If Australia were ever to lose 5-0 in England, there would be turmoil from Perth to Port Macquarie, Darwin to Devonport. It would be a national humiliation – the lowest point in Australian sporting history. They’ll make sure it never happens again.
If only the ECB could dispose of ashes in the same way. Twice in eight years we’ve been beaten 5-0, and the last time it happened there wasn’t even a review of what went wrong. Instead, our hapless board simply ignored the manager, made the team’s top batsman a scapegoat, and (after a poor World Cup) decided to focus on white-ball cricket instead.
think about it. England lost the Ashes 5-0, but the ECB actually chose to try and win the trophy for the last four years… (which they didn’t).
What should have happened was of course a focused and determined effort to ensure we send Australia a competitive team in 2017. Make English cricket respectable again. But obviously that’s asking too much. Instead, we sent Australia a worse team than we had in 2012/13. It’s not good enough.
Instead of prioritizing regional tournaments, encouraging specialized spinners, looking for fast, fast-tempo bowlers, and developing batsmen with impeccable technique and the ability to hit the long innings, the ECB actually did the opposite matter……
One of the first things Andrew Strauss did was appoint a coach who was considered a white-ball specialist. The first thing Tom Harrison does (sort of) is say that teams have to play enjoyable cricket and risk losing to win. Steve Smith laughed himself to death. Taking a chance on making the Australian captain the best batsman in the world? I do not think so.
As for the tournament – the domestic competition that is a favorite of players and fans – the ECB sees it as an inconvenience. My Worcestershire club will only be playing two league games at New Road between 15th May and 4th September 2018. That’s basically all summer. How exactly should this help England develop a squad that can compete with Australia?
What exactly has the ECB been doing for the past four years? Instead of helping Joe Root and his team avoid further humiliation, the board pulls out all the stops to create… … City Franchise T20 Championship! You cannot invent it. Their main priority is a game that most cricket fans consider unpopular and unviable.
The effort to fit this T20 monster into an already busy schedule will further damage the prospects of our testing team. The championship will still slip a little bit. Rumor has it that first-class cricket will not be played in August from 2020. This will help us develop our own Nathan Lyon. no.
The driving force behind it all is the economics of cricket, dumbass. The ECB argues that the city concessions will create ample revenue streams… despite the fact that they will lose money in the first few years. As for the crowds that flocked to City Stadium to watch the likes of Chris Gale and Brendon McCallum, didn’t Harrison and Graves figure out that these players were already featured in the hugely popular NatWest Blast?
With England going soft early this morning, I hope everyone remembers the wider context. Minutiae are largely irrelevant. We can criticize Root’s decision to bowl first; we can lay the wound on Moeen’s spinning finger; we can blame the fresh air in James Vince’s ear; heck, we can even blame the selectors. But the real culprit is the ECB – the board that has seen the decline of first-class cricket in England, the decline of correct batting technique, the diminishing attention span of our batsmen and our failure to produce more than one world in England. level madman. Three decades.
Also – and I don’t want to upset everyone too much – the future is unlikely to get better. If you’ve thought that Graves and Harrison might rethink their plans for city franchising if the worst happens and we also lose in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney, then I politely advise you to do so. That happened as likely as Strauss and Petersen were married in a civil ceremony atop Kilimanjaro on Christmas Day.
In fact, the ECB has no plan to prevent us from being humiliated in this series of ashes. They also have no plans to prevent another potential whitewash in 2021. They seem only concerned with picking the low-hanging fruit of T20. Our only chance is that Australia will decline faster than we do.
As painful as it is, I hope everyone quickly forgets about Adelaide. The disaster didn’t happen because Root would have preferred to play 4 instead of 3. The return of Ben Stokes won’t solve most of England’s problems and it doesn’t make much sense to speculate about what we’ll do with the retirements of Anderson and Broad…
The end result is that English cricket (a Test team anyway) is doomed until the guys who run the ECB realize that our supporters – the ones who pay to watch cricket and indirectly pay their wages – care about imitating the IPL and big teams. carnival. We only care about the ashes.
The goals of supporters and leadership organizations have never been more diametrically opposed. This is the sad truth.