The 50-over game is alive and kicking . . . we're just useless at it

End of the road: Andrew Strauss should quit as England's one-day captain and concentrate on his Test career
10 April 2012

As England's shattered captain and his players arrive home after months away from their families, what lessons have been learned?

England are still useless at 50-over cricket
No matter who the coach or captain is or how much money is spent on the backroom staff, England continue to perform woefully at World Cups. This time, they arrived on the Indian sub-continent pretty much exhausted after a long Ashes tour and on the back of a 6-1 one-day thrashing by Australia. There was nothing coherent about their team-play, they never seemed to have a settled strategy and staggered from one game to the next with the glazed, hollow-eyed look of the permanently jet-legged. All of which made for some entertainingly frenetic, jittery cricket - until, that was, they were obliterated in Colombo.

Another bloody tour
Coach Andy Flower said after the Sri Lanka defeat on Saturday that he did not want to make "snap judgements" but that there were "many lessons to be learned". The most pertinent of which is surely that the England and Wales Cricket board operate with all the sound judgement of FIFA's Sepp Blatter. Tour itineraries are drawn up as if we remain in an age before commercial jet travel, with players forced to spend many months away from home playing repeatedly against the same one side, just as they did in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Compare how England began and finished their winter tours, and wonder how they might have performed at the World Cup had they come home after winning the fifth and final Test in Sydney at the beginning of January instead of staying on for another couple of months in Australia.

Out of Africa
Throughout the winter, Flower, born in Cape Town but brought up in Zimbabwe, has spoken with authority and calm good sense. He has something of the frontier about him - a tough, unsmiling man, but, as Alastair Cook told me recently, "hugely respected". Much has been written about the fatigue of the players but what of the demands made on their coach as well? He had a skin cancer scare to contend with during the first Ashes Test in Brisbane and was away from his family in Stratford upon Avon for nearly five months. You never once heard him publicly complain. Compare his job to that of the lavishly paid (and part-time) Fabio Capello, aka Mr Muddle, and how each man conducts his business.

Calling time on Strauss
Watching Andrew Strauss struggle against Sri Lanka's occasional slow bowler Tillakaratne Dilshan in Colombo was a bit like watching a pub cricketer the morning after a long night propped up at the bar of his local. Mike Atherton called it an "ugly little innings". I'd call that high praise. By contrast, the Sri Lanka openers showed just how to open the innings. Take risks. Move your feet. Hit over the top. Improvise. It's surely time for the England captain to retire from the one-day team so as to be stronger for the Test match challenge.

The black dog
In Silence of the Heart, David Frith told the stories of the many cricketers who have committed suicide. Certainly cricket is a game that encourages introspection. There's the incessant travelling, the long periods spent waiting to bat or field, the brooding that accompanies an inevitable loss of form and the strangeness of the cricket circuit itself. Michael Yardy, who was forced to leave the World Cup squad early because he was suffering from depression, will not be the last cricketer to experience, as Marcus Trescothick described it, his "mind pulling itself apart in a hundred directions" while alone in his hotel room on tour.

Ponting the great
There can be a peculiar grandeur in observing a great sportsman who knows the end is near but who also refuses to succumb to the dying of the light. I'm thinking here of Ricky Ponting, who made a defiant century in a losing cause as Australia were beaten by India in the quarter-finals. Ponting has been out of form all winter and under attack from his critics at home. Yet, somehow, he dredged up another big innings from deep within himself just when it was least expected.

No more shovelling
Fellow pros call the doughty Paul Collingwood a "bottom-handed shoveller". It's true that he's not one of the game's natural stylists. Yet he has held down a place in the England team for most of the last six years, thriving where those of much greater ability, such as Mark Ramprakash and Graeme Hick, failed. This winter, however, has been an embarrassment for him and he has scarcely been able to manoeuvre the ball off the square. He should accept that it's all over in all formats and move on and out.

Long live the 50-over game
In February, Matthew Engel, a former editor of Wisden, gave a lecture in which he said that, because cricket was no longer freely available to watch on terrestrial television in Britain, the game had, in effect, signed its own death warrant. He also predicted that the World Cup would be "dross". In fact, it has been anything but. Yes, the tournament is far too long and they were too many mismatches and non-games early on but there were also some astonishing matches, none more so than the England-India tie. After that game, Stephen Fry tweeted: "Who said the 50 over game is dead?" Only me, Stephen, a couple of months ago writing in these pages.

Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman

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