ICC World Cup

I don't think it will be very long before Graves removes Downton Shabby, Moores and Whitaker - all of whom were Clarke appointees - and replaces them with the Headingley trio of Mark Arthur, Jason Gillespie and Martyn Moxon.

After all, historically it was always said that a strong Yorkshire means a strong England!!!

Every time Colin Graves speaks he undermines his executive team.

What an expensive dropped catch by Joyce!

Five South Africans (Amla, Du Plessis, De Villiers, Duminy and Miller) have scored tons in this World Cup. Rossouw and De Kock make up an excellent top seven.

I'm afraid my lack of resepct for Stuart Broad grows stronger every time he opens his mouth.

In his latest (sponsored) interview today, he first suggests the England squad is being "distracted" by KP.  (Silly old me : I thought they were losing because we're just not very good and we're actually missing KP).

He then goes on to have a lightbulb moment in which he finally realises that, as many of us have been saying for months, under Moores (and Flower before him) the England dressing room is unhealthily obssessed with stats and charts and virtual cricket on their iPads instead of concentrating on practice, play and learn.

“When we were at our best, we had characters like Trotty and Swanny. They couldn’t give a crap what anyone else was doing. They hardly knew who we were playing against. Maybe as a playing group we can get stronger with not bothering what the opposition are doing...I have been looking at things like where Dilshan’s strong areas are and where you shouldn’t you bowl to Sangakkara, but actually from now on I’m not interested in that. I’m going to run in and bowl what I’m good at.”

So that's Broad's sister out of a job , then (she's on a paid sinecure as an i-Pad "analyst" in the England dressing room).

But the worst bit is the nasty, cheap, shoddy, shabby piece of sponsorship at the bottom of Broad's interview: "Stuart Broad was with Hardys Wine at their Tintara Winery, selecting the wines to be sold at this summer’s Ashes series. www.hardyswines.com. "

One good thing, though: if senior players like Broad are now openly rubishing Moores' approach in public pronouncements brought to us courtesy of Hardy's Wine, I don't think Moores will be in charge very much longer.

Well done to cricinfo for blatantly nicking the interview and for refusing to print the vile sponsorship endorsement at the foot of their piece!

One of the problems of this ridiculously elongated 14 team world cup and England having a week between games is that the press corps accompanying them have to justify their existence(and expense accounts) by filing 1000 words of meaningless crap every day.

Broad is a complete numbskull but I feel sorry for his sister whom he seems to want to put out of a job. But she can probably go and earn £6.50 an hour as a waitress or a cleaner and - as big brother said the other week - people on nat. minimum wage should be grateful...

But it's probably unfair to pick on Broad as he makes himself such an easy target, and we should be grateful as he may have done us all a favour by coming out and criticising Moores' methods in such forthright fashion. The tabloids and Doballs should be making hay with what he has said. There's a cracking tabloid headline there along the lines of 'England bowlers mutiny against Moores'.

Fascinating piece by Andy Bull  from The Spin about the Moores/Flower/Moores regime's  reliance on stats, Hawkeye charts and computer analysis, and how we end up with Morgan stubbornly continuing to insist  that 309 v Sri Lanka was  "brilliant"  and "25 runs above par", even after the result had proved that it wasn't .

Relevant extract here:

"Moores was one of the new breed of coaches. A numbers man, and disciple of Michael Lewis’s much abused book, Moneyball. He even gave a copy to his batting coach, Andy Flower. Moores was so keen on advanced computer analysis that he used it as the sole basis for some of his decisions – the decision to recall Ryan Sidebottom to the side, for instance.

When Flower took over the team, he hired Nathan Leamon, a qualified coach and a former maths teacher, as the team’s analyst. The players nicknamed Leamon “Numbers”. He was extraordinarily meticulous. He used Hawk-Eye to draw up spreadsheets of every single ball delivered in Test cricket in the preceding five years. He ran match simulations – accurate to within 5% – to help England determine their strategies and their team selections. For the bowlers, he broke the pitch down into 20 blocks, each of them 100cm by 15cm, and told them which ones they should hit to best exploit the weaknesses Hawk-Eye had revealed in the opposing batsmen. Bowlers should aim to hit that particular block at least twice an over. Do that, Leamon told them, and they would “markedly increases the chance of success”.

