u/NiallH22

I can’t see the actual article but do we assume Sam Cook being withdrawn by England means he’ll be playing the third test? And is that the right decision?

I don’t want to rag on the bloke too much but surely, after yet another late night incident and especially with Stephen Fleming having not started yet so no full time coach, Rob Key should’ve been up there front and centre in front of the media today, not Joe Root…or at the very least he should’ve been there next to Joe.

He is the managing director of this team, he’s the big boss, yes, in cricket, captains are more front and centre than most sports but for me, Key is the manager, he should be the one in front of the press when the shit hits the fan for 19th time in the space of a year…support Joe, take the weight off Joe, let Joe prepare for the test match and be a fucking leader.

Richard Gould said Key kept his job after the Ashes because he’s one of the foremost leaders in the ECB…so where the fuck is the leadership?

If the weather at Headingley is scuppering your opportunity to sit and watch cricket all day, then fear not, for the County Championship returns and I assume at least somewhere in the country the weather will play ball.

There’s been a lot of bemoaning The Hundred and the lack of “Real cricket”(which I find incredibly disrespectful to the Metro Bank trophy which has been excellent but that’s another topic) in August but the next two weeks present an opportunity to stop moaning on the internet and vote with your feet…or your remote control.

So stick a county stream on, if the opportunity presents itself, get down and support your county at the ground. If two rounds of championship cricket in August just see the same few hundred members in the crowd who are their at the end of September and streaming numbers the same as they are at the beginning of April then it will only justify the ECBs scheduling decisions to push further to the edges of the summer.

The Hundred is never going away, we have to be realistic about that so this type of schedule with a couple of weeks of red ball cricket in August is probably the best we’re going to get, support it and let them know this is what you want to see at this time of year.

The heatwave is over, clouds are rolling in, the country is in recovery from a bout of Metro Bank fever and the cricket formally known as Crisp is at an end.

The new-old era of test side begins under New-Old Captain Joe Root on Wednesday and for the first time in what must be about 10 years given the amount of complaining about it…oh…for the first time since 2024(I’ve done my share of complaining about it too, don’t worry.), a full round of County Championship fixtures begins on Thursday, in August, which is just lovely isn’t it. All eyes probably will be on Durham where Englands most recent captain will presumably be looking to pull off something silly whilst hobbling about and generally looking uncomfortable to steal some headline from his former international team mates.

Anyway, just nice to have red ball cricket back, i recommend if you get the chance, then get out there and watch some of it. This is the time of year we want to see red ball cricket being played so we have to vote with our feet and get ourselves out there and watching it, to have any chance of that happening.

Oh and if all of that isn’t enough to wet your whistle and ruining your sleep pattern for the opportunity to laugh at Australians is your thing then the second test between Australia and Bangladesh is free to watch over next weekend.

Made a lovely fifty in the metro bank today, I saw him live down at Farington a couple of weeks back and he just looked like he had so much time when others looked like they were struggling for fluency on a new pitch.

Hopefully he can get a run in Lanc’s championship side to end the season and I’m sure he’ll get himself a franchise gig in the winter, probably with Sydney Thunder…

For all their issues in recent times, Lancs do look to be producing some top class youngsters, with Flintoff, Joe Moores and Luke Hands in particular looking like future England players.

Normally, with a new coach and a new captain, there’s a lot of debate about a lot of positions in the side but I think we’re in a bit of an odd position right now where, overall, we generally agree that we have the right players, they just need a more disciplined approach and refinement of their skills.

The one position we also all seem to agree on is that with the end of Bazball, comes the end of Shoaib Bashir, which I think is actually a good thing for Bashir, he can go and properly learn his craft at Derbyshire and come back stronger in a few years.

So that leaves one position to debate, who comes in as the spinner. The obvious answer to most is Rehan Ahmed but they seem allergic to picking him.

There’s a few options out there, Mason Crane, Jack Carson, Jack Leach, Dom Bess is a better all round cricketer now than he was when he was in the England set up, Michael Atherton is a big fan of Calvin Harrison and I’ll always value Athers’ opinion.

My sneaky suspicion is that they’ll go with James Coles for Pakistan at least. Series is being played in late August into September, I think it’s possible they’ll value the extra batter more, bring Coles in at 6, Smith back to 7 and have Root, Bethell and Coles share spin duties.

It really feels like everything here at the moment is just negative.

