Helmand High Water
Interesting day overall, England somehow manage to beat Afghanistan even though they reversed their batting order with Worcestershire & Northants (ex) T20 openers batting at 8 & 9. Then India suspiciously manage to win as Banned-gladesh clearly called Arsene Wenger in for their innings tactics. Choke is not the word, almost suspicious how the wickets and batsmen behaved?
To someone as sceptical as me, it stank of Mohammed Amir-agenaftamaban.
But I will be focussing on the England training game. Well, it should have been.
So the first thing was winning the toss and expecting to boost the net run rate we would choose to bowl and then knock them off double quick and jobs a good'un heading into the Sri Lanka game right? Nope, wrong...
The brains trust lent to us by the paddy's decided he'd stick the Afghan's in the field and attempt to bully the bowlers and pump them back to Helmand.
Well Eoin, that backfired a tad!
The England lineup is exciting, there is no disputing that, but i can't help but think Trevor (Bayliss) has never seen any footage of the players he could potentially use. If he had, surely the lineup would appear like the following based on the County T20 sides, in brackets are their actual positions today;
J. ROY (1)
A. HALES / J. VINCE (DNB/2)
D. WILLEY (9)
M. ALI (7)
J. ROOT (3)
E. MORGAN (4)
J. BUTTLER (6)
B. STOKES (5)
A. RASHID (DNB)
C. JORDAN (8)
L. PLUNKETT (DNB)
So can you now see my point? why would you select two openers at 7 & 9? Especially when David Willey has one of the fastest T20 centuries in a huge pressure environment against certain players who are consistently batting above him? How is this happening? Fine, I will name names, Chris Jordan. How is he anywhere near the side? What does he offer other than a demographic interest? Can't bat, bowls absolute buffet. Topley, another talented bowler, but cannot deliver on the big stage. We need someone like a Hannon-Dalby, not the fastest, but has more tricks than Paul Daniels in his prime. He's a wiley, thinking bowler. Just a thought...
So Jason Roy gets a send off after running past one,16-1 in the 3rd.
Vince chips one back to the bowler, Morgan forgets how to bat, Roooooooot gets run out by the Ginger Nugget (Stokes) all in 4 balls. in fact for the next 43 runs which took almost 10 overs, we lose Buttler, Stokes & The Boy Wonder Chris Jordan for a combined 28...
Excellent work fellers, no seriously well done. As Bumble said, it was "mindless". I'll go one better and describe it with a simple icon, 💩
Once again, if you know me, you will be sick of me saying this, Willey and Ali are in the WRONG POSITIONS!!!!!!!!
5.3 overs, these two put a stand together to take the score to 142!
If we have that outset with the fielding restrictions, we would have demoralised the opposition with 14 overs still to bowl!
Would the likes of Starc, Steyn, Rabada, Southee etc fancy bowling at a lineup which is gunning down to 9 with batsmen in their natural, familiar role? Not a bloody chance.
Do I really need to comment on the above? So can someone enlighten me as to why Jordan is in India? It's obvious there is a reason, but it's clearly not for batting or bowling.
On to Sri Lanka, I actually think this will be tougher than we are believing. Yes they are missing Sangakkarra, Jayawardene, Malinga, but they still have Mendes, Herath, Angelo Matthews and of course Dilshan.
But fear not! Remember, we have Chris Jordan...
