End Of Series Thoughts

August 11, 2008 · Filed Under England Test Cricket

“We’ve got Australia in a few months’ time and that’s a whole new challenge”, said Graeme Smith at the end of today’s final test (which we WON!), and he’s right. Although Australia aren’t the completely settled side of a couple of years ago, they won’t capitulate like we did on occasions in this series. They won’t have five out of six batsmen struggling for form against their attack, they won’t have a bowling “unit” as unthreatening as we were at Headingly, and it should be a good test for both teams.

If you had any chance to play Australia you would have chosen this year, with the transition not seeming that easy for some of the players. Come next summer and the Ashes, they should each know their position in the team, especially after home and away series with SA.

But going back to the series - it didn’t quite live up to my expectations and I find myself a little disappointed. I was so looking forward to seeing us battle against them, but each test almost ended up one sided and not the exciting test cricket we so crave. Its a shame Steyn broke a finger as we didn’t see him for two matches as it doesn’t matter which side they play for, you want to see one of the world’s best bowlers playing, full stop.

We showed bursts of talent, but they were all to lost amongst the mediocre performances both individually and as a team, and you can’t help but be a bit frustrated as an England fan. If we did that in a 5 match series against the Aussies we’d probably lose 3 or 4-1 which won’t be good enough next summer. We don’t have a test match now until December though, so plenty of time to think before changes are made. In the end I think it was a mixture of SA being too good for us, along with us definitely not playing to our potential, but we have to move on.

P.S It seems there is a new spin bowler by the name of Mendis who’s pulling up all sorts of trees playing for Sri Lanka at the moment - I’ll try to find out a bit more in the coming weeks as apparently this guy is currently bowling better than Murali, and he’s in the same team… the mind boggles…