0The Ashes urnEngland’s starting 11 picked by Michael Clarke

In a refresh­ingly can­did inter­view Aus­trali­an cap­tain Michael Clarke has announced the Eng­land start­ing 11 for the first Ashes test.  We’re not sure it’s a good thing that he seems to know the team, but the team he lis­ted is the team we would have picked ourselves, so it could be just intel­li­gent guesswork.

If Eng­land had selec­ted Gra­ham Onions in their squad (as they should have done) we would have pre­ferred to see them play 5 bowl­ers, but Eng­land rarely pick 5 and they wont want to change a for­mula that has brought them a lot of suc­cess in the last few years.  Most of the team picks itself (1 wick­et keep­er, 3 obvi­ous bowl­ers and 4 obvi­ous bats­men) so there are really only 3 places to sort out.  Giv­en that Eng­land con­sist­ently pick 4 bowl­ers we need to find 1 bowl­er and 2 bats­men.  In all 3 cases the choice seems straight-forward.

  1. Cook
  2. Car­berry
  3. Trott
  4. Pieterson
  5. Bell
  6. Root
  7. Pri­or (or Bairstow)
  8. Broad
  9. Swann
  10. Ander­son
  11. Trem­lett

This is a pretty strong look­ing side, and I fancy their chances against any 11 the Aus­sies have to offer.  So with that in mind, it’s time for my series pre­dic­tion.  I’m going to go with 3–0 to Eng­land, although I would­n’t be all that sur­prised if the Aus­sies sneaked one.  With that said, what do we expect the Aus­sie side to be?

  1. Chris Rogers
  2. Dav­id Warner
  3. Shane Wat­son
  4. Michael Clarke
  5. Steve Smith
  6. George Bailey
  7. Brad Had­din
  8. Mitchell John­son
  9. Peter Siddle
  10. Ryan Har­ris
  11. Nath­an Lyon

As we’ve said before, we’re not con­vinced by Shane Wat­son or Steve Smith as bats­men.  George Bailey in unknown and unproven at test level.  In the bowl­ing depart­ment Mitchell John­son does­n’t tend to bowl well against Eng­land and Nath­an Lyon would­n’t get near the Eng­land start­ing 11.  3 of the Aus­sie 6 bats­men are left-handed which is a bonus for Graeme Swann.

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