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Woeful bowling and muddled thinking

Posted on | November 19, 2009 | No Comments

Geoff Boycott reviews England’s two T20 matches in South Africa.

In the first one in Johannesburg we were in a mess from the word go. Joe Denly and Alastair Cook played across yorker length balls. They got their feet on the wrong side of the ball and had to play round their front pads. Cook has now been doing this for months.

For a while it didn’t look as though we were going to get too many but Paul Collingwood picked it up and with Eoin Morgan we got some fireworks we didn’t really expect. Colly made the best of his limited range of shots by using the bottom hand to thump it over and through the leg side but Morgan was a revelation. A little left hander, he puts me in mind of Neil Fairbrother, the former Lancashire and England batsman, in the way he goes about his work. Short and stocky he seems to have the gift for improvisation, not only because of his hand-eye co-ordination but because he has the mind set to try different things. Sometimes delicate, sometimes powerful, sometimes inventive as he showed at the end by stepping outside his off stump and lifting the ball over fine leg for six! When they bowled him a bouncer he hit it miles out of the park and his innings was as good as anything I’ve seen for a while.

In the end England had a pretty decent total but our bowling was woeful. Graeme Smith and Loots Bosman took a couple of overs to have a look and then whacked it all over the park. They were coasting when the rain came, as it does late in the afternoon or early evening in Johannesberg, 5,000 feet above sea level on what is known as the high veldt and when it started to get heavy there was a discussion out in the middle with everyone studying the Duckworth-Lewis tables.

If they’d have gone off then, South Africa would have won but, no, they stayed on for one more over. In the commentary box we knew it was seven to tie and eight to win because we had the same Duckworth-Lewis tables. But South Africa got six runs and seemed to think that was enough. How the hell they could get it wrong and fall one short is unbelievable. For all the talent that’s in their side there’s obviously a problem when it comes to reading and adding up; and it’s not the first time. To happen in the World Cup at Durban was bad enough but to get it wrong twice is madness and you can only say there’s more brains in a pork pie.

Smith and Bosman had crucified the England bowlers and it was just another screw up. One good over and England won because people didn’t know the regulations. It must have hurt them because when Smith won the toss at Centurion he batted first so that arithmetic wouldn’t come into it!

I’ve never seen batting like it even if the bowling was rubbish. Sajid Mahmood went for three sixes and seven fours and Adil Rashid was hit for four sixes in his one over. The only guys who came out with any credit were Jimmy Anderson and Luke Wright, a batsman who bowls a bit, and at least tried to get it straight and pitch it up. Unless England do something about the bowling it doesn’t matter what the batsmen do.

Tim Bresnan is too wide on the crease at delivery and he must get closer to the stumps and bowl wicket to wicket. I know the coaches at Yorkshire and England have told him about this, so either he won’t do it or he can’t but if he doesn’t he’s going to have a very short international career. I don’t care what anyone else thinks, I’ll say again about Rashid that he is too expensive for one-day cricket. He’s got all the variations but doesn’t have a stock ball he can drop on a sixpence, something Shane Warne and Richie Benaud insist is essential.

Our bowling needs looking at but you’ve got to give credit to Smith and Bosman. Smith stands there like a baseball player looking to smash home runs and six sixes and eight fours are testimony to his sheer power. Bosnan is a T20 specialist with a lovely free swing of the bat and gorgeous timing from a very powerful lad who had nine sixes and five fours in his 94. After they’d finished with us nothing else mattered, the game was over and we were totally out of it.

Our only hope, and it was a pretty slim one, was to say we need 100 off the first ten overs and 140 off the last, so what did we do? Send in Denly, Cook and Jonathan Trott who between them couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding in T20 and we’d lost all hope before we’d started. All three are lovely orthodox batsmen but there’s no way they’re going to score at ten an over and what on earth is Cook doing even playing T20 let alone being captain. Whoever thought that up wants his head testing. Morgan, Wright, Bresnan, Kevin Pieterson, all shot makers, should have gone in earlier to have the slightest chance of winning, a small one at that. A squad of senior players and 15 backroom staff couldn’t work that out? Give me a break. They simply didn’t think outside the box which is the whole point of T20. It’s so fast and furious you haven’t time for lengthy discussion, you have to think on your feet and that’s my one condemnation of England. There’s too many backroom staff doing the thinking for the players and when they have to work it out for themselves they just can’t do it.

As far as the rest of the tour is concerned, I disagree with Smith and Collingwood, I don’t think it matters who won the T20s but it was important for England to play well. In the final analysis the bowling was crap and, with the exception of Collingwood and Morgan, the batting poor.

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