Some of the comments about technical deficiencies amongst our younger players fail to fully understand the situation that has created them, namely the fact that first class cricket has been forced to the extremities of the season and, even when this process had not been completed, the promotion relegation imperative had not been well enough regulated, so Counties were getting away with producing deliberately poor pitches to force results. In such an environment, there is no shock that medium pacers who can make the ball talk take precedence over lean quicks who maybe just sit in the surface to be hit, nor is it a surprise that many batsmen adopt a mindset of "get some, before they get me".
Even when games are in the right part of the year, how many grounds produce good sporting pitches with pace and carry? I reckon from the cricket I have seen over the last five years that there are less than a handful left, and even the few that produce consistent bounce tend now to overly favour the batsmen (The Oval, I'm looking at you!)
Case in point - James Vince. A man with a Test career behind him that he would like, one imagines, to repurpose in front of him. Knowing that the most available slots in the England side were in the top three, he chose last year to move himself DOWN the batting order at Hampshire. One can only conclude that he felt he had more chance of convincing the selectors that he could move those runs up the order in Tests, than he had to actually score runs in the top three...
Second case in point - Ollie Pope. Its easy on recent form to suppose, as many of you have, that he is a busted flush, or that he was never of the required level in the first place. I thought about that view myself long and hard but I always come back to the hundred he made against Yorkshire a couple of years ago - against a top quality attack, on a difficult pitch he was simply in a different class to anyone else. My conclusion was that his issues largely stem from playing at The Oval because on a deck that benign, you can just walk down the wicket to quicks a few balls in because the ball is going nowhere!
Author
Topic: Ashes Test Series - 2021/22 (Read 90971 times)