In the latest world rankings, released after the Joburg and Hobart Tests, England are without a single batsman in the top 20 for the first time, by my reckoning, since 2002.

Andrew Strauss has slipped seven places over the course of the series with South Africa to No 21 and Kevin Pietersen’s fall has been sharper: down from No 4 at the start of the year to No 26 now.

Pietersen has fallen behind Paul Collingwood (up to No 22 despite not scoring a hundred in his past 11 Tests) and he is only one bad innings away from falling to England’s fourth best batsman with Alastair Cook in 28th place.

Heck, by the end of the Bangladesh tour, Pietersen could even have slipped behind Ian Bell, who is at No 32 and rising.

Four, or even five, batsmen in the top 30 isn’t in itself a bad thing. We’ve had as few as three in recent memory - and no more than six. Sri Lanka and Australia have only four each at the moment. South Africa have five and India have six, but England have two more than New Zealand or Pakistan and one more than the Windies.

That reflects our overall world Test ranking of fifth. The problem is the lack of one or two superstars. Depth is one thing, class is another. There are six different nations represented in the present top ten and England’s finest is 11 places outside that list.

This may be only temporary - Strauss could slip back into the top 20 next week if VVS Laxman (No 17) pays for a poor match against Bangladesh - but it has been a long time since we were without any top 20 representative. Pietersen had been in the top 20 since 2006 and was as high as No 3; before him there was a Trescothick or a Vaughan to fly the flag and, apart from a slump in 2000 and a brief dip in 2002, Graham Thorpe was in the top 20 between 1995 and 2003.

Before him, Mike Atherton and Alec Stewart were regulars in the top ten - and briefly, in 1992, we even had the No 1 and 2 batsmen in the world, in Graham Gooch and Robin Smith. Read more…

Administrator Views Alastair Cook, Alec Stewart, Andrew Strauss, Bangladesh, England, Hobart, Ian Bell, Joburg, Mike Atherton, New Zealand, Pakistan, Paul Collingwood, Pietersen, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thorpe

ALLAN Border’s contribution to Australian cricket is almost impossible to measure.

Such is his nature that Allan Border does not notice let alone complain that the true worth of his service to Australian cricket is often unrecognised, unwritten and undiscussed.

So to this end it is hardly surprising that the 25th anniversary of his first appearance as his country’s 38th captain went unnoticed this week.

This is not acceptable. Attention should always be drawn to December 7, 1984 when Border succeeded his mate Kim Hughes as skipper against the West Indies in Adelaide.

It is a date of the utmost significance for it marks the beginning of what is best termed “the age of stability” in Australian cricket.

It is much too easy following the heady successes of the past 20 years under Border, Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist to ignore, even forget, the confusion, controversy and tensions which so characterised Australian cricket in 1984.

Despite some initial misgivings and an anxious and sometimes grumpy first two years in office Border prospered to become a very fine captain and led Australia on a record 93 occasions over the next nine years and three months.

Aside from his enormous contributions as one of the greatest and most courageous batsmen of any era (11,174 runs at 50.56 with 27 hundreds and 63 fifties) his legacy was the provision of certainty, unity and a collective confidence at a time of great uncertainty — a bequest from which Australian cricket in general and Ponting and his men in particular continue to benefit.

Indeed, it is remarkable that Australia has had just four captains in 25 years and there is no doubt that the many successes of this period have been a direct consequence of the impressive stability achieved and maintained at just about every level of Australian cricket. There is no Read more…

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A total of 241 men have taken the gloves in Test Match cricket and 203 in One Day International cricket. Historically it has always proved very difficult to combine both jobs of batting well and keeping wicket. However, a number of players have bucked the trend in these forms of the game and here we pay tribute to them.

The rapid onset of the one-day game in the recent years has persuaded international teams that they need to consider their wicket-keeper more as a front-line batsman, with the admission that they wouldn’t necessarily take the chances that the pure stumpers of old may have done. Long gone are the days of the wicket-keeper hidden away down the batting order in case of emergencies.

