Andrew Strauss The only batsman who has regularly looked like scoring runs but as culpable as everybody else for getting out when set. Has managed to remain phlegmatic despite the burgeoning cares of captaincy. 5/10

Joe Denly In patches has looked the part – flamboyant, fearless – but playing your own game is different from judging your own game. But there is something there. Would be good if the selectors have got this one right. 4

Ravi Bopara The most important part of promise and potential is that they are realised. Bopara, bubbly and bold, is almost 50 matches in to his ODI career and has four fifties to show. Still getting out carelessly. 0

Matt Prior Not good enough by half, because he is too good a batsman to have produced the figures he has, and it is unreasonable to keep claiming he is the best keeper-batsman when he has two fifties in 47 matches. 1

Paul Collingwood A tired cricketer on the slide. The fact that he is available for Delhi Daredevils in the Champions League which follows the Champions Trophy and precedes the tour of South Africa is folly for him and England. 2

Owais Shah By now he should be one of England’s most popular cricketers, with a sparkling array of big shots. But he is in a mess, accident-prone and fretful at the crease and it doesn’t look like getting better. 0

Eoin Morgan Morgan, picked earlier in the summer, had been in woeful form for Middlesex and asking him to climb out of it against Australia was misguided. He has coped Read more…

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The ‘middle overs’ are killing us slowly, which is not a good sign for 50-over cricket. Until England win again

It’s a question that has skirled around international cricket this week like a late-summer English beach holiday wind, the kind that isn’t really a wind at all, just a constant gritty pressure on your face that makes you think of decay and death and how you’d probably be better off just sitting in the car eating cough lozenges and arguing quietly about wellies. Never mind format changes, or the erosion of 50-over cricket by the surging tides of Twenty20. The real issue right now is: will England’s tenacious, interminable but still oddly inconclusive 50-over one-day series against Australia ever actually end?

As the teams take the field at Lord’s this morning for another strangely muted but still un-ignorable oddly inconclusive 50-over showdown, this feels like a point of no return. Enforced abandonment may be the only way of killing off a series that has been going on for so long it has become insidious and all-pervasive. It clings to the walls. You can taste it in your mouth in the morning, you burp it up at inopportune moments, and when you finally succeed in luring that quite nice girl from work back to your flat to admire your collection of vintage Brownie camera accessories, she starts looking pinched and talking about train times – not for reasons related to the fact that you’ve tucked your faded I Ran The World T-shirt unflatteringly into the waistband of your Colonial Tobacco beige polyester slacks, but because of that lingering smell of never-ending and oddly inconclusive one-day series that seems to cling to everything like mould.

Recently it has become fashionable to blame “the middle overs”, a period of deathly, dust-blown limbo where people talk interminably about the deathly dust-blown limbo of the middle overs. For England the opening overs are almost as bad. This is a part of the match Read more…

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I thought today couldn’t get any worse when I got bowled out for one by Ryan Sidebottom and then found that Jonathan Trott had stolen my Official Team England dinner plate and spoon set in order to eat one of his disgusting biltong and melktert sandwiches that he says his nana used to make all the time when they was growing up in Shipton-Under-Witwatersrand and which he says is actually as English as warm beer, red post boxes and a crushing sense of being trapped by soul-sucking mediocrity and I dunno about that but to be fair he’s here now and that’s the main thing, stolen plate notwithstanding.

I get out the iPhone and there’s like six missed calls from Colin Gibson, who is what’s called a Director Of Communications at the ECB which is not as the name might suggest someone you go to if you can’t get a signal on your phone or Andersony’s hogging the official team laptop and you want to play Murder Death Kill IV: Revenge Of The Third Umpire online against some bloke in Myanmar but is in fact a sort of Public Relations person.

Anyway this Gibson isn’t your usual Public Relations person in that he doesn’t have blonde hair and a kind reassuring smile and say “Hi I’m Kyla / Katie / Klare / Keithetta etc” and offer to get you a hot or cold beverage before they make you answer the questions from the Bad People with the notebooks but in fact this Gibson is a large, angry man and he’s already on the iPhone again and I have to say he’s using some industrial language and not quietly neither. Read more…

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» Monty Panesar looks a better option than Adil Rashid
» Ryan Sidebottom rusty so Graham Onions becomes Plan B

Geoff Miller, the national selector, is sufficiently old to remember at first hand Johnny Nash’s 1972 hit There Are More Questions Than Answers so as he sat watching the Lions at New Road , inscrutable behind his shades, he might have been humming it to himself as he pondered the squad for the first Test, which he must announce on Sunday.

What might have been a relatively straightforward operation as fitness and form have started to come together has been confused by the Lions’s efforts against the Australians in the final warm-up.

Twice in the game the bounce and languid pace of Steve Harmison, omitted from the 16-man training camp, has accounted for the tyro Phillip Hughes in a manner that rendered the batsman undignified. Graham Onions has bowled beautifully, his figures not reflecting this, and Adil Rashid found bowling on a slow pitch left him little room for error but batted with real panache for 66, the latter part against Brett Lee and Mitchell Johnson with the new ball. Read more…

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Good week for…

Michael Vaughan
A muted departure for the greatest England captain of the modern era though it could hardly end any other way. Vaughan’s sad decline as a batsman can be traced back more than four years and in latter series his attempts at tactical genius were simply overcompensation.

The prodigious return at the 2007 World Cup, ending in defeats, Fredalo lies and ridicule for the Vaughan-Duncan Fletcher axis was really the end - and much sadder than this week’s final death rattle. Best to remember 2001-5, the centuries, the leadership and the lolloping camel gait at mid-off.

The generous plaudits from across the English game and around the world are all fully deserved but one in particular stood out. Yorkshire CCC CEO Stewart Regan declared, “Michael Vaughan is a class act and will be remembered by Yorkshire members and supporters around the world…. Read more…

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Sunday’s match between England and India was good enough to convert all but the most curmudgeonly of cricket’s followers. With this tournament, and with this match in particular, Twenty20 has shown itself to be a game for grown-ups, writes Richard Williams in the Guardian.

As we saw when Broad and Ryan Sidebottom bowled the final two overs of the match knowing that 12 balls were all that stood between India and the 28 runs the defending champions needed to avoid elimination, Twenty20 is making stringent technical demands on its players. The classic requirement of a sound technique with bat or ball is no longer enough. Now, with every delivery carrying significance, the players need to be endlessly adaptable and audacious, inventing their responses to meet the demands of the moment.

The empty seats at the Lord’s pavilion just highlight the snobbery of the MCC members, who still continue to believe Twenty20 is hit-and-giggle cricket, Tim de Lisle writes in the Times. Read more…

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