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England Cricket 2022

Stuart Broad in today’s Daily Fail:

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I have to confess that I wasn't expecting the phone call I received from Andrew Strauss on Tuesday that started with him saying: 'I've got some bad news.' That's not what you really want to hear on selection matters, and not something I have heard very often during my career of 152 Test caps.

I always try to find a positive in the hand that has been dealt to me. To be honest, though, that's been quite tricky this time because the decision to leave me out of the tour of West Indies has hit me pretty hard.

Not to big it up too much but it has affected my sleep. I said to my partner Mollie one morning that my body felt sore. She suggested that would be stress. No, I can't pretend I am as good as gold, because I am not. It would be wrong to act like everything's OK.

I care deeply about playing for England, and first and foremost I am an England fan. Defeats hurt me just as much now, as a 35-year-old player, as they did when I was a kid of 12.

The thing I want most is for the team to be successful and it has been my belief through these challenging past few months that I can play an integral part in getting us back to where we once were in Test cricket.

From a personal perspective, the only positive I can cling to is that my form — and you could add Jimmy Anderson's recent performances to this too — has been good. I took 11 wickets in the final two Ashes matches, I have been Test match standard for a long time and, for the last eight years, you would say world class. And so, it makes it even more upsetting that they don't see me part of their immediate plans, especially with a view to looking at a way of winning away from home, which was briefly explained to me. So, how do I assess that? Well, the decision has been made by a new selection panel really and that decision will arguably differ from the one a new director of cricket or head coach will make in a few months' time.

I am in the top three bowlers in the country and whether I play — or indeed Jimmy plays — when we resume international cricket in June will be a call for new eyes to decide.

Playing Test match cricket for your country is one of the biggest honours you can have as a cricketer. I felt when I started out on this journey back in 2007 that I had to earn every single cap and that the best team would take the field in a bid to try to win every game. That is why I'm finding it hard to put it into context.

I could take being dropped if I had let my standards slip but facing up to being overlooked when they haven't is another thing altogether. That's why I was so outspoken when I was left out against West Indies in Southampton a couple of years ago. It felt unjust.

The same again here but with the added factor that I am struggling to put things into context. It's hard to do so when all you've had is a five-minute phone call and nothing else.

But I suppose the support I have received elsewhere tells me how other people feel. For example, I have had more WhatsApps over the last few days than when I took eight for 15 to beat the Australians at Trent Bridge in 2015.

I hopped on the Tube in London the following day and people were asking 'What on earth is going on?' I couldn't explain it. How do you?

If anything, that compounds my frustration because if I had spoken to one person who had said they agreed with the decision to leave myself and Jimmy out, I could perhaps begin to understand. Do I believe I warrant a place in England's best team in Antigua on March 8? Of course, I do. That is why it is so difficult to comprehend.

If I was averaging 100 with the ball recently and had a terrible record in the Caribbean, then OK, try someone else. But I've bowled well there in the past and West Indies are a team I've had pretty good success against.

Yes, this England team have lost a lot of cricket matches in recent times and I am not against different mindsets and making changes. Yes, we do need to question a lot of things, but surely you must play your best players to win Test matches.

So, has this episode changed the way I think about my career? I just can't answer that at the moment. I spoke to my mum Carole on Friday because I am waking up more confused and angrier with each passing day, and she just advised me to take time, step away from the game for a bit and figure things out.

Time can be a great healer, she says. But right now, I feel gutted. Do I need to prove myself again? In my mind, I've nothing to prove. I am a proven performer, so it is now about the English cricketing summer and mentally and physically targeting the home series against New Zealand in June.

What I would say is there have been times when I have been able to answer such questions with ease. But as things stand, feeling as though I've performed well and deserve to be in the side makes it hard.

Understandably, people will ask if there has therefore been some fall-out behind the scenes, a bit of a rumble during the Ashes, but I can categorically say that is not the case. Hence, neither Jimmy nor I saw this coming. We were blindsided.

