Matt Prior started with 126* against absolute rubbish. Bangladesh is playing better than this West Indies squad.

Now he’s up against half decent bowling and he has been found out. Watch for more failures this summer from him. Not impressed.

Marcus I agree with you whole heartedly on Mark Waugh. This is an example of a batsman who was so elegant and so good that at times he got bored with it. While that in of itself is a flaw no one can deny the sheer joy and beauty of his cuts, flicks through midwicket and cover drives on the up. He should have been also the first man to score back-to-back-to-back centuries in the World Cup, if only Zimbabwe had have scored more runs that day in 96.

I still grin at the thought of England managing to see the back of one Waugh and what they must have been thinking when realizing they were going to have to deal with another one.

England teams facing a plodding attack of Craig McDermott, Carl Rackemann and Tim May and Greg Matthews scored much more slowly than they currently do against Australia.

Players don’t just up their strike rates against Zimbabwe. Australia scored plenty fast against England in either of the last 2 ashes series, despite an attack of Flintoff, Hoggard, Panesar and Harmison.

And England equally, scored quickly against Australia, despite an attack featuring McGrath and Warne. Especially Peitersen.

The lesson of the last 10 years that to score quickly, you simply have to want to. Players now leave a lot less balls than they used to, and running between wickets has also greatly improved.

Ricky Ponting quite regularly drops the ball at his feet and takes a single in Test Matches. Players in the 70’s wouldn’t have dreamed of taking such a risk for 1 run.

For the record, arch bully Matt Hayden’s average drops from 53.00 to 50.23 if you discard the free runs he got vs Zimbabwe.

It’s hard to find stats on test batting strike rates, but I would be willing to bet that all the players averages 55+ have correspondingly high strike rates. Except maybe Dravid heh.

Yousuf has simply improved a hell of a lot. When he first came on the scene he was nothing special, now he’s a powerhouse.

Obviously there is some effect in batting technology, better ground preparation and smaller boundaries that can’t all be attributed to the player.

But the MAIN reason averages have gone up in the last 10 years really is that batsman are much more attacking and play more shots.

If Ponting, Hayden, Pietersen or Yousuf bat for 2 sessions they make a century. If David Gower or Mike Atherton did that, they’d be lucky to be past 50 by that stage.

And that is the real story here. Test cricket is a much different game nowadays than it was 20 years ago. Draws are nearly unheard of, and a run rate of 4.0 is common, whereas 20 years ago 2.0 was the norm.

And quite frankly, it was players of great skill like Ponting, Hayden and Gilchrist that brought about this seachange in test cricket. Jayasuriya, Pietersen, Sehwag and Yousuf have simply shown that you don’t have to be Australian to do it.

And yet the person who truly gave Atherton the most trouble in his career was….Glenn McGrath.

Only if you think it also reflects badly on Viv Richards and Clive Lloyd, who never had to face Marshall, Walsh, Ambrose, Garner etc.

Obviously Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath are both great bowlers. But what I was getting at was the sheer intimidation of facing truly fast (i.e. not McGrath speed) bowling consistently coming into the ribs. It was this kind of bowling that prevented Hick from ever making it as a world class (or even consistent international) batsman; it was this kind of bowling that Atherton had to cope with for much of his career, and which probably explains the fact that he ended up with an average under 40.

Just remember that spin-bowling was judged almost dead when Warne came along in 1992, and people were worried the game had become one dimensional (i.e. too much fast bowling). But looking back, batsman might have benefited from the transition to a more varied, intelligent type of game that is, as you say, typified in McGrath and Warne.

It’s interesting to consider that Steve Waugh era Australia not only drove the game forward in terms of upping the scoring rate, they also dominated the world without a really quick and high quality bowler. Not sure what that signifies, but it’s certainly the period in which things changed.

Will

Farukh Engineer recently said that Sunil Gavaskar’s great disadvantage over other batsmen in world cricket was that he never got to boost his average against Indian bowlers! Perhaps this has worked in reverse for Aussie batsmen…?

Ponting and Gilchrist are probably the exception. They’d have still averaged plenty in the 80s and 90s.

And as for your rose tinted spectacles, are you really telling me that the bowling today is as good as the bowling 10 years ago? No, thought not.

Does the name “Glenn McGrath” mean anything to you? How about “Shane Warne”?

Likewise Ian Bell’s average of 42.59 is bolstered by 227 runs for no dismissal against a Bangadeshi team that was an embarrasment (and remains one – I reckon they should be kicked out of Test cricket, and told to play against A-teams until they are competetive. This won’t happen though, as it would weaken the Asian block-vote, and would mean that Tendulkar wouldn’t be able to score any more hundreds). When you take the Bangladeshis out of the equation, Bell averages a much more, well, average, 37.43.

Finally, imagine if Hick and Ramps had been able to start their careers now! We’d have two world beaters I reckon…

As an aside, I also feel this is the best time to be a ‘good spinner’. With excess of ODI and Twenty20 cricket, the art of playing spin bowling (in tests) is on a wane. So unlike in 70s and 80s, when a good spinner averaged in high 20s and even 30s, we might see more bowlers from Warne and Murali’s ilk breaking into the low 20s, and who knows even better that.

Kevin Pietersen’s century yesterday was his 9th, in just over two years of test cricket. When Graham Gooch hit his 333, it was viewed as the crowning achievement by one of England’s most dedicated and consistent cricketers (give or take a dodgy tour to South Africa), and it was his 9th test century.

Andrew Strauss, 10 test centuries; Alastair Cook, 6; Ian Bell, 6. All these players look set to rival Gower, Gatting and Gooch by the end of their careers, which may not be so surprising now that there is more cricket played and the England team is clearly stronger than it was in the 80s and 90s. But, at the risk of sounding like an old git, another Alastair Cook century doesn’t seem to have quite the same heroic quality that those of the three G’s or Alan Lamb or Robin Smith did. It seems like less an act of personal heroism, and more a symptom of endless work with the sports psychologist and computerised analysis of foot movement.

Most of all, it was not made in defiance of Ambrose, Walsh, Marshall, Donald, Waqar, Wasim or any other truly great fast bowler, for the simple reason that there aren’t any playing. Then again, to repeat the usual cliche, you can only beat what’s put in front of you…

Indeed, during the last Bangla series, he boosted his average by a full four runs in just two innings with those back-to-back unbeaten double hundreds. I’m sure they were super knocks, but…

Even take England’s current crop of middle order batsmen. Maybe it’s nostalgia speaking, but I don’t think Pietersen (52 run average), Collingwood (45) and Bell (44) are any better than David Gower (44), Robin Smith (43) and Alan Lamb (36).

Something else is that bowlers’ strike rates are also going down. Three of the greatest bowlers in history are Ray Lindwall, Alan Davidson and Alec Bedser- just compare their strike rates with those of Malinga, Jermaine Lawson and James Franklin. It seems to me that strike rates are no longer the most important indicator of a bowler’s quality.