If the ball moves around then they have three bowlers — Mohammad Asif, Mohammad Aamer and Umar Gul — who can cause us problems. But the one thing you know about England’s batsmen is that they will fight and scrap better than the Pakistanis did at Nottingham.

The England batters may not always be pleasing on the eye or have perfect techniques, but they are good, solid performers in Test cricket.

We know that Alastair Cook gets stuck on the crease and has technical problems with his footwork. We know that the captain, Andrew Strauss, is liable to have a nibble outside off stump and that Paul Collingwood is a bottom-hand player who sometimes looks ugly as he works the ball to the onside.

There are no problems with the young Irishman, Eoin Morgan. He is starting his career and is hungry for success, but what we need is Kevin Pietersen to return to form.

Even though he is struggling for runs, England are nowhere near dropping him. There is talk about it in some quarters but there is no way they would do that.

There is, though, some concern about whether he is focused enough on the international game and not other things going on in his life.

Eventually he will have to make substantial runs and not play little cameos.

Until he does that, there will be murmurings that he has not produced a big innings for a year and a half. It has been that long because I don’t count anything that happened against Bangladesh or in Twenty20 cricket.

There is nothing wrong with his batting technique. It is about what is going on between his ears. Too often he is trying to hit balls he should be defending.

He should give himself more time at the crease before he starts being expansive. It is about shot selection. Picking the right stroke for the right ball and accepting sometimes bowlers bowl well at you and you have to defend more than you attack.

But despite the weaknesses of the England batsmen, they have got good Test records and, anyhow, even if they nick it you can’t be sure the Pakistani fielders are going to catch the ball.

Look at the wicketkeeper, Kamran Akmal. He caught a blinder off the inside edge off Pietersen in the second innings at Nottingham but then he dropped a couple of sitters and missed a stumping against Collingwood when he had so much time that he could have run him out, let alone stump him. That seems to have cost him his place.

On top of that, we know for sure that if it swings and seams, our bowlers will bowl out Pakistan because their batsmen are very naïve and inexperienced in our conditions.

Even bringing back Mohammad Yousuf isn’t going to make the difference between winning and losing. He arrived yesterday afternoon and he hasn’t had time for an outdoor net. That is how ludicrous this situation is. Their cricket organisation is shambolic. You feel for the kids because they are so young and talented.

But even if the pitch is good and flat and their batsmen score runs I still believe that England are more professional, disciplined and battlehardened than their youngsters.

It should be men against boys. It is a shame because we would all like to see Pakistan do well. They deserve a bit of luck after not being allowed to play Test cricket in their own country. But I don’t see any way out for them on this trip.

This mismatch is the reason why we have to be careful of reading too much into England’s performances and tactics and get carried away about the winter.

On a tactical front, England are always going to pick six batsmen because they don’t make enough runs in the first innings to pick only five. They make too many mistakes and get themselves out. Five bowlers would be helpful but you have got to have dependable batsmen who make big scores and we don’t have that.

As far as James Anderson is concerned, it is true that he is a mercurial and brilliant bowler in these swinging and seaming conditions. But in Australia four years ago he played three Test matches, took five wickets and they cost him 82 runs each. That doesn’t win Test matches.

Although he is a little older and wiser, the Kookaburra ball will not swing like the Duke does here.

I don’t care how mature and experienced he is, just bear in mind Test matches against Pakistan have no resemblance to Test matches in Australia.

The obvious choices are Surrey and Middlesex with the latter the ideal because the Lord’s ground staff are there full time and if you want to play anywhere in the world it’s the best, the Mecca, the place to be.

Overseas players don’t have the same emotional attachment to counties as those who have grown up through the academies and second elevens. The county doesn’t mean as much to them as those players who have spent all their cricketing lives there.

When I was playing for Yorkshire and first got into the England team there were 17 counties playing 32 three-day games, plus first class games against Oxford and Cambridge, the tourists and MCC twice each. That’s 114 days and on top of that the Gillette Cup (later the NatWest Trophy) started in 1963, the 40 overs a side Sunday League in 1968 and the 55 overs a side Benson & Hedges Cup in 1972.

If I played in all five Tests in a series I missed two county games for each England match and therefor was available for 28 three-day games as well as the one-day competitions. Because I was born and raised in the county I had an emotional attachment and allegiance to my roots, just like Fred Trueman and Brian Close.

