Squaring the Pakistan series would be a huge relief to the ECB but it may have to be done without Ben StokesThe Headingley Test has become a spicier match than was ever anticipated at the start of the summer. England were so dire at Lord’s, so emphatically beaten by the side ranked No 7 in the world, that the calls for upheaval will reach a deafening level if England lose again in Leeds.Suddenly jobs are at stake. Another defeat and there will be more demands for heads to roll. The usual reaction and the one that is familiar whenever a football side are losing is simple: sack the coach. In any case, in this instance, it is Trevor Bayliss’s turn....
A thumping defeat at Lord’s by Pakistan in mid-May has set alarm bells ringing and raised concerns about the methodologyNever mind The Hundred; English cricket is in dire need of any old hundred. The inability of England’s Test team to convert fifties into centuries has become one of their defining foibles. And it’s getting worse: 24% in 2016, 20% in 2017 and, so far in 2018, a pitiful 6%. An elite batting lineup – such as England in 2010‑11 – would be at around 40%. An even more perverse statistic is that since English cricket’s new dawn in the summer of 2015, the one-day international team have a much better conversion rate (27%) than the Test team (19%). Given the...
England’s crushing defeat highlighted how red-ball cricket’s marginalisation in this country is damaging the development of Test players – but Pakistan’s victory was a triumphFor the romantic rather than the English patriot, the Lord’s Test provided a wonderful outcome.England were humbled by the pace trio of Mohammad Abbas, Hasan Ali and Mohammad Amir. Abbas is a former leather worker from Sialkot, who has been playing in the most uncharted domestic competition in the world for seven or eight years before an excursion as Leicestershire’s overseas player (maybe not the most glamorous of overseas gigs); Hasan’s parents wanted him to get a proper job as a lawyer so they apparently burned his cricket whites; Amir is the cricketing prodigal son, misled...
Test debutant and Jos Buttler make a stand amid England’s desperate inability to find impetus against brilliant PakistanWhen the game was as good as lost, England at last started to play as if they could win. They were 110 for six, still 69 runs behind, when Dom Bess joined Jos Buttler in the middle. The two of them batted right through the late afternoon, in the sunny lees of a hot summer day. Buttler is a man of peerless talent but the way Bess, a 20-year-old playing his first Test, made it all look so easy showed up just how poor England had been until he came to the crease. They put on 125 and the hours their partnership lasted...
Joe Root’s side have now been dismissed for under 250 in seven of the 14 Test innings they have played since SeptemberSeems new dawns last longer in the Arctic winter than they do in English cricket. At Lord’s their latest broke at around 3.30pm, when Jos Buttler walked out to join Ben Stokes in the middle, then set again 40 minutes later when Stokes was dismissed leg-before and Buttler was caught at second slip. By 4.30pm, England were all out for 184. They had lost six wickets for 35 runs in 63 balls. Sudden and short as it all was, the mayhem lasted long enough to make one thing clear – whatever was wrong with the team’s batting in the...