Sorry coaching a test side is a dramatic step up from coaching a county side

England and Peter Moores have found this out the hard way. He must except a decent share of the blame.

England looks unprofessional.

If we'd had the best bowling attack England have put out in the last fifty years, it would have left the batsmen exposed. 81 all out with only a couple of really good wickets - and eight pieces of gross batting incompetence - surely deserves at least some portion of blame? The whole sorry shower has performed disgracefully at Galle, I'm afraid, and they should all be ashamed of themselves.

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Money won't buy you friends. But it gets you a better class of enemy.
Spike Milligan

Defeat looks inevitable after that crazy treble wicket maiden but well done to Cook on getting his 7th test hundred and topping the batting averages for England in this series.

Why was i up at 5.15 watching you may ask,well my kids are to blame.My daughter woke the whole house up having a nightmare and my lad wanted to get up so i had to and then my daughter went back to sleep with her mum.Not fair.

Rain looks like it will save England from defeat,not that it really matters as the series was lost a long time ago.I don't know what this will do to the test rankings but all i do know is that England have been well outclassed by Sri Lanka in this series.

Congratulations to Sri Lanka who thoroughly deserve their series win and they are rebuilding their side quite well as Vandort looks a solid longterm replacement for Attapattu as an opener and Welegedera looked more than useful on his debut and is set to be a like for like replacement for Vaas longterm.Murali will continue for a while yet and they have 2 class act bats in Jayawardene and Sangakkara and one of the best keepers around in Jayawardene.All in all they have the makings of a decent side for a few years to come.

As for England it isn't quite back to the drawing board but they have some serious issues to sort out,mainly the bowling and fielding.

England really need to look at the balance of their bowling attack. At the moment it just isnt going to take 20 wickets and if you dont do that you cant win matches. We had this problem against India and have had the same one again doesnt Moores learn from his mistakes??

In NZ we can probably get away with playing 2 medium pacers but judging by the way they bowled on this wicket perhaps not.... and anyway is this good long term planning? It would be better to drop Sidebottom and play Broad instead to give him some experience.

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Mark.

Sod the long term the only thing that matters after dismal recent results going back 2 years is getting back to winning ways in New Zealand not continueing to build for some mythical point in the future. We are not an old team and there is absolutely no need for us to keep on chucking youngsters into the mix at the expense of picking the best available XI (before anyone gets worried I'm not calling for Ramps to be called up) for the conditions. If that meant a bowling attack of Sidebottom, Hoggard, with a couple of stop gaps Kabir Ali, John Lewis e.t.c and leaving out the frontline spinner Monty on some dodgy medium pacer friendly tracks in NZ then so be it.

We've really got to build up some momentum against this poor New Zealand side (think back to the series wins against the West Indies in 2001 and 2004 that led to a couple of golden periods) and get the confidence that regularly winning games brings back into this side.

Realistically we should be able to beat NZ anyway. Its a tough call if we play Sidebottom because he should do very well in NZ but ultimately that could well be the end of his test career because unless Hoggard gets injured Sidebottom wont do anything against SA next summer and shouldnt get selected.

Things would be easier if Flintoff were fully fit though........

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Mark.

Pretty pathetic and even more humiliating than defeat when you require rain to save you.

I could pick 11 another posters from this forum and captain the team to a rain saved draw in "Galle"

My squad might have even made more than "81" in the first innings with lots of improvised stroke play top and bottom edging the ball to places in the feild that seldom usualy see much action or feilders.

And the surprise and shock of our bowling attack getting the ball on target after multiple wides and full tosses will surely get us a few wickets.

England got a draw that they did not deserve in the least. Looking at the demographics of this match, somehow I felt that it is psychologically worse than a defeat.

Fact is that England did not deserve a draw: Another fact is that the weather intervenes on the side of one side or another at some stage, so it's hardly Englands fault that they scraped this draw.

Sri Lanka deserved their series win, and I doubt any England supporter would have bothered had the score been 0-2, it just did not matter - the fact was that England lost the series, and that's what counts at the end of the day.
The margin was not relevent.

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Ern