Honestly, the atmosphere within the team, although we were getting beaten by Australia, was good. I repeat, the reason I was given for being left out was they wanted to change tack in trying to win abroad.

During a post-play press conference last month after I took five wickets against Australia in Sydney, I recommended that the best way of achieving this was to go back to basics and pick the best team consistently.

As you can no doubt appreciate, I have had a lot to get my head round but some brilliant people to help me do so. Mollie has been fantastic. She doesn't really understand cricket, but she does understand people and I've chatted to Jimmy loads over these last few days.

Mainly planning golf trips to be fair because we've suddenly had some unexpected time free up, but we have also talked about our individual feelings and tried to understand the decision a bit more.

And one thing I have made a conscious effort to avoid is shutting myself away. I've got out for little runs, and they have made me feel better. What I don't want to do, though, is pick up a cricket ball for a couple of weeks. I will do so when I have decided whether to jump at the latest challenge set for me.

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Joe Root has got to go.
 
I wonder if anything else about England cricket has affected his sleep over his career, or is being dropped the first time he's been troubled? I imagine it's not easy to sleep with your head stuffed up your own arse.
 
Yes Broad is an insufferable egotist, yes he's a Tory wanker - and how exactly do you think this makes him differ from most of the rest of the team? Likewise, the posts on here slagging off individuals in the England team for not politically correct make me laugh. This is not a team of revolutionary socialists and anarchists for a reason. Cricket is the most establishment mainstream sport there is. The Empire lives on in Lords. Who are the Test playing nations? Can you see a pattern there? Cricket is the last days of dying Empire, and so the structure will reflect that.

Didn't you all, long ago, have to make a disconnect in your mind to keep following and loving the sport? After recognizing the fact racism was rife and actually desirable for the ECB? The fact the whole history is down to Empire and Commonwealth and the vast majority of our players have always been privately educated. None of this reflected my life, but the sport is so bloody...everything that anyone who understands that can't walk away. So I didn't. But I did realise I wasn't following a bunch of lefties very early on, came to terms with that and decided it's pretty worthless slagging off the team for their politics. Or for being an entitled bunch of wankers.

So Broad might well have his head up his arse. Maybe it is hard to sleep like that. But he seems to have managed to stay a top World class bowler with that head up the arse.
 
planetgeli said:
The fact the whole history is down to Empire and Commonwealth and the vast majority of our players have always been privately educated.
Click to expand...
This bit isn't wholly true, though. In fact the better England sides of recent times have generally contained fewer privately educated players. Nasser Hussain's teams often contained just one (Hussain himself), while the 2005 Ashes team was majority state school.

I'd argue that the way this has got worse over the last 20 years or so is part of a process that was accelerated, ironically enough, with the wide popularity of the game in the aftermath of the 2005 Ashes and subsequent taking of the Sky millions. It's also coincided with (and contributed to) the decline of the game's popularity among black kids in England.

In many ways, cricket mirrors wider society. It did become genuinely more inclusive from the 1940s to, say, the 1980s/90s, but that inclusivity has been on the retreat since then. And pre-war, it wasn't exactly exclusive, teams were just rigidly class-divided.

Even pre-war, the very best players were often not the privileged ones - the professionals like Hutton or Larwood. It's quite notable to me that if you pick out a few 'legend' names at random from any period in the past, you will of course find the elite-drawn names like Dexter, but more common are non-elite-background players like Laker, Truman, Compton, Barrington. England's private schools have actually been pretty bad at producing good cricketers. Even in the recent batch, the likes of Root and Hameed attended private school on cricket scholarships, so they don't really count as products of the private system - they were produced by club cricket.
 
Yeah 'vast majority' wasn't right. But, despite what you've written, 'vast majority' still feels right because of the where the power has always lay. Because anyone else with Mike Brearley's mind but not his background wouldn't have got anywhere near the team for example.
 
