England's Ashes obsession

It doesn’t take much to get England players and fans optimistic about their chances in an Ashes series. One victory in a dead rubber after badly losing a home series seems to be enough.

While Kevin Pietersen barely put a foot wrong on the field, his immediate declaration that his team was good enough to win back the Ashes was misguided. Obviously there is nothing wrong with pundits such as Ronnie’s Ghost looking ahead to the Ashes, but you would expect the England team to know better.

Australia had exactly the right response: silence and then some brilliantly patronising comments by Tim Nielsen. The telling quote for me was: “We've got a couple of big series coming up that are taking up most of our thinking at the moment.”

Isn’t that the case for England as well? If I’m right England have a Champions Trophy one day competition (if they deem Pakistan safe enough), an opportunity to avenge last summer’s home defeat against India, a series against the Windies and then a potentially very tricky series against Sri Lanka, who recently moved above England in the ICC Test Championship, can beat all comers at home and now have a mystery spinner. Given that England once managed to make Paul Adams look like Shane Warne , we should be a bit worried. All that remains is for people to start excusing poor performances by Harmison on tour by saying “it will be different during the Ashes” and another 5-0 defeat becomes a real possibility.

Two other points stand out for me in this opening round of Ashes speculation. First, the idea put forward by Andrew Millar on Cricinfo today that Pietersen as captain is the Aussies worst nightmare doesn’t make much sense to me. Usually in a test series the Aussies target a team’s captain and best batsman. Haven’t we just made their life easier by combining the two? Plus there’s plenty of opportunity for sly digs about his nationality.

Second, a few weeks ago the ECB was complaining about the fact that India’s cricket board had denied the fans the chance to visit some of the country’s great cricket venues during their tour. But why should India bother putting England in the decent venues if our tour there is nothing more than an insignificant warm up for the Ashes?

We could, possibly, win the Ashes, but it’s not even vaguely likely at the moment. We would need our entire team to be fit, and to have the kind of luck we had last time (McGrath’s injury, Ponting’s bad call at Edgbaston, Gillespie losing his mojo etc etc).

Most importantly it is vital that we start the Ashes after notching up a long sequence of victories. And we can only do that by taking each match as it comes, which is the cliché Pietersen should have used after the Oval victory. Read more...

Gayle's guide to staying captain

While everyone in England has been focusing on Michael Vaughan’s resignation and KP’s appointment, over in Jamaica Chris Gayle has shown the level of political skill needed to stay captain.

After a reasonable test series against the Aussies (2-0 defeat but every match ran to 5 days) and a disastrous one-day series (5-0 loss), Gayle decided not to hang around and wait for the sack. Instead he resigned and let it be known that he was doing it because he disagreed with the Board's selection policy. I guess he was referring to the way spinners such as Amit Jaggernauth are picked and discarded more or less at random.

He timed it well, as the Windies cricket board was in the middle of a scandal. It’s not clear exactly what has been going on, but it’s something to do with details of the president’s house in St Lucia being leaked, leading to a few sacking and suspensions.

The result? Today Gayle has graciously decided to reconsider his resignation, after talking to players and fans etc etc. Presumably he now has a greater say in selection as well. Definitely a politician in the making. This tactic probably wouldn’t have worked for Vaughan, as the ECB is a stronger organization, but under-pressure Pakistan captain Shoaib Malik could consider trying this tactic.

This about-turn could also be further evidence of the IPL influencing cricket boards. Chris Gayle is a high-value IPL player and he may have threatened to walk away from the Windies altogether unless he was given more power as captain. There was also a lot of speculation last week that Pietersen’s appointment as England captain was designed to stop him defecting to the IPL. It will be interesting to see if other countries start following England and the West Indies' lead by appointing their best 20-20 players as captains. If so then we could soon see Misbah-Ul-Haq as captain of Pakistan and Brendon Mccullum in charge of New Zealand. Andrew Symonds captaining Australia would be fun, but is probably a bit of a long shot.

Read more...