1Aussies Tonked — Now to the Future

Firstly an apo­logy for not updat­ing the site much of late – along with the oth­er author for this site I’ve been on a drive through Europe.

We are back now though, so fear not.

So, Eng­land wrapped up the Ashes with a barn­storm­ing per­form­ance on the last day to well and truly send them pack­ing. A lot has been writ­ten already about England’s per­form­ance and, in par­tic­u­lar, Stu­art Broad’s per­form­ance. It was excel­lent, end of.

So I’m going to con­cen­trate on some­thing a little dif­fer­ent, a little off-centre if you will.

When Aus­tralia were at their peak a few years back (seems so long ago now!) the one mis­take they made was not to blood up-and-com­ing young­sters so they had a chance to exper­i­ence the highs and lows of test match cricket.

Their side always picked itself and they stuck to an oft-quoted prin­cip­al of not chan­ging a win­ning side (fair enough). But when the golden gen­er­a­tion decided to call it quits the dearth of exper­i­enced tal­ent was imme­di­ately available.

Eng­land now are in a pos­i­tion of strength. Whilst it would be great to beat the Aus­sies 4–0 we have won the Ashes and won them com­fort­ably. There is no argu­ment – we are a far bet­ter team than they are.

Now would be the per­fect time to test a few young­sters in what will still be a com­pet­it­ive game (the Aus­sies still have some pride to play for) in a no-lose situation.

I’m not say­ing we should tear up the team sheet and start again but there’s no harm with test­ing a few lads.

Firstly I think we should look at who is going to be our next spin­ner. Monty Pan­esar has seem­ingly had a melt down and Simon Ker­rigan has leapt above him in the peck­ing order. Graeme Swann has been England’s best spin-bowl­er for years but he isn’t going to be around for ever and can be prone to the odd knock. Ker­rigan should start.

Tim Bresnan has played well but is now injured. Woakes and Onions have been called with one of them likely to take his place unless Eng­land break a time-hon­oured pos­i­tion and pick two spin­ners at the Oval. Per­son­ally I’m not that sure about Woakes but if Eng­land see him as the future then let’s see what he’s made of.

One pos­i­tion that is rarely talked about these days is that of wick­et keep­er. That’s a massive vote of con­fid­ence in Matt Pri­or who has made the pos­i­tion his own. But who comes next? Are Eng­land look­ing to have Jonny Bair­stow as his long-term suc­cessor? Or are they look­ing else­where? Either way it would be an idea to test their second option in the test-match arena.

So that’s three changes already. Now what about the bat­ting line-up? Well, Bell aside, the top-order have largely failed to shine, get­ting starts but not con­vert­ing them and not bat­ting in part­ner­ships. Des­pite this the top order, with the pos­sible excep­tion of Bair­stow, will pick itself for the next instal­ment of the Ashes but there’s no harm in see­ing what oth­ers have to offer. Taylor is clearly in the select­ors’ thoughts but two York­shire lads –Gary Bal­lance (who hit a cen­tury for the Eng­land Lions vs the Aus­sies) is there or there­abouts as is fel­low Yorkie, 20 year old Alex Lees. One of the three should be con­sidered with any of the cur­rent bats­men (Bell and Cook aside) hav­ing a rest.

Revolu­tion­ary stuff I know, and we do run the risk of los­ing the last match, but wouldn’t it be even sweeter if we still tonked them with four first-team­ers out.

As an aside you will be proud of these two authors. When in Venice on our European adven­ture we got into con­ver­sa­tion with two young Aus­trali­an ladies. Des­pite their back­ground we both man­aged to avoid the burn­ing tempta­tion to men­tion the crick­et. Gold star for us!