England, it was said, were making better use of the computer analysis than any other team in the world. And it was working. They won the World T20, the Ashes home and away, and became, for a time, the No1 team in all three formats of the game. Leamon’s work was picked out as one of the reasons why. And yet now they’re losing, that very same approach is being singled out as one of the things they are doing wrong. You can see why. After England’s nine-wicket defeat to Sri Lanka, Eoin Morgan said “Going in at the halfway I think we got 310, probably 25 for both par, and again, stats back that up, par is 275, 280.” It was, Morgan thought, the bowlers who were to blame for the loss. They had delivered too many bad balls. He said he didn’t yet know why. “Over the next couple of days, we will get the Hawk-Eye stuff back and the proof will be in that.”
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On Tuesday morning, Kevin Pietersen tweeted that England “are “too interested in stats”. He was echoing Graeme Swann’s comments from last summer. “I’ve sat in these meetings for the last five years,” Swann said. “It was a statistics-based game. There was this crazy stat where if we get 239 – this was before the fielding restrictions changed a bit so it would be more now, I assume – we will win 72% of matches. The whole game was built upon having this many runs after this many overs, this many partnerships, doing this in the middle, working at 4.5 an over.” Swann said he was left shaking his head."

A reasonably close match between Scotland and Bangladesh that exposed both the strengths and the fallibilities of the case for excluding Associate sides from the next World Cup, an argument rehearsed on this forum. On the one hand it is undoubtedly true that the lack of bowling of an acceptable standard,much more than the batting or any tactical naivety has been the undoing of Scotland, Ireland, and even Afghanistan, the best-equipped in this regard. But then, hasn't poor bowling undermined England, and West Indies, and others? In short-form cricket just one bowler hitting form at just the right time in an innings can swerve the course of a match, or a few poor deliveries from a higher-rated player can play mercilessly into the hands of a Warner, a De Villiers, or even a Tamim Iqbal.

The closest contests have come from games involving these minnows. It has been all one to Australia and South Africa who they scored their 400 + runs against and New Zealand, on home teritory and in the form of their lives, with a team who clearly bond together so much more happily than in the recent past, will rattle up the runs in the happy knowledge that Southee will swing balls round corners and fearful batsmen will forget everything they ever learned about playing this strange, uncanonical form of white-ball bowling. Clearly these three teams are on a pedestal of achievement far higher than any other competitors, and barring accident - that one, in-form player finding the lucky touch at the crucial moment - one of them will win this tournament, and whoever they meet in the final, the match will be one-sided precisely because the combination of talent, form and team esprit is so high that the side that first shows it in the game will drain those qualities from the other.

India, England, West Indies, Sri Lanka, Pakistan - all sides capable of doing much more, but not consistently. England's problems have been too exhaustively dissected to warrant more of the same, but all the others have similar elements : two or three real stars, who sometimes refuse to sparkle, a group of talented but lesser players, imbalances in team selection, and interestingly, every one of them having some unsettling relationships with management and controlling Board. India could have joined the leading pack were it not for the ongoing conflicts between Dhoni's ego and the other power elements in team and management.

That leaves Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, and there really is very little to choose between these sides and , on a good day, any of the Associates playing here, and perhaps one or two who missed the cut. If we opt for a 10 side World Cup, as is currently the ICC plan, its wagons formed up in a protective laager around the cosy confraternity it has created and whose substance it is determined to maintain, then will we be having the same discussions about the inclusion of these teams next time? After 10 years there has been no radical improvement in Test performances, despite considerable touring exposure - although some ICC members are rather more generous in their scheduling than others - and Zimbabwe still has a strong dependence on the traditional backbone of batting from members of former colonial families long established in the internal structure of the game.

I think we do need more competition, more wild-cards, but not necessarily to take part on a league basis. I'd be happy for the next Cup to have 16 teams playing straight knockouts - imagine the excitement if Ireland beat Pakistan then! - or even more, with a seeding system in place and a preliminary round, rather like theway the old Gillette Cup first round used to operate with the top 5 Minor Counties. Everybody sneered at it,but it got Bill Edrich back playing in front of big crowds at the age of 55, and it wiped the smirks off some Yorkshire faces when they became the first county to lose to a non-championship side. Durham, as I recall, long before money and the Riverside came calling. That could provide enough games to suit the media companies,and maybe open up some more markets for them. And it might make for some more interesting cricket.

Or put another way : England have to win both their remaining games and still might not qualify. Bangladesh only have to win one to be certain of a q/f place.

I still think England will scrape through as I didn't see anything in the BD bowling last night that should prevent both England and NZ beating them. But who knows? We are going to have to play much better than we have in the tournament so far, with both bat and ball...

Another glass, Mr Borderman?