The modern centrally contracted players can’t have that same attachment because they’re hardly ever there. It’s not their fault, it’s not of their making, but there is so much international cricket, 45 days in the English summer this year plus training and practice days, that it’s only fair that sometimes they’d like to go home and see their families, get a bit of rest and get mentally refreshed.
When you take all that into consideration there’s very few times when they could play county cricket so over a few seasons they’re bound to lose contact with their county clubs.

In KP’s case I’ve worked out that in five and a half summers he’s played in seven county championship games for Hampshire and 19 one-day fixtures making a total of 47 days, about eight days a season! How can anyone expect any sense of belonging or loyalty ? The answer is, you can’t. KP is so tied up with England that he’s only looking for the odd game and somewhere to practice and like other top players he’s lost contact with the county game.

It’s a pity because that devalues our English first class cricket because youngsters don’t get the chance to grow up playing against the best and finding out how good they really are before they reach Test level. The standard of overseas players has dropped just as steeply as well. There’s no Clive Rice and Richard Hadlee at Notts, no Malcolm Marshall, Barry Richards or Gordon Greenidge at Hampshire, Viv Richards or Joel Garner at Somerset nor Clive Lloyd and Wasim Akram at Lancashire. Those and many others like them provided a real test for up and coming youngsters but it’s a fact of modern day cricket life that the best players are lost to the counties.

Jonathan Trott got off to a decent start in five of his seven innings with scores of 28, 69, 18, 20 and 42 but, again, he never went on to do anything to swing the game in England’s favour. When it’s your day you have to make those good starts count and make a lot of runs.

Kevin Pietersen is our best player, his record for England before this series is better than anybody else’s. But his shot selection was unbelievable and never once was he got out by the bowlers. Some of the really great players have poor series like Peter May in South Africa in 1956-57 when he could hardly get a run in the Tests, making 153 in ten innings. In 1966-67 Ian Chappell could only score 196 in ten innings in South Africa. The difference was the bowlers got them out while Kevin gave himself up.

Someone has to get to KP and tell him he has to play according to the state of the game. He can’t just keep saying ‘this is the way I am, this is how I play’. When you’ve been out of the game for four months you have to play your way back in to form, you can’t just pick up where you left off and he needs telling some home truths.
Matt Prior’s wicketkeeping has improved a lot in the last 12 months but his batting has gone backwards in this series. He played only two decent innings out of seven. So what have we gained? Nothing and that’s hurt us.

Stuart Broad has been touted as the next genuine all rounder to step into Freddie Flintoff’s shoes and he showed lots of promise before this series. There was plenty of discussion about whether he should bat at seven and allow us to include an extra bowler but he failed with 76 runs in seven knocks. What was really disappointing in his last innings in Johannesburg was his attitude to being given out caught off his glove down the leg side. I’ve no problem with him standing and waiting for the umpire’s decision, Graeme Smith did the same and got away with it, but when the TV review showed he was out he went off shaking his head and acting as if he’d been cheated out! He needs a good talking to and reminding if he annoys the umpires with his conduct he won’t get the benefit of any 50/50 decisions when he’s batting or bowling and that hurts England as much as him.

The surprising batting success was Ian Bell who was under serious pressure after the first Test but who subsequently showed his mettle and talent. At Durban he played a quality innings full of lovely strokes to set up a big lead and in Cape Town had two good knocks making 78 in the second innings which went a long way towards saving the game. What was particularly pleasing was that in Durban he played fluently but adapted his game to play a defiant, defensive innings at Newlands.

The other success was Paul Collingwood. He isn’t the prettiest of batsmen and at times looks ungainly with nearly all his power in the bottom hand. But I and the rest of the public take our hats off to him because he has made himself into a very good player. What he lacks in natural ability he makes up for with character, plays according to the situation and doesn’t sell his wicket cheaply. For all the talent of the others above him he’s the one we’ve come to depend on.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; batsmen put you in a position to win, bowlers take the 20 wickets to bring off the victory. But if the batting doesn’t do its job there’s not much the bowlers can do about it.

In the only match we won in Durban we got a big lead and scoreboard pressure told on the South Africans who folded.

Simply, our batting didn’t do its job in the other three matches but who do you replace them with? There’s not much competition and in fact some of them want to think themselves lucky they’re not playing in previous eras. So we have to get more out of what we’ve got or we’ll be in serious trouble in Australia next winter.

I have great admiration for the resolve the players showed at Centurion and Newlands. Unfortunately, the performance in this Test match was a shambles. For the first time in the series, England came across a pitch with pace and bounce, and they couldn’t cut it. On flat surfaces, with Dale Steyn injured or not fully match fit, they’ve been OK. But in Johannesburg, some of the shots they produced beggared belief. It was as if they had packed up their bags, ready for home, with a demob-happy mentality.

