can we please stop throuwing in all these average county hard working bits and pieces cricketers who give absolutely nothing to the side. It limits success because it just means that pieterson has to do all the hard work. australia have big gun names..ponting, hayden, gilchrist, symonds. these are international bullies and if we only have one of them as yet then we need to drop these god awful selectors we have and actually find people with an eye for talent so that a player can be picked who will be the next big thing in the future. i know one thing, test cricket is bloody hard, incredibly difficult and thankfully the selectors realise that but if they threw dimi mascarenas in a test team it would greatly diminish our chances as it does in one day cricket. dont just pick an allrounder for the sake of it. pick someone with real class. also if they pick an extra batsman and he gets runs then when flintoff comes back automatically it gives competition for the batting line up. one more thing, use the players theyve got to make the extra ten overs. ie. we all know pieterson can go galavanting around hammering everyone to hell and back, so just stick him in the nets bowling for four hours and so he can be useful in that respect as well. needed to rant unfortunately as this sqaud has no vision and weve been consistently doing this nonsense for the last ten years extradinarily unsuccessfully. the chairman is a fool and has no concept of vision.

Not so long back, Warne was talking of Mascarenhas as the second best England-qualified all-rounder behind Andrew Flintoff and suggested he would certainly have made Australia's 30-man squad. Since then, Mascarenhas has got better and better: he should have walked into our England WAT 'A' side last year as specialist bowler.. but only Andy and I recognised this: see http://www.world-a-team.com/showthread.php?t=7123.

This is a well deserved promotion.

Ref: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cric...es/3912879.stm

one thing, ian harvey is by far the best bits and pieces one day style cricketer there has ever been. and you know what? even he couldn't get in the australian side. because as ive precisely said they simply have too many big name bullies, epic batsman and epic bowlers......shoving aside teams and their competitors. that is the most ambitious thing we can aim for and if the selectors had any guts, ingenuity and intelligence they would go that way. as it stands stagnation is the call of the day.

In a perfect world, England would. of course, pick young batsmen who could warrant mention in the same breath as Knight, Gower, Fairbrother and Thorpe... a ODI 'keeper to rival Russell at his best... ODI seamers who merit comparison with Willis, Gough and Fraser... and ODI spinners to rival Underwood and Embury.

Oh.. with some preferably doing two roles... and all fielding like Derek Randall when in the covers, like Botham when in the slips and like Chris Lewis when chasing around the leg-side boundary.

Back in the real world... Cook, Bell, Pietersen, Bopara (injured), Flintoff (injured), Collingwood and Panesar select themselves (looking best placed of all available candidates to follow in the footsteps of the above English greats, and being good enough to challenge for a place in ANY national ODI squad).

Of the rest... Sidebottom, Yardy and Mascarenhas have done absolutely everything that could have been asked of them, deserve a chance.. Shah continues to be highly regarded throughout the game... Prior is probably entitled to prove doubters wrong... and for all their current woes, Broad, Anderson and Plunkett are a trio of yougsters with huge potential and who deserve the faith of the selectors.

Only Trott stands out as a bit of a wild selection... but with the 20-20 thing coming up, it's not a bad thing to start getting him into the frame!

ps. If you were a hard working cricketer in the county game, either inside OR outside of the academy / performance squad, I think this selection would give you immense encouragement: long term promise is being recognised, hard work and form is being recognised AND faith is being shown - excellent work!

thats great, you've obviously done your homework. but i dont buy it. I know the selectors have got to tick the all the boxes, put forward clever arguments and sound like they know what they're doing but they dont. they're just stooges. I believe in the basics and building on that. As Ive said though this squad is an exact replica of all the previous ones that have been shambolic and a disaster. i find it amazing how of all people Botham could be so right in saying 'your best players are your best players and should be able to adapt to all conditions. We shouldn't just be conservative and settle for second best as you seem content on doing. we have more talent in our country than australia thwerefore as they have a better system we should make the most of this talent. its all very honourable and fine rewarding hard work in the county game but the difference between one man and a dog and a pact stadium is absolutely huge. very very few make it. on this subject you would say that we should cut our loses but i say find the talent and keep pushing it.
your arguments are all very well but theyve all failed in the last ten years. and ill tell you one more thing. its a snobbish fact that if a world great like pieterson is surrounded by some useless county nobody's too long thatll rub off on him and he wont like being surrounded by the mediocrity. however if you chose a talented cricketer...say carberry from hampshire, pietersojn would respect that and maybe take him under his wing. frankly the joke of english cricket was summed up when that dopey fool yardy was sent in ahead of pieterson in the ICC championship.....i would have been laughing if i were pieterson.
trust me, just play the test team. look at it another way, blackwell was well and truly apalling when he played that one off test for england as was irani etc. so lets just get away from all of this reasonable business of so and so warrants this and that and be a little more idealistic, ruthless and ambitious towards that 'perfect world' in the approach.

Which players in that squad DO you agree with? Pietersen plus who? Presumably Cook, Bell and Panesar (as the obvious class)... but how about Collingwood? Nowhere near as talented... but doing a LOT with what he's got... and the ultimate example of a county player (like Mascarenhas) making himself International class through sheer hard work.

I presume you also have Flintoff and Bopara in... but then again.. so would the selectors!

I'd be interested to see your picks for the others spots.

On your other point... you seem overly concerned about the results of the national ODI side (as a fan)... whereas to my mind, the game is about club cricket: call-ups for deserving county stalwarts like Nixon, Sidebottom and Mascarenhas are to my mind CRUCIAL to running a system that is fair to the players... and if that means the national side isn't quite what it could be - so what?

Sport is something to be played, not watched: if lots of folk watch it, and put money into it, that's great... as that allows the game to grow.... but the game should belong to the players... and that means the national side should NOT involve kids seen as having "potential" ahead guys like Mascarenhas who have actually EARNED a place.

Talent is nothing without application, and I'm afraid nothing about Carberry IMO has shown that he has the application required. You cannot bring a player into an international set-up with the intention of them being taken under someone's tutelage; they have to be able to succeed without having their hands held thoughout.

__________________
"Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose."
- Ayrton Senna

digging youself into a massive whole there. sport runs on money nowadays and thank god it does as its money which gives county players the chance to perfrom to an actual crowd ie the 2020
also, the only good thing that fletcher did was make england a team in itself-with the central contracts. your argument that they should be club first and then pop off to play for england is ten years old.
further more collingwood is a special case. remember that he's an excellent fielder and even if you are right that hes like a mascarenas, i wouldn't drop him out of my principles expressed here as after 100 games hes worth a place in the side. no point in going backwards there. but what im saying is that looking forward needs a new strategy. collingwood great now but no more new collys if you like. lets not get sidetracked, talented players only please who have the potential to be the big bullies...hayden, symonds, gilchrist, ponting in the future. a simple way forward. difficult to say but ill give you my team then
cook
carberry
joyce
pieterson
collingwood
bell
prior
plunkett
anderson
panesar
sidebottom

rashid

carberry is well known around the circuit for having a good attitude to the game. that and being prolific through the offside!

That's not the point, to get into an England squad, be it Test, ODI or Twenty20(!), players have to be good enough - and Carberry just isn't. And I've not heard Carberry's name touted for a place in international cricket prior to today.

__________________
"Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose."
- Ayrton Senna