England / India

Our England-India composite XI

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All Out Cricket are doing a thing where you can pick your England-India Composite XI from the last 25 years.

Here’s ours:

composite-xi

It’s easy to be distracted by the mouth-watering batting line-up, but there’s more to this team than that. We’ve also picked three spinners, which means either Jonathan Trott or Paul Collingwood may well find themselves opening the bowling.

Tell us you wouldn’t pay good money to watch that.

5-0 predictions

As far as the coming series goes, there’s a lot of English pessimism. This is hardly surprising. If you were qualified to represent England at pessimism, you’d be odds-on to earn a spot in the world team too. It’s in our DNA. It probably came from the Celts or the Romans or the Angles or the Vikings or the Normans. It’s a quintessentially English quality.

But now that everyone else is getting in on the pessimism act, let’s rein it in a little here at King Cricket. England will not out-spin India, but they could out-reverse-swing them. Supplemented by competent spin and the occasional freakish innings, they could snatch a Test and then India could get wobbly.

But more than anything, we’d like to see a draw at some point in the series – ideally early on. There have been just three draws on Indian soil in the last seven years, but should any game have the makings of one, many England fans will be quick to moan that it is ‘typical’ as if Tests in India always end this way.

If you can’t enjoy people moaning about something that almost never happens on the grounds that they think it always happens, just what can you take pleasure in?

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24 comments

  1. http://www.alloutcricket.com/squad-selector/england-india-xi?tp=a226c27_201611071613_sm.png

    Why are there so many 5-0 predictions for this series? India are without their first choice openers and none of their batsmen are in great form. If it’s based on the Ind-NZ series, the difference there was the runs from lower order and England are much stronger than India on that front. India will find it very tough to take 20 wickets consistently against that line-up. It should be a close series and either team has a good chance of winning it.

    1. http://www.alloutcricket.com/squad-selector/england-india-xi?tp=a226c27_201611071613_sm.png

      The predictions are all based on England’s percieved inability to play spin. The idea being that if NZ couldn’t play Ashwin and Jadeja, England won’t be able to either.
      Thing is, NZ don’t have a Cook and while Williamson is very good, Root is, possibly, better. And if Broad and Anderson click (reverse swing and all that), I don’t think the Indian batsmen will have a very easy time of it.

      Of course, this does mean that Cook and Root will have to fire most of the time and Anderson’s fitness levels may or may not allow all 5 tests.

      Be a good series either way.

  2. Dravid
    Gooch/Sehwag
    Azhar
    Tendulkar
    Pietersen
    Stewart/Flintoff
    Flintoff/Prior
    Kumble
    Swann
    Zaheer
    Anderson/Panesar

  3. Cook
    Sehwag
    Bell
    Pietersen
    Tendulkar
    Dravid
    Dhoni
    Swann
    Broad
    Kumble
    Anderson

    That’s my serious attempt. Is everyone else doing it as a joke? Is that the reason King Cricket hasn’t picked Tendulkar and Pietersen?

      2. Totes. I would pick a Dashers XI but can’t really be bothered – you can pretty much just pick the opposite player to the boringass one KC has picked. Tres to open with Sehwag, ‘ave it!

  4. Cook
    Sehwag
    Dravid
    Tendulkar
    KP
    Collingwood
    Prior
    Ashwin
    Swann
    Zaheer
    Anderson

    Considered Bell over Collingwood, but think the latter’s off-cutters would be more important.

  5. Cook
    Sehwag
    Dravid
    Tendulkar
    Pietersen
    Flintoff
    Stewart
    Swann
    Kumble
    Zaheer
    Anderson

    Guaranteed 20 wickets, and above – par first innings runs including an interminable 2nd wicket partnership.

    I think an India-Eng Compost XI of the last 25 years would also be hilarious.

  6. Ganguly says,Jimmy shouldn’t play .He has dropped some pace and you need pace to reverse swing in these conditions.80MPH will be useless here

    1. All makes sense except for the assumption he has lost pace. Anderson sometimes doesn’t bowl all-out when the ball swings conventionally, but that seems to be because he’s concluded that he doesn’t need to.

      He certainly still has it in him to ‘get it through’. The question really is for how long he can sustain that – particularly considering he’s missed a bit of cricket with this shoulder injury.

  7. Using my real name from now on. Looks like I fell foul of KC naming etiquette in my previous post. Apologies. Also now feeling stressed about failing to come up with a stylish nom de plume. Uuuugh.

    I’ve always wondered why everybody says it’s such a quintessentially “British/English” thing to be pessimistic. I mean, have any of these people spent a lifetime being from every other nationality on earth? So how do you know there are other peoples out there who aren’t more pessimistic than us? From what I can see, all sports fans everywhere start off, or can very easily slip into, extreme pessimism. I even see All Blacks fans getting twitchy before they play teams like Wales. They haven’t lost to them since 1953.

    I can’t get on board with the “choosing an XI” thingy. As a captain/general administrative dogsbody for a dismally low-standard cricket team, the idea of having choice when it comes to team selection, as opposed to desperately trying not to be more than three players short just prior to a match commencing is too much for my tiny mind to cope with. Yours all seem good though. I think Ben Stokes should be in them even though he hasn’t actually played against India yet. He is good though. Just a proviso that he has to wear a gag though. The chunter is tiresome…

    1. If the English are naturally pessimistic, just imagine how the nations conquered/occupied by them feel.

      (Yes, I’m talking about Wales again. Cymru am byth!)

      1. Araf safle bws, henoedd.

        Sorry, that’s pretty much all the Welsh we know. We learned it from road signs. Think that says “Slow bus stop, elderly people.”

        Croeso!

      2. I actually don’t speak Welsh (I did sort of study it at school, but only at Primary School before I made the initially harrowing emigration to the North of England where goalkeepers go ‘in net’ instead of ‘in goal’ and there are 50,000 different distinct but subtly delineated types of bread and cake), so that’s about as much as I know as well, apart from “Mae’n gymylog”, “Ysbeidiau heulog” and the numbers 1-100.

      3. Surely if you know the numbers 1 thru’ 100 (American parlance today, sorry), AP, it would take only a small leap to learn all of the numbers?

        Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu.

  8. To play in India:
    Cook
    Sehwag
    Tendulkar
    Dravid
    Pietersen
    Stokes
    Dhoni
    Swann
    Ashwin
    Broad
    Kumble

    1. Was just thinking about that. Probably not, because last time around a couple of readers won but it took ages for them to get their prizes. (Not sure one ever even arrived.) We had no influence over this, but felt guilty anyway – partly because we had no influence.

      Shame, ’cause it is kind of fun.

      1. It has that in common with most things I’ll say and do today.

        Apart from waking up, turning on my ‘phone, and wanting to go back to bed. Rarely has my heart been as in something, as it was in wanting to go back to bed this morning.

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