England pay the price for bullying teams at home
"It is always harder to play away from home but England have to lose their short-sighted vision of playing on green wickets in this country," writes Michael Vaughan in the Daily Telegraph .
George Binoy
25-Feb-2013
"It is always harder to play away from home but England have to lose their short-sighted vision of playing on green wickets in this country," writes Michael Vaughan in the Daily Telegraph.
I have been saying this for ages. It is not that we have a group of players who are not good enough. This is the best generation we have had in terms of skill, coaching and preparation. They have got everything and as much as they deserve a huge amount of credit for the way they have played for the last two years in Test cricket, they have to be honest and accept they have got things wrong in one-day cricket.
Strategy in one-day cricket is shaped by the World Cup cycle. The next tournament, in 2015, will be in Australia where the pitches are flat and the ball doesn’t swing. You need power to manoeuvre the ball into the gaps, play spin and have the ability to post scores of 300. There will not be any green pitches and it will be boiling hot as well.
A cricket year that began in triumph at the Sydney Cricket Ground has ended in humiliating tatters at Eden Gardens as an exuberant young India side deservedly completed their clean sweep, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian.
England have been outplayed over five matches, not just with bat and ball but in the field and between the wickets, taken on at their own game. To collapse as they did on Tuesday evening was bordering on the surreal, perhaps a culmination of what had preceded in Hyderabad and Delhi, Mohali and Mumbai. England were culpable but, as Andy Flower pointed out, we should not, for all that, forget the many good things achieved by the team in all formats of the game over the past two years. "We have underachieved hugely," he said, "but please don't just judge them on this one series." Sometimes the immediacy of the moment leads to short memories.
George Binoy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo