately bowled poorly with the new ball. They admitted as much themselves. I have watched highlights of England bowling, trust me Sidebottom wasnt unplayable.

But if the swing is predictable you become less effective. Quite often swing bowlers take wickets with balls that (unintentionally) dont swing or move i.e Sidebottoms wicket.

What i wil say is that Vaas showed Sidebottom how to bowl and the Englands bats (Pieterson apart) showed how not to bat! They were all undone by playing on the back foot to balls that were pitched up and swinging at about 75mph!

More to the point what is going to be done about Prior - how many more easy chances is he going to drop.

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Mark.

Rachael

Firstly, I'm not disputing that Sidebottom is generally a good, consistent left arm swing bowler, he adds variation to the side and just as importantly creates footmarks for Panesar. His strength is that he bowls a consistent line and length, but on this tour he's generally bowled too short, as have all the bowlers. If you cannot control the swing reliably bowling seam up, then you have to resort to scrambled seam bowling until you can. Hoggard himself has admitted in the past when the ball is either swinging prodigously conventionally or in reverse that quite often he has no control over which way it goes, but that still didn't stop him taking wickets for the simple reason that he was bowling a good line and length to the batsman.

It doesn't matter one iota how much the ball is swinging, if you're bowling the wrong line or too short or inconsistently you won't take wickets, unless you get really lucky of course.

I don't understand why you're reposting cricinfo commentary here, personally I'm not interested in what cricinfo commentators say - only what I see with my own eyes, no wonder you hold such fanciful notions about cricket if you rely heavily on what the numpties at Cricinfo have to say about things, they're frequently wrong, incorrect or inaccurate.

You talk about commentators saying that England created enough chances to bowl Sri Lanka out for 250, my response to that would be 'If ifs and but's were pots and pans...' They didn't take those chances therefore it doesn't really matter much does it?

England have consistently failed to create enough wicket taking opportunities to bowl Sri Lanka out for 'gettable scores' it doesn't matter that what chances they have created were not taken, they didn't go on to create another wicket taking chance. If you give a batsman like Jaywardene even one lifeline - he'll punish you which is exactly what he's done.

Yes I do, because that's the only way you're going to take wickets on these pitches. Sure, you'll get hit for runs when the ball either doesn't swing or swings wide, but you'll also be creating wicket taking opportunities with the balls that do, do what you expect them to do and that's the most effective method I know of, of slowing the run rate down - take regular wickets. Your way, of pulling the length back as a means of controlling the swing simply means the bad balls will be whacked for 4 and the good ones defended as they're not posing much of a threat and that's precisely what the Sri Lankan batsmen did and put themselves into a winning position in the process.

I find this quite a bizarre attitude to be honest. If you don't take the chances you create, of course you have to keep creating chances to take wickets! The problem is, England have created too few chances and taken even fewer of them, meaning that they've consistently failed to bowl Sri Lanka out. This is no different to when England won the Ashes, they didn't just create 20 chances per match they created hundreds of chances, some were taken and some wern't, but enough chances were created to make the ones that wern't taken irrelevant, and even then they only just won that series.

I don't see the relevance of any of this Rachael. Malcolm Marshall was probably the best fast bowler to ever grace a Cricket field and it was only towards the end of his career that he developed his 'cutter' balls, but the point you're missing is that a 'cutter' is simply a 'variation' ball, just like a slower ball, a bouncer, an inswingner or an outswinger, it is not a stock or standard ball at all. Your statement earlier was that 'Hoggard was fit enough to bowl cutter's' if he's not fit enough to bowl his entire repertoire of balls then he's not fit enough to play - simple.

Pie_C

You pretty much just said what I said but used far fewer words to do it!

I simply do not understand why people blame out batsmen for this 'debacle', the batsmen we have are pretty much the same batsmen we're had for some time, and they are capable, the only difference is that they're now exposed because of the poor bowling.

In the past the excellence of our bowling was sufficient to 'cover up' the deficiencies in our batting by bowling opposition sides our for totals our own batsmen could achieve fairly easily, now our bowling is 'toothless' it's exposing weaknesses in what was otherwise a pretty solid batting unit.

You don't win Test Matches with batsmen, you win them with bowlers, you save Test Matches with batsmen.

Uh oh, the old WK debate!

Personally I'm still a fan of Geriant Jones, I know a lot of people aren't but he would still be my choice as gloveman and it's interesting that Prior is another in the same mould as Jones, a batting keeper.

In the same way as I was happy to see Jones given an extended run in the side, I also feel Prior should be given an extended run as well, I think it's a little unfair to judge him so early on, he has promise and potential, the big question is whether he can realise it or not and he should at least be given a reasonable run to show what he can do. If he's not improved in a years time or he's still making the same mistakes then someone else needs to be given a chance, but at the moment it's too early in my opinion.

The only person I didn't want to see take the WK gloves was Read as I simply don't feel he's good enough at Test level as a batsman, and nothing I saw of him made me want to change my mind on that either, regardless of how good he was as a gloveman and his excellence with the gloves never made up for his deficiencies as a batsman.