In the first innings, Jonathan Trott played eight balls as if he was drunk. Perhaps his second innings wasn’t quite so bad, but he still didn’t look too comfortable against the bouncing ball. In fact, he didn’t seem to have the technique or the stomach for a fight. Which is very worrying, especially if England have pencilled him in as their long-term solution at No 3. You can’t bat there if you don’t relish a battle.

Then there was Kevin Pietersen, who came in with the score at seven for two, and got out by pulling a catch to mid-on. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when England were trying to save the game in the second innings, he drove at a ball so wide he could hardly reach it. From the way these two batted, you’d think they’d been picked for England but were playing for South Africa as double agents.

I get the feeling that Flower and his staff believe Pietersen is untouchable. He shouldn’t be, because the only thing that matters is whether you can get runs and wickets. If you can’t, you should make way for somebody else.
I have always been a great admirer of Kevin, and I still think he is one of the most talented batsmen in the world. The fact is, though, that he has struggled since he came back from his three-month injury break. His whole approach has been wildly off the mark. He has only faced about 350 balls in the series, because he starts playing irresponsibly and extravagantly from the first ball.

I watched a montage of his dismissals on television, and he didn’t get out to a single really good ball in the whole series. Each time he has played a shocking shot (with the sole exception of that other crazy moment when he ran himself out). You’d think that with 16 support staff in the England backroom, someone should tell him to spend more time in the middle.

There are a few technical flaws to work on. Pietersen doesn’t have a solid platform when he plays on the front foot. He walks into his strokes, which means that his right side and leg come around as he makes contact with the ball. The bottom line is that he is off balance both physically and mentally. Until he sorts out his head, the body won’t follow instructions.

Returning to the match, pretty much everything went wrong from the first morning, when Strauss won the toss and batted instead of fielding. It was the second time England had made the wrong call in the series, after they put South Africa in at Centurion. You don’t often see bowler-friendly conditions away from home, so when you get the chance, you had better use them. Even more disappointingly, they showed a real lack of fight when the ball started seaming and swinging around.

The second innings was even stranger. I still don’t know what England were trying to do: win the match, save the match or lose the match.

Even in the case of Paul Collingwood, the only man who played well, his whole approach was the opposite of the one he had used during his long vigil in Cape Town. There, he protected his wicket by playing with a short backlift. Here he took the bouncers on, a tactic that brought him runs but also threatened to get him out. You almost wondered whether England had had a team discussion and said: “Sooner or later, we are all going to get a good one, so we might as well attack and get what we can, while we can.”

We all want to support England but this display was unacceptable. If you bat badly, you lose Test matches – it’s as simple as that. Some of these players will go off to Bangladesh next month and make hay. They will be playing on flat pitches against county-standard attacks and fill their boots with runs, but who cares? It won’t mean a damn except for statistics.

I feel for James Anderson and the rest of the seamers, because you have to wonder how England will ever be able to play five bowlers while their batsmen are performing like that. Take Matt Prior for example: he twice got out hooking on a bouncy pitch. He may have improved his wicketkeeping, but his batting brains have gone out the window.

When you look at the side on paper, it looks promising, with runs all the way down to No 9. The trouble is that the batsmen can only cope on flat pitches where the ball doesn’t bounce too high.
The bowlers have done a good job in this series and never given up.

Unfortunately, they are always going to be knackered because the Test matches come one after the other with little rest. Without the option of dropping a batsman – which England daren’t do after the performances in South Africa – Anderson and company will always have too big a workload to share.

DON’T get sidetracked by the issue of the third umpire at the Wanderers. Yes, Daryl Harper made a cock-up by not adjusting the volume knob on Graeme Smith’s caught behind, but you can’t blame the Decision Review System for the result. Remember, the onfield umpire, Tony Hill, gave Smith not out on 15. So without the new technology, Smith would still have made a hundred. I don’t remember England complaining when Collingwood was reprieved first ball in Cape Town by the system. Without that lifeline, England would never have come close.

The man under most pressure for Durban – and not for the first time – is Ian Bell. He made a terrible misjudgement in the first innings. We have all left balls that clipped the outside of the off stump – but this one hit the top of middle. It’s obvious that he hadn’t worked out his angles for when Paul Harris came from wide of the crease. In the second innings, he nicked quick ball from Friedel de Wet, pitching on a good length and line. But you would expect an international batsman to keep those out.

