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Ravi Bopara or Ian Bell?
We’re saying Ravi Bopara. If you’re going to drop someone, you have to do it properly. Ian Bell has been dropped like a hot pan full of cymbals that’s been grasped with bare hands.
Bopara might be crap at tiling and even worse at promoting Nuts magazine, but he’s one of the few batsmen who’ve been excelling in county cricket. Admittedly, his first-class runs were scored in the second division – and we decided this year that the second division doesn’t count – but he played some major innings in significant one-day matches as well and he’s always seemed a class above most other batsmen.
He’s someone who got dropped from the England team and promptly went and scored runs. How many runs? ‘Many’. Ian Bell would do well to take note and try and score ‘many’ runs himself.
If Bopara does get recalled, it should be made clear that he’s being reinstated for his superb batting and not for his occasional bowling, which is toss. Okay, it’s not toss, but ‘functional and unthreatening’ is hardly much better. It’s a disservice to his batting to call him an all-rounder in our opinion.
Are you saying that when Sir Bob Key scores 269* & 149 against Northants in the LVCC div 2 in April it wont count?
I hate the way the term “all-rounder” is used these days. If Ravi Bopara is an all-rounder, so is Geoffrey Boycott. And wicket-keepers are wicket-keepers, not all-rounders.
As everybody knows, cricket was better in the 80s. Back then, all-rounders were people who could score 150 quick runs, take 3 for 27 with the new ball, drink 28 pints of beer, take drugs, challenge the established authority just by existing, sleep with dozens of women, play a second sport professionally, be fat without anyone really noticing, and walk. Oh yes, that’s proper all-roundering, that is.
I bet Ravi Bopara couldn’t do any more than two of those, possibly three.
Price, we were well aware of that when we wrote this.
We were hoping no-one else was.
Definitely Ravi Bopara. No doubt about it.
I think I’ve noticed from his picture above the crucial flaw in his technique, which the Sri Lankans so cunnigly exploited in his debut series. He always has his eyes closed.