ENGLAND v INDIA at Trent Bridge

Hello and welcome back to my blog


Well Fletcher, the coach that won the 2005 Ashes, may be coaching India but it's his side that is being taken down by the very kind of planning that he nurtured in that team of 6 years ago. Admittedly the plans required to unhinge this Indian side aren't nearly as clever as those to disrupt Ricky Ponting's outfit but the skill and ruthlessness of their execution has been impressive so far. England have managed to crush India by over 300 runs after conceding a first innings lead. They yet again exposed how weak the Indian bowling can be without Zaheer Khan (and a fit Harbhajan Singh for that matter but a little about him later). Bell played one of his best innings and with the home side 2-0 up the possible exclusion of an injured Trott (the reason Bell batted at 3) shouldn't prove as costly as it might have done. For England the temptation must be there to bring Steven Finn back to expose the Indian lower order to another barrage of short pitched bowling, an obvious but ridiculously effective plan.
If Trott's injury won't concern England all that much, the injuries to the Indian team must be inflicting nightmares upon the management. The absence of Sehwag has proven to be a far larger curse than I thought it would, his destructive batting is ideal for not allowing the likes of Anderson and Bresnan to settle and certainly a better risk to take than to open with your form batsman (Dravid) and watch him get out to the swinging ball early. With weaker sides I would be more hesitant to advise such a move but with a top of the test ranking battle it pays never to be too conservative.
Indeed that appears to be India's main problem. They seem to be playing old school test cricket and old subcontinent cricket at that! Just settle in for a long innings and rack up a slow 500 runs - i.e. win the test with your batsmen instead of your bowlers which is the complete opposite to how a series in England is decided. The bowling and fielding is appalling in attitude, and by extension the results are as well, the kind of 'going through the motions' rubbish that flat subcontinent wickets breed sadly. The English team proved time and again in this test that you can manufacture wickets with a bit of planning, aggressive fielding and accurate bowling. At this point I expect that England will win this series by 3-1 if not 4-0 and rightfully become test cricket's top team (at least on the evidence of this series)


Now to a point of contention
When Ian Bell was on 137 and on the ball before tea, he was runout in bizarre circumstances when he left his crease (thinking that the shot had gone across the boundary and that it was basically the tea break) before being reinstated after Dhoni (eventually) withdrew the appeal during the break. The whole incident, while having little to do with the result of the match, has divided opinion in both countries with the two arguments basically boiling down to whether it was in the spirit of the game to withdraw the appeal; some have said that Bell should have known better and others say it was a great piece of statesmanship for Dhoni to provide such charity while being thrashed. Now I agree with both of those actually: Bell should have known better and Dhoni was kind to withdraw the call. The point I would like to make is the role of the crowd in these decisions - I have no doubt, no doubt that their reaction (needless to say it was vocal and not in favour of the visitors) was a key factor in Dhoni's decision and this disappoints me. Not that it was a factor but that it is allowed to be a factor, as cricket fans we need to understand that cricket was always the sport where quirky things occur and momentum can turn on the naivity of a player who forgets a basic rule for example. This is an idealist position and asks a lot of passionate cricket fans but an ideal is still something to aspire to and I would also contend that a real cricket fan would take such an instance on the chin - perhaps even see the humourous side to it; there is plenty of irony in a man set on 137 being dismissed by such a lapse in judgement.
Some have trumped up the Grant Eliot incident from 2008 or the Murali incident in New Zealand some years ago (you may well remember watching either one without my needing to go into detail - I witnessed both of them live and feel I have the ability to comment on the comparison). You can already tell perhaps that I think this is nonsense. In particular the comparison to Eliot being runout in that ODI, to think this a valid point you must, MUST believe that the batsman made an error and was runout according to the rules (basically what happened to Bell). Now this is babble of the loosest kind, Eliot was knocked to the ground in an accident that was the fault of neither he nor Sidebottom (the bowler) and should have been called back. The Murali case is slightly more grey because that error was of Murali's creation and certainly a cricketer of his experience should have known better. McCullum, who affected that runout had every right to whip the bails off and although it was unfortunate there is a key difference between these cases. For me it is all about whether the player has made an error of judgement


Last things
It was announced right before I finished this entry that Harbhajan Singh and Yuvraj Singh will be out of the rest of this series. It's difficult to tell whether this is injury based or form based to be honest. Both are dynamic players that England have undone across the two tests

Well the next match is at Edgebaston and with any luck I will have a man (and lady!) on the ground there to give me inside info. This venue always seems to provide an interesting test match so we can look forward to that

Well that's it from here and I hope you join me again
It's good bye for now