by Arthur Crabtree » Sat Nov 08, 2014 4:33 pm
A year of eight months. I could have typed this in August, as England's Test cricket shut down for the year then, until the tour of West Indies next Spring. Probably not a bad thing. Following the England cricket team hasn't been a pleasurable experience for the past year, almost exactly since the happy tourists arrived in Australia with their menu of super-fruits and a heavy schedule of team meetings.
Personally, I can't remember a year as dismal as this since Mike Gatting, currently a managing director at the ECB and President of the MCC, took a rebel tour to South Africa. Most of it seems to have been centred around the reaction to Kevin Pietersen's sacking and literary retaliation, and Alastair Cook's hapless tenancy as England skipper, and the ECB's image manipulation of Captain Steely. Cook had a terrible year, the feuds with opposition captains and the press rendered all the more stark for his poor batting form. Still, with a backwind of support from the press, he got through it. And Cooky, was given an unexpected boost from Pietersen's sympathetic rendering in his autobiography.
But this thread is about events on the field. Unfortunately not a year of cricket easy to celebrate for supporters of the England side. Twenty-fourteen started in Sydney, where a disinterested England XI completed their series whitewash against a bellicose and vengeful Australian team which righted some ancient wrongs with a huge win. Probably by Sydney, a reserve state side would have done the job. It wasn't even easy to indulge in petulant hostility towards the victorious opposition. The England side was pretty hard to like itself
Back home, Sri Lanka won their first ever series in England, and when India bounced England out on a green Lord's pitch, made for their own bowlers, England had reached a fresh low. Cook had Ballance and Bell and a lot of luck, to thank for his recovery in Southampton, and subsequently Anderson and Broad with the ball. Yet, so abject was India's submission to three successive defeats, that it hardly lifted the gloom. Watching them throw away their wickets to Moeen Ali felt a little bit depressing.
So, in perennial fashion, I'll pick the five best batting and bowling displays for and against England this year, and then pick an opposition XI. But you know, what stays freshest in the mind since the start of the year, is the aggro, on and off pitch. No more of that, on with the action.
I always say that everybody's right.