Yes I know what you mean. But the worst of it for me is that this is a situation that is very clearly deteriorating when you would have hoped that it would be improving. Things like the recent comments from the Middx chairman about black and Asian kids don't inspire hope that those running the game either understand or care tbh.

The Hundred! Yay! Half a dozen of the games were on the BBC. What are you complaining about?
 
planetgeli said:
Yes Broad is an insufferable egotist, yes he's a Tory wanker - and how exactly do you think this makes him differ from most of the rest of the team? Likewise, the posts on here slagging off individuals in the England team for not politically correct make me laugh. This is not a team of revolutionary socialists and anarchists for a reason. Cricket is the most establishment mainstream sport there is. The Empire lives on in Lords. Who are the Test playing nations? Can you see a pattern there? Cricket is the last days of dying Empire, and so the structure will reflect that.

Didn't you all, long ago, have to make a disconnect in your mind to keep following and loving the sport? After recognizing the fact racism was rife and actually desirable for the ECB? The fact the whole history is down to Empire and Commonwealth and the vast majority of our players have always been privately educated. None of this reflected my life, but the sport is so bloody...everything that anyone who understands that can't walk away. So I didn't. But I did realise I wasn't following a bunch of lefties very early on, came to terms with that and decided it's pretty worthless slagging off the team for their politics. Or for being an entitled bunch of wankers.

So Broad might well have his head up his arse. Maybe it is hard to sleep like that. But he seems to have managed to stay a top World class bowler with that head up the arse.
Click to expand...
To agree and disagree, he's different because he's written about how good he is in his Daily Mail column. It's being KP, but as it's Broad, it will be treated differently. Imagine being in a touring squad knowing the massive ego thinks he should be playing instead of you, no matter how supportive he may seem?

At least Brearley was in the team as a player before he became captain the first time. Chris Cowdery was far, far worse a decision.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Yes I know what you mean. But the worst of it for me is that this is a situation that is very clearly deteriorating when you would have hoped that it would be improving. Things like the recent comments from the Middx chairman about black and Asian kids don't inspire hope that those running the game either understand or care tbh.

The Hundred! Yay! Half a dozen of the games were on the BBC. What are you complaining about?
Click to expand...
If you get a chance to read the Covers are Off, the last couple of chapters confirm what you and planetgeli are saying. MCC, old boys network, Empire and racism.. and poorly run.
 
The Cowdrey decision was a more or less conscious effort to replicate the 1981 Brearley decision, no? I remember it at the time, and of course it didn't work. The Brearley decision had been a long shot that required a fair bit of luck to succeed. Everyone remembers Botham's heroics, but look back on footage from Headingley 81, and by fuck, both he and Dilley rode their luck. Stokes's Headingley miracle was more impressive, I would say, as it was more calculated and controlled.

But yeah, the Cowdrey decision stank.
 
paulhackett said:
To agree and disagree, he's different because he's written about how good he is in his Daily Mail column. It's being KP, but as it's Broad, it will be treated differently. Imagine being in a touring squad knowing the massive ego thinks he should be playing instead of you, no matter how supportive he may seem?

At least Brearley was in the team as a player before he became captain the first time. Chris Cowdery was far, far worse a decision.
Click to expand...
I'm not totally sure what I think about Broad's piece. I don't mind the bigging himself up so much, but I'm not sure I agree with his assessment. On recent form - say over the last 12 months or so - I would argue that the top three England seamers have been Anderson, Robinson and Wood. Broad is fourth on my list from that period.

I wouldn't have had too much of a problem if England had dropped one of Anderson and Broad for the West Indies, and it probably would have been Broad not Anderson. Anderson and Broad first came together as a bowling pair due to the relatively brutal axing of Harmison and Hoggard, with the latter never playing again and without him having suffered any real long-term slump. That's just the way it goes.
 
