sussexpob wrote:How many of these players would we consider to have had specialist bat records, along with a high strike rate, that made them worth of selection in one day cricket??
Root, Roy, Hales, Trescothick, Collingwood, Stokes, Bairstow, Buttler are all players worth of selection, and who excelled.
Collingwood had a career SR of 77. All the rest of those other than Bairstow and Trescothick are post-2011 picks, and Bairstow wasn't quite there yet at that point. Neither was Taylor
Kieswetter did ok and probably deserved a better run.
Morgan and KP were legitimately the best ODI batsmen we had at the time.
Who else was there?
Prior, Bell, Cook, Strauss were the other specialist batsmen in the England set-up in 2011, no-one is defending their inclusion that I can see. Yardy was crap and picked mainly as a bowler. Patel you can make a case that his career stats were alright, but a lot of that average of 32 comes from being not out in a third of his innings - i.e. death slogging. He only passed 50 once in 22 innings and usually only contributed about 24 runs per innings. He might have deserved a better run in the side as a lower-order allrounder, but he wasn't top 6 material.
Maybe you can cobble together a hypothetical XI of players who should have been in from the counties and never got a run who would have done better, but we'll never know if they would have been able to make the step up to international level or not.
I think we can all agree that England were awful in ODIs back then, and the selection was all over the shop. But I still maintain that the player who scored 1300 runs at over 50 was not the reason we lost so many games.