Indian White Wash
3 down and no real sign of Pieteresen’s boys making an impact in India in the one day series. Off the back of a total humiliation in the Stanford Cup Final, England have so far failed to pick themselves up in India.
The most worrying thing is that even with a slight improvement in each match, they still look nowhere near competing. The Indian spinners seem to have the English batsmen at odds and ends, and despite having “batting” down to 9 or 10, we have yet to bat for a full innings, which is an age old problem mentioned before on this blog.
If we do manage to stay at the crease against spin, then the runs dry up pretty quickly meaning we post too low a total. Yet when we play our own spinners they seem to get hit all round the park, although Graham Swann probably looked the best of the bunch yesterday.
To be fair Yuvraj Singh has been in outstanding form, but at the end of the day it would appear that we are just not good enough. Occasionally we get the odd glimpse of what could be e.g when Pietersen and Flintoff were in together in the second ODI, but as always seems to happen with England, when that partnership was broken we collapsed like a deck of cards.
On the bowling side we are just not consistent enough. Whenever there is a problem the ball gets thrown to Flintoff, but in the limited over game especially, then others have to step up to the mark. Anderson and Harmison are too erratic by far. They are as likely to get clubbed for six or bowl a wide as they are to take a wicket. When the ball isn’t swinging then Anderson seems to lack the ability to bowl a consistent line and length and put the batsman under pressure. One or two balls an over are too loose and get thumped for boundaries letting the opposition off the hook.
So what’s the answer? Well I’m afraid there isn’t one right now. Whatever players you put in the squad and whatever combination eventually make it onto the pitch, we are simply not good enough to compete at the top level. A whitewash in the ODI series at least is definitely on the cards.