England's bid to win back-to-back World Cups is off to the worst start — and the ECB must Blame Photo: REUTERS/Andrew Bowers
England's start World Cup on the wrong foot. The mindset of their batsmen against New Zealand was wrong. The Hundred and T20 Vitality Blast have programmed them to play high-risk shots rather than making low-risk centuries as Devon Conway and Rachin Ravindra brilliantly did.
Key to winning 50- There is nothing complicated behind the matches. One of the best batsmen should do very well, or rather, on the flat pitches of Asia, very much do.
In this World Cup opener, neat symmetry saw Conway score 150 out of 150 or more in one-day international competitions. Of those 150-plus points, only 21 of them, or 14 percent, were scored by the losing side. On a more positive note, a team that has a batsman who scores 150 wins six games out of seven.
The Hundred and 20 Overs competitions serve several purposes. But even their most ardent proponents can't argue that the sport's shortest formats encourage batsmen to score big hundreds (yes, it's ironic that a format hostile to batsmen wanting to reach three figures is called the Hundred).
Each of England's top seven batsmen in Ahmedabad was dismissed for an unintentional error, an attempt to play a risky shot — an attempt to run before they could walk, before they had built a platform, before they had earned the right to concentrate on borders. The result is a pathetic spectacle of England's last pair struggling to hit the over.
And that's exactly what the Hundred and T20 have forced England batsmen to do all summer. They were only given four one-day internationals against New Zealand to adjust. Before this World Cup, they would have been better off playing Test cricket like England are doing now, scoring the ball almost from the run-up, just playing traditional cricket shots.
Sorry, but this is not post-event wisdom. On August 4, I wrote on this site about a one-day competition in the Metro area, that is, with 50 participants. It all started in the shadow of the Ashes and the Hundred: “And yet none of England's current one-day players are playing in this 50-over domestic competition. Is this what madness is? Or is it counterintuitive, illogical, or just plain stupid?
Some 120 of England's best white-ball cricketers are, of course, taking part in the Hundred, a competition that has attempted to reinvent the wheel. They play games that last 200 balls, with overs that typically last five balls, before World Cup matches that last 600 balls.
There is a world of differences. Batting in a hundred consists of trying to hit each ball for a boundary. In 50-over cricket on flat pitches such as the World Cup-hosted India, the opening batsman must negotiate a new ball that swings briefly; watch for the use of the first game in the powerplay of 10 overs, when only two fielders are allowed to go beyond the semi-circles; play many overs from 10 to 40, working as spinners, without leaving the game; and only then, in about the last 10 overs, open up, as happens in T20 and Hundred games.
The master of ODI batting was India captain Rohit Sharma. He scored eight scores above 150, including his highest of 264. Virat Kohli scored five such scores above 150: ODI format suits him best.
England? Jonny Bairstow, Dawid Malan, Joe Root, Harry Brook and Liam Livingstone have not scored a single ODI score of 150 between them. Jos Buttler has scored two goals — against the Netherlands and the West Indies. Ben Stokes is the main exception to this rule: he scored 182 in the Oval ODI against New Zealand. Stokes, of course, did not play in a T20 or Hundred match last summer, only in Tests.
England could have been well prepared for this World Cup if their players had competed in the Metro District competition. The ECB's commercial imperatives dictated that they should play in the Hundred. So England have a lot of bad habits to break if they are to return to Ahmedabad for the final and retain the World Cup title they won after a perfect preparation for 2019.
Weird, not true is it? The fact is that in the fall you will reap what you sow.
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