Here's Broad last summer after Giles sacked Smith as selector

“I was disgruntled because the selectors had said the first Test team of the summer will be our best team,” said Broad, “To be told I suddenly wasn’t in the best team with my record in England, that’s what upset me. Is it realistic that I’m going to play every Test? No. But if the communication is done well, you understand why you might miss certain games to be fit for others. When the communication disappears, that’s when players can’t see reasons.” It was something of an open secret that he did not see eye-to-eye with Smith in this regard, a tension which dated back to being dropped from the first Test in Barbados in early 2019 when the former national selector was on tour. Asked to appraise Smith’s time, Broad replied: “I think you can say it was a success in the sense that the team won games and a World Cup. And he brought some fine players through. But personally, from my point of view, we struggled a bit on the communication side and probably saw the game of cricket slightly differently. A lot of people have bosses who don’t rate them as much as other people and I think he was mine. He probably didn’t rate me as much as other players. That’s fine but I kept trying to prove some selection decisions wrong. I really disagreed with getting left out in Barbados where it’s one of the best places to bowl as a tall fast bowler and there are a few occasions where I have felt a bit disgruntled and didn’t have the clarity of communication that I would like. I am very open to being told things. Have a discussion face to face and then have a beer and move on, that’s how I like to do things. Maybe Ed and I didn’t have that sort of relationship.” Like Anderson, who turns 39 in July, Broad has no thoughts about retirement at present. There may be 517 Test wickets to his name already but he is still looking to play all seven Tests this summer, while next winter’s Ashes tour in Australia is being viewed as anything but a swansong. Broad said: “Ashes away series can be seen as the end of an era, can’t they? But I see it being in the middle of our journey as a team, I see it as the middle of my journey and am in no way looking at it thinking I could walk off at Sydney. I want to keep going and Jimmy is a big inspiration to me. “[Nottinghamshire head coach] Peter Moores calls it the sexy stage of your career – you know what you’re doing, you don’t have too many bad days because if you bowl a bad ball, you know why."
 
Dropping Broad in Barbados was a big mistake, mind you, as mystifying as dropping him for Brisbane. Sam Curran opened the bowling in that match. I remember quietly fuming at the time.

ETA: probably not quietly, tbh. I probably moaned about it on here. :D
 
Given that's the only warm up game, that will presumably be their planned 12 for the first test. But surprised to see Overton ahead of Mahmood. But then I was s bit surprised to see Overton in the squad.
 
RileyOBlimey said:
I’d like to see a Foakes & Parkinson partnership flourish but it’d be harsh on Leach.
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I like Parkinson. Watched him on tv in the last round of the county champs and he bowled well. Good turn. He is very slow, though. Can you get good players out on good wickets at that pace? I don't know.
 
Robinson ruled out of the first WIndies test, gutted etc, but hearing (next big thing) Saqib Mahmood is in as 12th man, and might make the side if we don't need Leach
 
Ted Striker said:
Robinson ruled out of the first WIndies test, gutted etc, but hearing (next big thing) Saqib Mahmood is in as 12th man, and might make the side if we don't need Leach
Click to expand...

I'm not particularly outraged by Anderson and Broad being left out like some are. But if the point of doing it is to look to the future (which I have a degree of sympathy with) then surely Mahmood has to play. And Parkinson if they are playing a spinner. Wood, Woakes, Overton is not an attack for the next few years is it.
 
England win toss and bat – a no-brainer in Antigua, which can be a bit of a road.

Opening bowlers for this match: Woakes and Overton. I agree that that doesn't exactly feel like a new dawn. I'm underwhelmed by the decision to leave out Mahmood.
 
Botham's there. They just zoomed in on him and showed his stats. Surprisingly quite mediocre. 33 with the bat and 28 with the ball. I mean they're ok but. Well I'm too young to remember him playing really but I assume he must have been a bit better than that in a game changing sense to be such a legend.

Meanwhile Foakes is proving how fucking weird it is he wasn't given more of a chance earlier.
 
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