Arthur Crabtree wrote:Maybe the comparison could be WI after BCL and Shiv was their last great batter.
Though, JB and Gentle Ben are decent Test bats.
There'll be good players around. Just a matter of finding them.
That's what was so annoying about the fatalism around picking Moeen as the spinner. It was a selectorial white flag.
Moeen's initial selection was rather unnecessary as well. Before his debut series, Stokes was fit (not 100% maybe, but certainly fitter than Broad and Prior who were selected) but England decided to punish him for the locker punch. So Moeen was the all-rounder for that series, even though he only bowled occasionally that winter with the white ball teams.
Granted, choosing a spinner at that time was no easy task, I can't say who should have been picked (and it was 4 years ago now), but England made things difficult for themselves the way they did it.
If Leach nails down a place though, it's difficult to see how Moeen fits in outside of Asia and the Windies. We've seen plenty of his batting and whilst he'd be a better option at #3 than Vince, he'd still be too loose to be a specialist batsman.