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Loading ...I find it hard to get excited about the one-day problems. If the test team are confident and playing well, it’s going to rub off on to the one-day side.
Dump Duncan?
By Will 2 years ago, at the end of June Leave a comment on this post
I must say, this has been brewing in the back of my mind since England lost the first one-dayer at Lord’s. But I avoided mentioning it in either of my verdicts as I felt it was not only premature, but too controversial. Enter Tim de Lisle who, handily, has done it for me, and rather more directly and eloquently too:
6. Replace the coach
Some players are just better suited to Test than one-day cricket. Some coaches are too. Duncan Fletcher was a handy one-day player himself for Zimbabwe, but his style as a coach - patient, methodical, painstaking - is better geared to Test cricket. With the help of central contracts, four-day cricket, Nasser Hussain and Michael Vaughan, he has changed the culture of the Test team. But he hasn’t done much for the one-day side. He should either have a rethink or step aside for someone with a real feel for the one-day game. It could be someone Fletcher would approve of, like Andy Flower, already a mentor to Chris Read and Alistair Cook. Or it could be someone Fletcher wouldn’t approve of at all, like Adam Hollioake. Desperate times, desperate measures.
Who to pick? Matthew Maynard, who some believe is the main in waiting for the top job? Tim’s right: Fletcher is too calm and methodical a coach to be sufficiently proactive (not reactive) in a one-day series. That’s the impression I get, anyway.
Tags: adam-hollioake, andy-flower, coaching, duncan-fletcher, england, matthew-maynard, sri-lanka-in-england |
5 Responses to “Dump Duncan?”
June 27th, 2006 at 9.44 am
June 27th, 2006 at 9.53 am
I find it hard to get excited about the one-day problems. If the test team are confident and playing well, it’s going to rub off on to the one-day side.
But I like Tim de Lisle. He wrote a really interesting piece a week or so ago, propounding that Vaughan’s leadership is so necessary in the Ashes, that he should play even if he’s limping. Steve Waugh did it, and just hid himself in the slips when they were fielding. Makes sense to me.
Anyway, sometimes weird things can work in one-day cricket. I remember the great World Cup of 1992, which was played down here, and which NZ should have won, by the way. NZ started that summer in completely useless form, being thrashed mercilessly by England, then turned around and thrashed everybody in the World Cup roundrobin except Pakistan. What NZ did was use spinner Dipak Patel to open the bowling and pinch-hitter Mark Greatbatch to open the batting. Worked a treat. God it was exhilarating to be a Kiwi cricket fan that summer. Until the semifinal when we were undone by Pakistan (who went on to beat England in the final) — our captain Martin Crowe had to go off injured and under John Wright, we couldn’t contain a rampant young Inzamam. Sigh.
June 27th, 2006 at 10.15 am
Interesting. We’ve had separate captains, why not separate coaches? But, in my opinion, part of the problem is that One-Day Cricket isn’t seen as being that important to England, certainly not so much as it is in the subcontinent.
I personally feel that there are too many ODIs anyway, and that people quickly lose interest in a series that gets to 2-0 or 3-0 (Especially if their team is 2-0 or 3-0 down).
Clearly there’s some overlap between these issues. Of course people are more likely to be interested in the Test side of things if England are doing better on that front. Even so, the current attitude of only seeming to worry about One-Dayers in the build-up to the World Cup is somewhat inevitable as things currently stand.
June 27th, 2006 at 10.20 am
Oh, and call up Mal Loye. Saw him thump 120 n.o a couple of weeks back, and he definitely fits the bill.
June 27th, 2006 at 3.56 pm
I don’t think there’s a need to change the coach. What needs to be done is a mindset change, that ODIs are not important, the World Cup is just a bloated tournament, pah - who cares about the ICC Champions Trophy.
Whether those tournaments are needed or not is debatable. Whether Twenty20 should replace the ICCCT is debatable too. But England’re basically putting all their bets on the Ashes horse. Imagine if England lost the Ashes [I'd never have used the word "Imagine" a year ago!]. Then they’d have neither the Ashes, nor any one-day tournament. NOTHING.
Winning tests doesn’t have to come at the cost of winning one-dayers. If you don’t respect [one form of] the game, it comes back to bite you with a vengeance, as India’ve found out with test cricket.
