Posted by The fast bowler’s injured, the new opening batsman made a duck and the returning genius reminded us precisely what we were missing by being dismissed by a left-arm spinner.
But actually, things are okay. When they play well, England’s biggest strength is that you can happily avoid watching their first innings in the knowledge that at least one of the top three is boring everyone to tears and then beyond tears and then back to tears again. So hurrah, Alastair Cook is up and running with a beautiful, plodding hundred.
Another plus point is that Samit Patel has scored runs. We like Samit Patel. We’ve got in our head that he’ll score runs in India. This opinion is based on a feisty one-day knock in Mohali last year and a Twenty20 innings which we’ve just realised was played in Sri Lanka. Still, plenty of people in sport believe that ‘gut feeling’ is the best way to make decisions, so maybe we should shed our old-fashioned preference for careful consideration of detailed information.
If that really is your gut feeling, you’ve got to switch to acidophilus milk.
KC appears to be suggesting that his gut feeling is in his head. I would say that that kind of anatomical misalignment is beyond the power of a mere lactobacillus to fix.
Oh ye of little background reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/health/23gut.html?pagewanted=all
Everyone kinda has a brain in their gut.
My smaller brain is telling me to get back to work. Fortunately my larger brain is telling me to hang around here a while longer and cause trouble.
I would like Patel to succeed. But I just can’t see it. What I can see is him being caught at short leg a lot for not very many, much like Flintoff in the early stages of his career.
Oh Mein Gott! Cats confronted by growling dogs are scared. The 1902 study shows this! Who woulda thunk?
So all I need to do is swallow more Tums to become smarter?
Samit’s gut has always inspired a lot of feeling
Avoid careful consideration, so says http://youarenotsosmart.com/the-perils-of-introspection/
“Time after time, experiments show introspection is not the act of tapping into your innermost mental constructs, but is instead a fabrication, a construction, a fiction. You look at what you did, or how you felt, and you make up some sort of explanation which you can reasonably believe. If you have to tell others, you make up an explanation they can believe too.
When it comes to explaining why you like the things you like, you are not so smart, and the very act of having to explain yourself can change your attitudes.”
That makes a lot of sense for liking things, but saying whether a cricketer is effective or not is not about liking them.
We like Samit Patel – that doesn’t warrant scrutiny. We’ve got it in our head that he’ll score runs in India – that perhaps does.
We like Samit Patel BECAUSE we’ve got it in our head that he’ll score runs in India. Not sure where that leaves us.
I think Samit Patel is a pretty decent batsman. If he gets a run of games he’ll probably average around 37.32 in test cricket, and given that you can fiddle a few overs out of him and he might take the occasional wicket, that’ll probably be enough to keep his place for a bit.
I don’t think he’s one of England’s best six batsmen right now though, nor do I think he’ll be one of England’s best six batsmen at any point in the future, and for that reason I’d rather we picked Morgan instead.
Well, there is no doubt that England have got the pace attack but the things that has to be worried about is that the English bowlers haven’t delivered in the sub-continent and on these spin and slow pitches England will have to look forward to Greame Swann. Batting is not really an issue for England as their top three have doing pretty well.