The fantasy of the balanced side

Both teams set out to play this Ashes series with a balanced side – five bowlers and five specialist batsmen. So far, neither has managed it.

Australia abandoned the policy before the first Test, when their allrounder, Shane Watson, pulled up lame. They reverted to six batsmen and four bowlers, and it has mostly worked a treat. The sixth batsman, Michael Clarke, has made runs, and the fifth bowler was missed only on the first two days at Adelaide, when England tucked into Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne as never before. Now, following Damien Martyn’s sudden retirement, the Aussies are flirting with balance again by bringing back Andrew Symonds as their allrounder.

England went ahead and played a balanced side – or tried to. They picked five bowlers and six batsmen, with Andrew Flintoff as the pivot, just like in their glory years of 2004 and 2005. But it hasn’t worked out like that. The balanced side has been a fantasy.

With an overloaded Flintoff going in at six and an out-of-form Geraint Jones at seven, the batting has been brittle. Each time Flintoff has batted after a bowling stint, he has flopped. He has been his old self only in the first innings at Adelaide, when he made a breezy 38 not out in a no-pressure situation. His struggles are confirming the simple truth that no man can do three jobs on a cricket field for any length of time.

At his best as an allrounder, in 2005, Flintoff was visibly giving his all for England. Once he was captain as well, on the toughest tour in the game, something had to give. It was his batting. He managed some captain’s innings in India, but since then he has been scoring like a tailender: five Tests, 103 runs, average 17. His strike rate has plunged from his usual merry 70 to a wary 49. He has managed a few fours and sixes, but the ones and twos have dried up. It’s block, bash and usually crash.

So England have really only been picking five batsmen. And they certainly haven’t had that many bowlers. At Brisbane, three of them were liabilities – Steve Harmison, Jimmy Anderson and Ashley Giles. At Adelaide, all three were picked again. They improved to the extent that their three wickets cost 368 instead of 485. None of them has managed even a two-for so far. This England side is balanced in only one sense: the batsmen and the bowlers are both liable to go to pieces.

The silver lining here is that the selection has been so wrong that both suits can be strengthened at once. The most pressing need is for a third bowling banker – someone as dependable as Flintoff and Hoggard. There is only one candidate in the tour party: Monty Panesar. Not because he is a saviour or a panacea – those are just labels. It’s because, on the evidence of recent Tests, he is steady and occasionally deadly. Only three men have taken a five-for for England in the past year – Hoggard, Harmison and Panesar.

In 2006, Monty has 32 wickets in ten Tests at an average of 32 and a strike rate of 75. Giles has six wickets in four Tests at an average of 84 and a strike rate of 157. Go back to Giles’s last 10 Tests and he has 17 wickets at 67. Compared to Monty, Giles offers half the wickets at twice the price. The gulf between them is there in every column of their stats, even the maidens – Monty bowls 10 per Test, Giles only four. One builds up pressure, the other releases it.

Good citizen though he is, Giles is never picked as one of four bowlers, which is revealing. It’s a tacit admission that he isn’t good enough. He is a fifth bowler. In the last Ashes, that was all right because Flintoff and Simon Jones were forming a little dream team as third and fourth seamers. Since then, Giles’s bowling has been like his batting: marginal. England’s four victories since the Ashes (not counting the Hair forfeit) have all come without him – and with Panesar.

If Flintoff and Fletcher finally accept this and leave him out, what happens to England’s balance? Not much, as long as they also accept that Flintoff himself isn’t able to operate fully as a batsman. So he moves down to seven, with Ed Joyce coming in higher up (hell of a time to make a debut, but England didn’t have the sense to pick anyone with experience, and Joyce does have plenty of talent). This leaves Flintoff as one of four bowlers, which is a risk, but not as bad as having only five batsmen for a must-win Test.

It means Paul Collingwood – mysteriously untried so far – and Kevin Pietersen will have to bowl some of Giles’s overs. With Panesar taking the rest, the net result might even be a profit. England’s attack will then be Hoggard, Flintoff, Panesar and one other. This could be Harmison, though it would be an act of blind loyalty. Or it could be Sajid Mahmood, who has pace, bounce, movement and the knack of getting good batsmen out. He just doesn’t have consistency. The normal caveat about him is that he is expensive, but he can hardly go for many more runs than Anderson has (4.78 an over). It would be a less balanced side only on paper. In practice, it would be better-equipped to climb the mountain that England now face.