If you are going to deliver a nightmarish performance, devoid of passion or panache, it is probably best to do so thousands of miles from home in front of a sparse crowd in a relatively modest contest in Abu Dhabi rather than at HQ in an international tournament.
This thought may well have crossed the mind of England’s director of cricket, Andrew Strauss, who has just spent a week in the United Arab Emirates without, on his own assessment, seeing the team play well. Perform at Lord’s in a World Cup match in the way that England did on Wednesday and the knives would start to be sharpened.
It is a bit more relaxed here. However, Strauss will be well aware of what is going on at the Rugby Football Union, which is almost a sister operation to the England and Wales Cricket Board. In fact, he was asked if any lessons could be learned. “Don’t go out in the group stages,” he said.
“It’s hard to comment on what’s going on in other sports but what you saw [during the rugby tournament] is that a home World Cup is a massive opportunity to showcase the game and they don’t come along very often.”
England host the 2019 cricket World Cup as well as the Champions Trophy in 2017. They need to be a settled side by then. Strauss has been keen to emphasise the importance of one-day cricket. “Fundamentally we need to get better and we won’t get better by treating one-day cricket as the poor relation,” he said. “We always make our sacrifices in one-day rather than Test cricket. Our best way may be by having more separation and more specialists in each team.”
In the current setup, Eoin Morgan, David Willey, Alex Hales, Jason Roy and Reece Topley, who was one of the few to shine on Wednesday, come into this category. Strauss is now an advocate of encouraging these specialists to gain experience in the IPL and the Big Bash, which may prompt a wry smile – if he does wry smiles – from Kevin Pietersen, who was advocating the virtue of playing these T20 tournaments three or four years ago. “If someone is a white-ball specialist then it seems like an easy decision to make,” said Strauss, while recognising that it becomes more complicated for Test players to appear in these T20 competitions.
At the moment Strauss offers the ECB a stability that no longer exists at Twickenham. Here he needed no prompting to praise his chosen men in charge: “Eoin Morgan is a tough character, calm under pressure and genuinely passionate about white-ball cricket. He’s one of the few players who have played in the IPL and he has a far broader experience of white-ball cricket than most. To me he ticked all the boxes to captain the side, especially as we want more separation between the teams.”
Unsurprisingly Strauss speaks well of Trevor Bayliss too. “When you’re measuring how a coach is doing, obviously you look at performance but you also look at captains and I think both captains are thriving under Trevor. He’s much more a pressure-off coach and he encourages both the captains and the players to take more ownership of responsibility for their games. That’s 100% my philosophy. If you want guys to make the right decisions on the pitch you have to let them take more decisions off the pitch.”
Recently England have shown glimpses – though not on Wednesday – of playing with a new freedom in ODI cricket. “People love watching England going out and mixing it and playing with flair and vigour and taking the game to the opposition,” said Strauss.
“That, funnily enough, is how you win global events but it would be ridiculous to say we’re anywhere near the finished product. We have a lot of raw young cricketers who are going to make mistakes. That’s OK at this stage as long as they are learning from them and improving.” A whole lot of improvement is required if England are going to level the series in Abu Dhabi on Friday. They will be playing on the same pitch, though not necessarily with the same team. Even though the surface is likely to be even slower, Paul Farbrace, Bayliss’s assistant, kept open the possibility of selecting an extra pace bowler in the side. In which case Liam Plunkett or Chris Jordan just might be preferred to Adil Rashid, thus significantly stalling England’s winter experiment with wrist spin.
As ever the bowling attack is the first to attract some tinkering. In fact England’s main problem on Wednesday was that, with the exception of Morgan and James Taylor, the batsmen (and there are plenty of them if we include the all-rounders) were out of sorts.