I got it at the end of Bazball, that was a pretty low point but even now, the appointment of Fleming is just met with negativity, the appointment of Root, negativity, anything Rob Key says, negativity…alright I understand that one. The Hundreds on so everyone’s negative, even when people post about having a nice time at The Hundred, they’re met with negativity…

Cheer up, it’s summer, there is cricket on wherever you turn. I’ve had a great time watching the one day cup over the last couple of weeks, had a great day out at Lancs’ new ground in Preston last week, if you don’t like The Hundreds then ignore it and go and support your county, watch the live streams, take advantage of the cheap tickets etc, go watch your local club on a Saturday…show the people in charge where your priorities lie and where English cricket fans priorities lie…

Stephen Fleming was one of the highest calibre test match captains of the modern era and he’s had a lot of success as a coach even if it’s not in red ball cricket, Joe Roots captaincy is no where near as bad as people make out and now he’s got Fleming behind him too. Harry Brook is leading the white ball side well and that’s on the up.

There’s stuff to be positive about, it’s not all doom and fucking gloom.

It struck me watching the South Africa A series earlier in the summer that the South Africa side was a proper, full strength 2nd XI to their test side, whilst the Lions is always a bit of a mishmash, it’s something the ECB need to change and need to make Lions cricket important again but it got me thinking about what a proper 2nd XI would look like, I’ve got:

Haseeb Hameed (c)

Ben McKinney

Asa Tribe

James Rew(wk)

Jordan Cox

James Coles

Rehan Ahmed

George Hill

Matt Potts/Olly Stone/Saq Mahmood

Sonny Baker

Sam Cook

Bit of a longer form discussion for us here amongst chatter of coaches and retirements and whatever else, it’s just something that’s been on my mind for a while. Why can’t English cricket take the next step? Or do it consistently?

The men’s test team has been spoken about to death but essentially, we’ve never been able to consistently get on the level of Australia and India, we’ve had our victories, we’ve had our good runs, great runs either but then it slides back down again.

The men’s white ball sides have climbed the mountain a few times, t20s in 2010 and 2022 and they’re in a seemingly good place right now but they’ve not been consistent. The 50 over side climbed the mountain in 2019, were genuinely the best team in the world for a few years and then have fallen off and are now miles off.

In the women’s game we’re better than most but inconsistent when it comes to the likes of South Africa and India and we can’t get anywhere near the level of Australia.

Lions and age group cricket is a bit harder because it’s hard to know how often we actually can play our strongest XIs but generally they’re inconsistent and a level below the very top teams again.

As a country, we have possibly the best cricketing infrastructure in the world, we have the money, we have the facilities, we have the participation across all levels, so what is holding us back? Because it’s not a recent phenomenon, it’s not about Bazball or the women needing a reset after Jon Lewis or the introduction of The Hundred, we’ve been at basically the same level since the early 2000’s with only brief periods of stepping up a level.

I don’t think there’s a simple answer to this so I’m looking forward to some decent debate and ideas

Not about that batting performance on Sunday night, we all know that was a shit show but the wider picture.

Still think McCullum will be gone? Key gone? Complete reset?

Been interesting listening to the 10000 podcasts about this week but I think most interesting came from the Telegraph podcast, who said the ECB had already made the decision to sack Rob Key but Stokes’ retirement has sent it all into a bit of chaos so when that announcement…or if that announcement still comes we don’t know.

For me, I still think complete reset is the right move, it may mean we have an interim head coach and DoC for the Pakistan series but I think you’ve got to take the rough to hopefully eventually get to the smooth and this isn’t about one series. It’s about the future of Englands test team in the long term, we cannot afford to tread water for another year because the ECB don’t want to pay out McCullum.

On the positive, the game and a half against India confirm to me that I’d be happy for Baz to carry on as white ball coach but I also worry that he’s become such a massive figure in it all that he’s overshadow whoever gets the red ball job.

Overall, it’s just a fucking mess isn’t it, and there needs to be consequences beyond just Key and McCullum, the whole top level of the ECB needs to be held accountable…but who holds them to account? There’s no cricketing expertise on the board barring Ebony Rainford-Brent and it would be unfair to put this all on her to make a difference…I don’t actually know how the mechanisms at the top of the ECB work, do the government have to step in?

I start by saying that I am 99% sure Harry Brook is going to be the next test captain and I’ll also throw in that I’m fine with that…assuming Baz gets the boot.