When Bell is playing well he looks magnificent. He moves beautifully on to both front and back foot, and he has lovely timing. But he just makes too many mistakes. I would expect the selectors to give him another go at Durban, but if he keeps failing, they will lose patience. If one of your top six is not delivering any runs, you might as well play another bowler.

England are great fun to watch from the sidelines, but I feel for Andy Flower and his nerves. At times, they are too exciting for their own good. Just take Sunday: England were saving the match comfortably through Jonathan Trott and Kevin Pietersen. While Trott was playing defensively, and just picking off the odd bad ball, Pietersen was in complete control. He looked what he is – a class act.

This pair had all but saved the match. They needed to bat only another 10 overs but then Pietersen went and ran himself out trying to pinch the bowling. I used to be a pincher too, but at least I could count: Pietersen took his kamikaze run off the fifth ball of the over! It was quite unnecessary, the sort of brainstorm that people always feel he is liable to have.

You might say that England got away with it in the end, but it was a close-run thing. Even with just a few balls to go, they were doing their best to invite South Africa in. In the penultimate over, when Graham Onions bunted one and they went through for a run, I couldn’t help shouting “No, get back you idiots!” The end result was that Paul Collingwood faced two of the last eight balls, and Onions the other six.

South Africa’s advantage at Centurion owed less to any obvious superiority in firepower than to the fact that England kept on handing them freebies. It started when Andrew Strauss won the toss and asked South Africa to bat. Some people have blamed the bowlers for the fact that they took only two wickets on that morning, but the truth is that the ball didn’t do enough to warrant giving South Africa first use of the pitch.

Strauss had probably been keeping an eye on the playing surface for the three days leading up to the match. There were showers around, which kept the covers going on and off, and the groundsman had left plenty of grass until the final cut on the first morning. I think Strauss got sucked in by what he had seen a few days before. It’s dangerous to be looking at pitches too early.

The fact that England got away with a draw, despite all their mistakes, owed something to South Africa’s half-strength attack. The home side missed Steyn, and a fully-fit Jacques Kallis. As for their most experienced player, Makhaya Ntini, he is not the force he used to be. He was outbowled by De Wet. Sport is harsh – you have to pick on ability and can’t be ruled by emotion. There is no shame in admitting that time is catching up with you.

Ntini has been a fantastic standard-bearer. He has opened up the game to millions of black cricketers with his talent, determination and infectious energy. He has become an iconic figure, and the first successful black cricketer in South Africa.

Until apartheid was dismantled, cricket was a whites-only game. He has fired the imagination and ambition of millions of his countrymen who now want to play cricket. That is his legacy far more than the number of wickets he has taken.

Article reproduced with kind permission from the Daily Telegraph

England’s most obvious problem will be their lack of firepower. There will never be another Andrew Flintoff, and Steve Harmison also leaves a big hole in the attack. The rest of the bowlers are steady and can produce decent results in England when there is some movement in the air or spin in the pitch. But on flat South African decks, I don’t see them keeping anyone awake at night.

James Anderson now finds himself promoted to the status of senior bowler, which means he has to be more consistent. On his good days he is a world-beater, but the bad days come along too often for my liking. Stuart Broad, too, needs to step up. He produced a brilliant, Ashes-winning spell at the Oval, but at Edgbaston the ball was floating out of his hand like a powder puff. Broad has said he wants more responsibility now that Flintoff has retired from Test cricket.

This is his chance to grab it.

The other man I am concerned about is Ryan Sidebottom. I just don’t think England are using him in the right way. They are encouraging him to bowl as fast as he can, to push his speed up into the high 80s. But by striving for extra pace, Sidebottom has lost the control that made him such a success in his first full year with England. He has become too expensive and sends down a stack of four-balls.

Sidebottom’s strength is his swing, and that is only effective if you have pinpoint control of line and length. I saw Sachin Tendulkar interviewed the other day about the most challenging duels he has experienced in Test cricket, and he mentioned the spell that Sidebottom bowled to him at Trent Bridge two years ago. It didn’t actually get Tendulkar out – but that’s not the point, because it would have done for anybody else.

That sort of spell is what Sidebottom needs to get back to: proper swing bowling, when the ball almost seems to be under remote control.

He is never going to be a genuine nasty fastie, and searching for a few extra mph won’t give the likes of Jacques Kallis anything to worry about.