One of England’s finest glovemen was Bert Strudwick who played 28 Tests between 1910 and 1926 but ended with a Test batting average of 7.93 and a highest batting rating of just 104. George Duckworth replaced him in the team and held his place for most of the next decade but he ended with an average of 14.62 and a highest rating of 127. Other examples of the ‘all-field, little-bat’ keeper include Ken James (highest rating 41 in 11 Tests), Gil Langley (highest rating 223 in 26 Tests), and Narendra Tamhane (highest rating 251 in 21 Tests).

To illustrate this paradigm change, in the 1980s Test wicket-keepers averaged 23.61 with the bat. In the 1990s it was 27.29 and in the 2000s it had risen to 30.76.

Of course, some have flourished despite keeping wicket for the vast majority of their careers. Andy Flower managed to combine his role as key batsman and wicket-keeper and became the first keeper to reach the number one spot in the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings for Test batsmen in 2001. He was followed the following year by Adam Gilchrist, who hit 17 Test centuries and single-handedly revolutionised the way wicket-keepers are viewed in the longer format Read more…

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His first four appearances were so disappointing that in another, more successful side, he may have been forced to wait a very long time before being invited back for another go.

But this was the England team in 2001, not exactly a powerhouse of one-day international cricket, and sure enough when an experimental squad was unveiled to travel to Zimbabwe later that year Paul Collingwood of Durham found himself on the plane.

Deliverance came in the first match in Harare - a maiden wicket (thanks to a James Foster stumping) and an important innings of 36 in what was a tricky run-chase. The seed for further success was sown, and eight years on he has become the most capped player for England in one-day internationals.

Over the course of the decade, an exceptionally resourceful cricketer has emerged, one who has delighted coaches by pouring so much effort into training sessions. That hard work has frequently paid off with individual moments of brilliance at backward point, making him arguably the greatest fielder to represent England.

In the summer to end all summers, 2005, his catch to end the innings of Australia’s Matthew Hayden in a match at Bristol must be considered one of the best ever.

And on Sunday, he marked his 171st appearance with another stunner to send South Africa’s AB de Villiers on his way, proving again that his agility and flexibility is unrivalled in the England team.

Collingwood’s batting has had predictable peaks and troughs over the years, but his bowling has developed with the times, morphing from bog-standard medium-paced seam-up to a conjurer’s bag of tricks with slow cutters, faster bouncers and a bit of old-fashioned swing.

When, also in 2005, he followed up a century with a six-wicket haul in a single match against Bangladesh at Trent Bridge, the scale of the achievement was predictably tarnished Read more…

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The current series may be overlong but the home side have simply never played enough limited-overs cricket

I don’t know about you, but I simply cannot get enthused about this one-day series. With seven matches and a brace of Twenty20 games, the whole concept is overblown – commercially successful, but wearying. Coming straight after the intensity of the Ashes series, it is just a tedious appendage.

The Australian captain has been at home, some England players are struggling to raise their game and finding the atmosphere downbeat, and the talk in the White Hart, this column’s sounding board where things move on swiftly, with a hint of amnesia, is that Andrew Strauss’s men are a bunch of losers. Against which accusation I am forced to defend them without real conviction. Their general limited-overs inadequacies, nothing new of course, have come to the fore and their real strength has been forgotten. This past week has been like putting on the support act after Elvis has left the building.

The questions come fast. Why is Jonathan Trott not playing? Where is the good place that Owais Shah is supposed to inhabit, and how does his presence there as a numpty batsman affect property prices? Indeed if in the space of a few days while occupying said good place you football-tackle one of your own players into the infirmary, tread on your stumps and run yourself out, what would constitute a bad place? And there is that old chestnut: why are England so poor at a form of the game at which they play so much domestically?

This latter is a conundrum. There has been limited-overs cricket played here at first-class Read more…

Administrator ENG vs AUS, England Alec Stewart, Australia, Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, ECB, England, Gillette Cup, Owais Shah, Paul Collingwood, Sanath Jayasuriya, Twenty20, World Cup

Nobody can appreciate the massive emotional gulf between success in an Ashes series to failure in another quite as well as Andrew Flintoff.

Man of the series and national hero when the Ashes finally came home in 2005, he was captain of a ship that sank to a 5-0 defeat barely a year later.

Pictures of Freddie the happy match-winner had been splashed liberally across the tabloids during that glorious summer; but in 2006-7 the look of pure anguish he wore as his team spiralled to a horrible defeat in Adelaide provided one of the most haunting images of the series. Read more…

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