First Test Rant

This was a disgusting, terrible result for English cricket. This is as poor a Sri Lanka as there has been since I’ve been watching cricket who went into the series with no confidence and having had a hectic schedule. There is no Murali, Malinga or Vaas. The Sri Lankan board and the country itself is a mess; England should not be losing.  Credit to Sri Lanka though, they played well and deserved to win. 

Andrew Strauss is very close to the edge of the precipice. It might well be time for him to go regardless of the result in the second test. As captain you can’t go on scoring no runs while your team is losing. It’s a shame because I respect him as a captain and as a player and I don’t think unlike Vaughan before him that he is no longer good enough to be a test bat but unfortunately he hasn’t scored the runs.

Lol at the English media on the fourth morning. They all predicted England to win. lol, wtf, England hadn’t scored 340 all winter. Why would you expect to England chase this down today on a wearing pitch with a batting order with no confidence now? Retarded.

Samit Patel selection was a terrible selection. He proved exactly what I had predicted. He is not a good batsman and hardly bowled. He bowled poorly in the first innings but somehow fluked a couple of wickets. England needed a proper batsman to play properly, Samit was not that man.

At the start of the winter I wasn’t sure whether Monty should go because I didn’t think his bowling had improved as many had said and his batting and fielding were still terrible. In the UAE he bowled well and didn’t disgrace himself in the field or with the bat but Pakistan are poor players of spin. Here with the ball he lacked penetration, in the field he was an embarrassment and caused England to lose a lot of the momentum in the match/ maybe it was even the turning point of the whole match. I still think he’s basically the same player who last played test cricket 5 years ago. Hopefully Kerrigan continues his improvement and I won’t have to watch Monty through my hands as he bats and fields. 

Alastair Cook was rested from the second warm up because he had scored a hundred in the first warmup and because others had not performed in the first game and England were not sure of who to play as the 6^th batsman. This in hindsight was a bad decision. The batsmen who were going to play in the first test should have been given every chance to be as comfortable as they could be in the conditions. 

One caveat I would like to muse upon is maybe the bowling of England has not been quite as good as everybody has speaking of this winter. Maybe the wickets weren’t as good as people have thought. Obviously the batting has been poor but maybe the bowling and the captaincy(no-one has been saying this has been great, but maybe it has had some affect on the result) hasn’t been quite as top notch as people having been saying.