A liability against Australia, a match-winner in South Africa – Stephen Brenkley speaks to the comeback king who blasted his side into the Champions Trophy semi-finals

To explain England’s bizarre exhibitions of the one-day arts, their captain Andrew Strauss often compares them to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It is an easy, inexact shorthand, but it means that England can be useless one day and magnificent the next.

Mr Hyde, who had been overstaying his welcome and appeared resistant to desperate blandishments to shove off, has for the time being left. Dr Jekyll is in town. Owais Shah perfectly symbolises this dichotomy. In his case choose any antonymic extreme you fancy: chalk, cheese, lager, beer, day, night, beautiful, ugly.

For weeks leading up the Champions Trophy, Shah had not only been dreadful, he had been a menace. Not only was he out of form but he was getting out in soppy ways like prodding to mid-off. And not only that but his running between the wickets was so ill-judged that neither he nor his partners were safe.

Nor was that all. In an incident which seemed to embody his state he tackled his batsman colleague Joe Denly in a warm-up up kickabout, injuring the newcomer’s knee and putting him out of action. It was a mess and England matched it.

They were crushed in the NatWest Series against Australia and Shah grew steadily worse. They came to the Champions Trophy in equal disarray. England had no hope whatever of progress and Shah was playing for his career. Indeed if regulations had allowed the team to change the squad last week it would have been terminated. But the only way players can be replaced is if they are injured. Shah was not – but it might have occurred to the selectors to give him Read more…

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In the middle of the one-day series that finished at the weekend, a fellow scribe, someone who is just about as far away from the archetype of the cynical hack as it is possible to be, a man whose sense of humour and of the absurd is never far away, looked at his blank laptop and said: “I love this game, I really do, but I just can’t take any more of it this season.”

On the same day I had given my godson a ticket for his first international match at Lord’s. He could not have been more excited. When I saw him at the end of the day his sense of wonder was undiminished. Only the result was a bummer, he said.

It is a difficult business for administrators to balance the cricket weariness of players and pundits against the enthusiasm of followers who might see, at best, one or two games a summer (and at the ECB’s prices, who can afford more?). Responding to the criticisms of the NatWest Series that completed the longest international summer in living memory, Giles Clarke, the chairman of the ECB, had a point when he said that the appetite for such matches remained strong.

Seventeen thousand turned up at Durham on Sunday to watch a game in which the only interest was a ghoulish one — whether England could avoid a 7-0 whitewash.

Against these excellent ticket sales, and the greed of the players (and players’ associations) who cannot see that turning out for every Tom, Dick and millionaire weakens fatally their case for burnout, administrators must realise that schedules, domestically and internationally, are stifling standards, which will, in turn, eventually diminish sales. When coaches must rest top players, or in the case of Tim Nielsen, of Australia, rest themselves, overkill is not so much a Read more…

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