Modern Test sides require a batting keeper, or someone to contribute runs at No7 and Read simply wasn't good enough as a batsman to bat at No7.

I don't want to reignite the Keeper debate, these are my views on it and I don't see them changing anytime soon!

In any case, England have much bigger things to worry about at the moment than the WK position and the first thing they need to do is get rid of Bopara and replace him with another specialist bowler, once they have the balance of the bowling right and improve their fielding they should start competing again.

People argued (may not have been here) that England should play 4 specialist bowlers and 7 batsmen when Flintoff isn't available - it's been shown time and time again that it simply doesn't work on the international stage (unless you're Australia, or playing a vastly weaker side than you are) and this Sri Lanka series is yet another example of how it just doesn't work.

When the hell will they learn?

A traditional saying... and there's much merit in it... but as Hughes argued today, on pitches like those in Sri Lanka, bowlers (of any description) are basically destined to flog themselves into the ground in hope rather than with any real expectation of creating chances.

Many "fans" witter on about bowlers taking the pitch out of the equasion... but the captains, coaches and commentators who actually play (or have played) at the highest level seem pretty much agreed that on pitches like those in Sri Lanka it's more a matter of maintaining discipline and waiting for - and being capable of taking - every chance presented by a mix of luck and tired batsmen.

Of course... great sides "create their own luck"... and mistakes tend to come from sides that maintain the most pressure.... but to my mind, England would be right in this match (and this series) if they'd simply been able to maintain a fielding-ring to the standard set by the Aussies (with Ponting, Clarke and Symonds at the fore, and reliable catchers like Hayden playing their part) and with a better gloveman.

To use another old saying... "catches win matches" (to which someone should append "especially on batsman-friendly wickets).

Rachael

There's a lot in what you say and It's hard to disagree with any of it, and I certainly agree that the sub-continent is generally not a bowler friendly place. However, having said that, if Sri Lankas bowlers can take wickets on it them so should Englands, despite the fact that Englands batsmen conspired at times to make it woefully easy for the Sri Lankans to bowl them out.

As Vaas said in interview, "I put the ball in the right areas and got my rewards..." admittedly assisted by some 'rabbit hutch' batting. The key words there were 'right areas and rewards' not something that Englands bowlers really acheived is it?

That simply goes to show that if you do put the ball on the right length and on the right line and consistently enough, you will get results as Vaas ably showed. Sure, there's a huge difference in the mentality of the batsmen and winning the toss, conceeding a fairly significant declared first innings score in a game you have to win isn't really going to help them too much and we all know that Englands batsmen are prone to collapse under such situations as history tells us.

Why do you think India, with their batting heavy line up have traditionally (at least up until very recently) been atrocious away from their beloved flat sub-continental wickets? I'd put it to you that it's because their bowlers can't bowl on wickets outside of the sub-c, the same problem as England currently have but in reverse, and their batting line up has been prone to collapse in precisely the same way that Englands does for precisely the same reasons, but that doesn't make Indias batting lineup weak does it?

So, sorry, I smply don't buy into the view that on sub-c pitches you simply wait for batsman mistakes, you have to create those mistakes by good, wily, cunning pressure bowling and that involves putting the ball consistently in the right areas and fooling the batsman into making a mistake, because some batsmen (Jaywardene and Sangakarra spring to mind) won't make those mistakes unless you force them to. It's the same principle the world over, it just requires more patience and consistency in the sub-continent and certainly the bowling of the right line and length!

Englands bowlers have been spoilt by the lush green tops they get in the UK where the ball swings and seams nicely and they get an awful lot of assistance off the pitch, you get none in the sub-c and that simply means you have to be more accurate in where you put the ball - a discipline Englands current bowlers simply do not possess.

Scott,
Scott look at England batting order, after Pietersen England have {Bopara-Prior-Sidebottom-Harmison-Hoggard and Panesar}.
I agree without reservation that bowlers win matches, and my opinion is at the moment England don't have a World Class bowling attack, they are shoddy fielders - and the batting is poor, how many did England score today [81]?
These basmen are not IMO capable - look at the drubbing they took in Australia 06, beat with India - and now bowing out against Sri Lanka.

Sorry Scott I can't agree with this at all.

If an inferior keeper and I won't go into names, score say 60 runs - then though mistake allows the opposition to add another 150 or so runs, then he is a net loss.

IMO a side should go out with the best keeper possible, batsmen should be getting the runs - not keepers.

This is the think edge of a bits and peices side, first the keeper and then the spinners have to be able to make runs - more often then not the pressure tells and you end up with an ordinary keeper - who fails more often than not with the bat.

A start to improve Englands fortunes would be to get rid of Moores - he seems to have no imagination, and can't pick his best bowlers.

England need to srengthen the batting, even if that means bringing in a couple of the older county players - or IMO England can kiss the 09 ashes goodby now.

Also when Flintoff is fit - he should not play in every match - in particular the PJ stuff, and that goes for Harmison, Hoggard and any other bowler who is required to put his back in it.

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Ern