Also because if Baz, and presumably Key both get the boot then English cricket again finds itself at a cross roads and asking how to proceed, I’ve said already this week that I think for the summer the ECB will buy themselves some time and we’ll have a lot of interim-ing going on (Flintoff as interim coach, North as interim DoC, possibly Root as interim captain to, to give Harry and the new set up a clean start come the winter.)

My person opinion is that if Brook is to become test captain, then he should be stepped away from the white ball job, in an ideal world, I’d go one coach across formats and split the captaincy and give the white ball captaincy to someone not in the test squad at the moment. Whether that means a Phil Salt or Sam Curran, or whether it means Jacob Bethell stepping away from the test side for a bit.

Either way I think you need someone who’s sole focus is white ball cricket, that’s part of what made Eoin Morgan’s side successful, Morgan wasn’t distracted by test cricket so he could focus and really drive the white ball side without the coach always needing to be by his side…you’d obviously need someone strong enough as captain to be able to do that but the theory is solid.

As we don’t live in an ideal world, I’d split both…I hate splitting it completely, I think it always ends with one side feeling left out or like they’re being left short but with schedules the way they are, it’s the second best option I think, you’ve got to allow the test captain to focus on test captaining and the white ball captain to focus on white ball captaining.

I think something we’ve lost a bit under McCullum is that it’s the captain that runs the side, the captain that drives the side, makes the decisions, sets the tone, sets the standards, the play style…in the last year or two it feels like McCullum has become a much bigger feature than any coach I’ve known before, he’s almost become more of a football manager style figure and I’m not a fan of that.

So let’s get back to the more traditional approach, pick a strong coach, two strong captains or even captains with the potential to learn quickly in the job and let them build something, it might not be perfect at first but instead of jumping straight on them lets acknowledge that right now English cricket is lacking in leaders and captaincy options and therefore it’s going to take a bit of time to build. We really can’t afford to get it wrong again. (Also if we could get a coach/captain who actually wants to win the test championship and will acknowledge over rates, that’d be great too)

Over the last few days…weeks…months, a lot of anger had been directed at individuals like McCullum or Key or Stokes and whilst most of that is justified, I think it misses the wider picture, and that is that the ECB just don’t care about you.

There’s many examples I could use for this, it could be that they cut our test summer from 7 tests to 6 despite us being the one country that sells our test matches no matter the opponent, it could be about the hundred and it’s detriment to the 50 over game or it’s squeezing of the county season, it could be that they just don’t care about the world test championship because we host the final so no matter what, they get there money…

I’m actually instead going to use Wednesdays T20 against India as my example.

Anyone with half a brain would’ve have foreseen when the football World Cup fixtures came out that there was a very good chance England would be playing their first knockout game at 5 o clock on Wednesday night, the ECB should have seen this and pushed the start time of the t20 back to 7, put big screens up around the concourse and made it an event for ticket holders, who would’ve come early, watched the football, spent money on beer and food and then had the cricket afterwards. They also have a rights deal with channel 5 to show two t20s a summer, so put this on there and advertise it during the football, maximise the audience at home.

But what do they do instead? They moved the start time forward by an hour to 5:30 with only a couple of weeks notice, not only making it harder for ticket holders heading down after work but also to pander to the Indian audience and scrounge a bit more money out of the Indian broadcast rights.

The ECB don’t care about you, they care only about how much money they can get from India, after we’d lost the Ashes down under and everyone’s focus was on how we turn the test side around for the 2027 Ashes, all they cared about was that India aren’t touring in 2027 so they might lose some money.

The ECB do not care about you. The ECB is currently not fit for purpose and that is where our anger should be directed.

For those out of the loop, Sky are currently in the process of buying ITV for a reported…fuck ton of money. I wonder, is this now the chance to get more cricket on FTA tv?

Particularly test match cricket, maybe one game a summer on ITV? It’ll be pretty much a net gain for them, more eyes on it, more advertising cash and a simulcast will cost them nothing, more advertising for their sports channels…

I also wonder if it brings ITV to forefront when it comes to the next round of selling the rights to The Hundred, Sky and the ECB are so intertwined at this point that it would make complete sense of Sky to snap up the FTA games too and stick them on ITV, again, it would cost them virtually nothing as they’ll be showing them anyway…

It actually works with any format or form of the game they have the right too…an England t20 on ITV, an ODI on ITV4, a few blast games, maybe a county championship game…

None of that will happen but a man can dream, right?