Another concern for England is the absence of Port Elizabeth from the Test schedule. That’s the only ground that you can count on to turn a bit; the rest are likely to reduce Graeme Swann to the role of a stock bowler, shutting down one end while Strauss rotates the seamers at the other. I am not sure Adil Rashid will get a game, because England’s strategy will probably revolve around containment, and he tends to be expensive.

Rashid’s weakness is that he has all the eye-catching tricks but he doesn’t have a stock ball he can rely on. When the young Shane Warne went to Richie Benaud for advice, Benaud told him to go away and perfect a stock ball he could bowl at will. Benaud thought it might take two years, but Warne’s talent was such that he did it in six months. It’s the same for professional golfers: when they are in trouble, or under pressure, they need to have a particular shot they can hit with their eyes closed. Until Rashid sorts that part of his game out, he will always be a risky selection at international level.

As for England’s batting, that has been shaky for a while. The best player in the side, Kevin Pietersen, is recovering from an Achilles injury, and no-one can be entirely confident about his form or fitness. Then there are the openers. There is no back-up in this position, so if either Strauss or Alastair Cook gets injured, the selectors will be struggling to find a replacement. I hear that Cook has done some rebuilding work on his technique, and I hope he has tried to stop playing around his front pad.

This whole tour is going to be a searching examination for England against a well-conditioned and well-balanced side. Strauss has already shown himself to be a strong leader, but if he comes back from South Africa as a winner, that will outstrip anything he has achieved as a captain to date.

Article courtesy of the Telegraph.co.uk

If the Australians had bowled out James Anderson or Monty Panesar at Cardiff, they would have won the match and then it would have been a drawn series. Likewise, if Shane Warne had caught Kevin Pietersen in the final Test at the Oval in 2005, the Aussies would have kept the urn.

It’s probably true that England had the rub of the green, but no one in this country will be crying about the Australians’ misfortune. They have come out on top too many times. Now, though, it is time to focus on the next big commitment for Andrew Strauss and company: the tour of South Africa that starts in November. Even after the euphoria of the last couple of days, there are still plenty of problems to address.

England’s biggest worry will be their top order. Strauss has given an object lesson all summer in the mechanics of batting: he has shown excellent balance, footwork and judgement of what to play and what to leave around off stump. At the other end, though, Alastair Cook has been all over the place. His technique has gone backwards, and it is imperative that he gets into the nets and works on his footwork over the next couple of months. He is fortunate that there are no other opening batsmen queuing up for his place.

Ian Bell is also looking out of his depth at No 3. The short ball is troubling him too much: he got out to it twice in the last two Tests, and took a number of blows on the gloves and the arm. The worst thing is that he isn’t even looking at the ball half the time. In South Africa, the pitches bounce, and the opening bowlers have plenty of pace. They will have noticed his struggles around his chest area, and if he comes in early against the hard new ball he is going to get peppered.

The return of Kevin Pietersen will give the middle-order a more imposing look, but the people around him are not convincing. Bell isn’t the only man struggling against the short ball. Speaking on the radio, Phil Tufnell compared Paul Collingwood’s dismissal on Friday night to himself batting at No 11. Collingwood may be alright in the comfort zone at No 5, where England have plenty of options now that Jonathan Trott has emerged as a potential star of the future. But you always need solid people at the top of the order. Ravi Bopara is a talented young player, but he has been found wanting up front as well.

I have said before that one good way of shoring up your batting is to play three openers up front. The new ball is crucial in Test cricket, so if you can blunt it, you are usually on the way to a decent score. There are a couple of other options out there in Robert Key, who is a mature player, and Hampshire’s Michael Carberry. I haven’t seen Carberry myself but I have heard that the selectors are taking him seriously.

Down at Nos six to nine, England will be looking to stack up a pile of all-rounders to make up for the loss of Andrew Flintoff. They don’t have an Ian Botham-type player – those only come along once or twice in a generation. So the alternative is to spread the load around. We have already seen Matt Prior, Stuart Broad and Graeme Swann show that they can score reliable runs, and I expect Adil Rashid to be added to the mix. He has jumped the queue ahead of Panesar after two successive county championship matches where he has scored an unbeaten hundred and taken five wickets in an innings with his leg-breaks. On top of that, he is a brilliant fielder in any position. With the case Rashid is making, I don’t think the selectors will be able to keep him out for much longer.

These are the areas that need to be addressed. It will be interesting to see how far they are prepared to stick their necks out when the touring squad is announced, in around a month’s time. There is certainly no room for complacency; England can’t start believing they are the best team in the world, as they did four years ago. But if they beat South Africa in South Africa, they might just be able to say that.