Trent Bridge Day 5: The Entrails Part 1

Putting issues like walking and the Decision Review System to one side, if we can get that close playing at those levels I definitely like our chances of heading out of The Oval with the urn in hand, and if we can’t quite manage that I reckon we’re looking good to have the prize reclaimed by the end of the Australian summer.

I’m not in the business of assigning percentages to the opposition, though I’m fairly definite in saying England were playing somewhere beyond 100% back in 2005. That’s an easy call. They were playing out of their skins, far better than they, or anyone else, had a right to expect.

So I’m not sure about the level of performance from this England side in that particular Test, but I’d rate our batting somewhere between 75 and 80% and the bowling somewhere between 85 and 90. There’s room for substantial improvement with the bat and a significant lift with the ball and we still only fell 14 runs short.

Pattinson, Starc, Siddle and Agar may well be our best specialist bowling quartet, but there’s room for improvement in the lines we bowl and the percentage of deliveries we force their batsmen to play at. If Trent Bridge is a sign of the surfaces we’re going to see through the rest of the English summer we’re not going to see anything resembling bowler friendly conditions unless weather and atmospherics intervene so attack off stump, get the length right and we’re going to be a big show.

Looking at the English bowling, this particular quartet is handy, and they under bowled Broad in the first dig after he got collected in the shoulder. There may be room for improvement there, but not having seen enough of them in the past it’d difficult to judge. There’s no doubting Anderson’s class, but I think there’s a fair gap between this group and their 2005 combo, which was boosted by the Flintoff all rounder factor.

If you scratch your head and wonder why we get our knickers in a knot looking for a Botham or Flintoff, take a look at our lineup and ask yourself how good it would look with Watson assuming a fair proportion of the workload. Four overs in the first innings and fifteen in the second when his four colleagues were all in the thirties doesn’t rank as a fair proportion of the workload from where I’m sitting.

At his best he’s not far behind the best of them for pace and aggression, which is why I’ve never been happy about having him open the batting, but that, it seems, is where he’ll be staying for the foreseeable future, so there you go.

The batting is the department where there’s the most room for improvement, and the first thing I’d do is issue an edict that an unsuccessful referral will result in a thousand dollar fine. No, make that ten thousand. Let’s see an end to the speculative or opportunistic referral, and limit them to setting the absolute howlers right rather than allowing a batsman who’s made a mistake the possibility of a lifeline.

At the moment it seems to be a case of maybe I can get away with one here rather than hang on a minute, that decision was wrong.

I suspect a decline in the number of referrals will result in a decrease in the number of referable decisions, and everyone will end up benefiting.

I also believe that taking out the lifeline will make a couple of our batsmen more responsible for technical deficiencies, and in the case of unsuccessful referrals from Watson I’d double the amount of the fine (apply the same figure to Rogers if you think that’s unfair, but Watto seems like the sort of bloke who’d be likely to blow the whole allocation within the first ten overs, which, to me, is another reason I’d prefer to see him down the order.

Having whizzed Warner off to Zimbabwe and South Africa, where he’ll get more time in the middle against better attacks than an English county side resting key players will throw up, and with Khawaja as the other specialist bat in the squad, I’d have him back in the side at three.

That means a batting order that reads Rogers, Watson, Khawaja, Clarke, Smith, Hughes, Haddin, Agar, Pattinson, Siddle, Starc which is, I guess about as good as we can muster at the moment and puts Hughes and Smith under the spotlight with a chance to cement their places over the next two or three Tests, which is fair enough in my book.

Any changes in the bowling lineup would be slotted in after Starc.

That’s my take on what’s gone down at Trent Bridge, and having allowed myself the ineluctable luxury of sleeping in until nine-thirty this morning, it’s one that hasn’t been influenced by at length cogitations on the morning walk or extensive perusals of opinions expressed in the press and over on Cricinfo.

We might be taking a squiz at those tomorrow, and casting an eye forward to Lords on Wednesday and/or Thursday. Stay tuned...