Posted by Remember that mad notion that England needed to deliberately omit James Anderson and Stuart Broad to create ‘opportunities’ for new seam bowlers? England will play around half a dozen non-Anderson, non-Broad quick bowlers in the coming week alone.
It was always a bit of a nonsense. When the two lithe, middle-aged titans were omitted for that tour of the West Indies, England had already used nine pace bowlers in 12 months of Test matches without even trying.
They’re currently operating without Ollie Robinson, Mark Wood, Jofra Archer, Chris Woakes, Olly Stone, Saqib Mahmood, Matt Fisher and Mark Wood.
Opportunities to bowl quickly for England are plentiful.
This is especially true if you factor in the other formats. There are three one-day internationals against the Netherlands before next Thursday’s third Test, each of which will feature quick bowlers.
This kind of scheduling poses problems for team selection. With regards to pace bowling, the solution seems to be that Eoin Morgan gets all the left-armers, while Ben Stokes gets all the right-armers. It’s an interesting policy, but you can’t say the division isn’t clear-cut.
Now seems like a pretty good time to re-push our feature about format specialisation and why running separate teams can never be a clean way of operating within a fundamentally crappy ecosystem.
You – yes you! – should definitely sign up for our roughly-thrice-weekly email. Just listen to what happy reader Javier Vicente Bellend-Fernandez has to say about it!
“I haven’t regretted signing up for the King Cricket email for even a second! Why would I? It’s only an email. I don’t even really think about it all. I probably only even open one in four, if I’m honest.”
I guess the One Day ‘leftovers’ felt a bit put out after everyone was praising the Test team’s aggression…
I did notice quite a few people (okay, mostly Simon Doull) praising the fact that England are playing two series at once. I accept that it’s probably helped England to go to the Netherlands at a time when they otherwise wouldn’t have done so, but it does seem surprising that people are so ready to treat the absurdity of the fixture congestion as a positive rather than as evidence of a largely broken system of international cricket.
I got some sort of notification that this article would take less than one minute to read. Is this a new feature designed to hook in idiots with short attention spans? Worked on me.
I took it as a deadline
Do people like this addition?
We find it really personally uplifting to invest a load of time writing something to then see that we’ve created less than a minute’s worth of reading matter.
Spare a thought for those of us who are now compelled to grapple with the idea that we are no longer quick readers…
…mind you, Daisy did interrupt me twice in forty-five seconds while I was trying to read that article…
Thanks for your writings, KC, whatever they might be about. Roll on the next one.
I felt so under pressure that I skipped straight to the bold stuff at the end. The email endorsement was funny and it took me under a minute to read, so I for one am a satisfied reader.
That makes two of you!