Time for England to do some serious thinking
England may have hung on to a draw at Cardiff but they will need to do some serious thinking about their game if they are to challenge Australia in the remaining Tests
Ashwin Achal
25-Feb-2013
England may have hung on to a draw at Cardiff but they will need to do some serious thinking about their game if they are to challenge Australia in the remaining Tests. Both the batting and the bowling needs some work, feels Lawrence Booth in the Guardian.
Each bowler let England down in his own way. Jimmy Anderson forgot that he is at his best pitching the ball up. Stuart Broad unaccountably spoon-fed Phillip Hughes. Andrew Flintoff briefly rode a wave of popular raucousness, then reverted to unpenetrative type and is now injured once more. Graeme Swann overpitched; Monty Panesar lacked verve - and both spinners bowled too fast. They probably didn't go into this game thinking they would learn anything off Hauritz, but Ashes cricket evidently retains its capacity to surprise.
Kevin Mitchell, in the same paper, doesn't think too much of Andrew Strauss's captaincy, and feels that the draw cannot hide his inadequacies as captain. He compares Strauss and Michael Vaughan, calling the retired batsman the 'near perfect captain of recent times'.
Strauss's field placings, meanwhile, ranged between unimaginative and puzzling and his bowling changes asked few hard questions. He was not helped by some ordinary bowling and idiot batting, but there was none the less a palpable sense of drift. Occasionally Strauss looked to the skies for the promised rain, the equivalent of a beaten boxer going to the ropes with his gloves around his head hoping the referee will rescue him from his torment. Muhammad Ali, as fine a boxer as he was, won many a bout with what might best be described as the power of his intellect, an intangible magic that drained his opponents of rational response. Vaughan did it to Ponting in 2005. If Strauss is to have even a chance of emulating him, he has to find sorcery from somewhere.