Cricket World Cup 2015

[Loony BoB]

Pretty keen on this one as we've been playing fantastically. Black Caps ftw. Just look at those beautiful stats (http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cricket/31428625) about why England apparently won't win. But look at New Zealand on those stats! We're competing! This is unheard of and I look forward to seeing what happens (likely: inevitably bow out in the semi-finals, as we pretty much always do).

What about you guys?

:tumble:

...okay, what about you, Manus!?

[Old Manus]

Dat NZ first 15 overs
Dat England capitulation right on the money
DAT IRELAND DESTRUCTION OF 3 OF MY COUPONS

I just wish I could watch more than 15 overs before having to go to bed if I want to function properly in work the following morning. Brendon McCullum looks like he's going to boss this tournament and I am salivating like a dog with rabies. I hope they make the final. Mitchell Starc has a punchable face. I cry for the West Indies every time I see them play. As much as I want to believe, England won't get out of their group after losing to Scotland and Bangladesh after battling to a last-ball win against Afghanistan. AB DE VILLIERS

[Loony BoB]

Yeah, I've managed to get myself watching through the first innings where possible (ie, Friday and Saturday nights) but never can stay awake for the second innings. I prefer to watch NZ bat than bowl, though, and I do wake up a few times throughout the night and quickly tap into Cricinfo and/or Sky Go (if the match is being played) on my phone to see what's going on. I really hope NZ keep the momentum because we're not used to being as good as we have been lately. xD

And yeah, the Windies are gonna be minnows soon enough at this rate. :S

[Old Manus]

The kiwis need to take advantage of this recent turn of actually being a force in international cricket as I genuinely can't remember the last time they were a serious cup-winning prospect (were they ever?). I'm surprising myself thinking about them like this. How can a country of a few hundred people and their dogs - who all prefer rugby anyway - suddenly spawn a swashbuckling team while England are perennially rubbish?

It's not like these are EXCITING NEW PLAYERS either. Dan Vettori and McCullum have been around for donkey's years, as have the likes of Taylor, Ronchi and Southee. Shit's crazy.

[Loony BoB]

The kiwis need to take advantage of this recent turn of actually being a force in international cricket as I genuinely can't remember the last time they were a serious cup-winning prospect (were they ever?). I'm surprising myself thinking about them like this. How can a country of a few hundred people and their dogs - who all prefer rugby anyway - suddenly spawn a swashbuckling team while England are perennially rubbish?

It's not like these are EXCITING NEW PLAYERS either. Dan Vettori and McCullum have been around for donkey's years, as have the likes of Taylor, Ronchi and Southee. trout's crazy.
Williamson has been our best batsman in recent times, and is fast chopping up records to become fastest New Zealander to reach x number of runs on a somewhat regular basis. Boult is snapping up wickets pretty swiftly, Anderson is picking up wickets while continuing his McCullum-like strategy with the bat, Elliott has returned to the side effectively, Guptill is actually capable of being an opener that doesn't get bowled out first over every single innings. Basically we just have a lot of players at the top of their game lately, there's always someone who will contribute effectively.

Well, unless we're playing Scotland, apparently. xD Watched up 'til McCullum got out and then fell asleep, woke up to find out we struggled to win in the end. Happy that Scotland competed, though!

[Old Manus]

RIP English cricket

[Loony BoB]

NZ Cricket says 'sup :aimsun:

[Old Manus]

Waking up this morning:

http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/holy-sht.gif

[Loony BoB]

This tournament is crazy.

Getting a bit nervous about the NZ vs. Aus game.

[Aerith's Knight]

This tournament is crazy.
.

http://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/god_damn_right_breaking_bad.gif

I can't decide if it would be ever more or less crazy if I actually knew the rules.

[Old Manus]

RIP English Cricket 2015-2015

To borrow a line from Malcolm Tucker, watching England play one-day cricket is like watching a clown running across a minefield. They haphazardly flail their way through the game with any real forward progress giving the impression that it is down to luck more than anything, before suddenly putting one step wrong and the whole thing explodes violently. Eoin Morgan gets up and heads towards the post-game interview, optimistically claiming that everything is fine, because if they keep taking the exact same route then eventually they'll create a mine-free path to the victory they know is waiting for them.

It's difficult to begin the postmortem because there is no one place you can start with to find out where it went wrong. The batting has been below average, the bowling has been blunt and the fielding has been unremarkable. The team selection has been baffling at times. We're coming off the back of a mildly successful warm-up procedure, where everyone thinks "Right, this is the team for the World Cup", and then suddenly ODI-welterweight Gary Ballance appears out of absolutely nowhere and gets slotted in at 3 in place of James Taylor, who had arguably looked their most settled and dangerous player since he was (finally) selected in the few months prior. Ballance's scores in the WC? 10, 10, 10, 6, before being quietly dropped. Taylor gets permanently bumped down to 6 and scores a promising 98* in the first game before tumbling to a bunch of non-contributions in the following four. Who's idea was that?

Besides Ian Bell, none of the batsmen performed in this tournament, and even then Bell did it while playing a brand of cricket foreign to that which we were watching in the games not involving England. His strike rate didn't get above 90 in any game and was middling at around 60-70. That's what our best batsman is offering, and yet a few hours later you're watching AB de Villiers hit 160 in 66 balls like he does this all the time (and he does). The style of cricket, the whole approach to the game is on a completely different planet, and every team but England is currently either on or working towards it.

We talk a lot of the batting, but what of the bowling? It's been so anonymous that it's not even crossing people's minds. What is Stuart Broad actually bringing to the team? He's taken a total of three wickets in five games, going for 79 runs each, and he sure as hell can't bat (What the hell happened to him? Remember the days when people were genuinely entertaining the idea of him batting at 6?). Jimmy is trying hard but it's just up and down. The ball isn't swinging and it's at no express pace so batsmen can just feel like they're having a net. Steven Finn once again promised a little but gave nothing. We seem to have completely given up on playing a full-time spinner.

The reason there isn't much to talk about bowling-wise besides that is that there really is nobody else to turn to. There is no 'next cab off the rank' to come and have a trundle and introduce to international cricket. Harry Gurney? Average - only picked because he's a left-armer. Jade Dernbach? *spit*. That's about it. Spin-wise we have James Tredwell who's in good form but England seem to have a mortal fear of playing a spinner who can't bat, and instead they only utilise the "jumped-up-KP" spin of Moeen and Root. The truth is they will neither get many wickets or hold down an end for long before getting biffed, so they rely on Jimmy, Broad and Woakes/Finn/Jordan to get the wickets, a strategy which has plainly not worked judging by the fact that they have only bowled out one team in five games (minnows Scotland) and in the others taken 17 wickets between them.

These individual poor performances, as far as I'm concerned, are merely a symptom of a more general malaise about the way the England setup approach one-day (in fact, all) cricket, and culture at the ECB in general. Every time I see the camera pan over the England dressing room during a game (usually to get a close-up of the team's response to whatever batting collapse is taking place currently), I see the seats full of people I don't recognise. These random people, all dressed up looking professional in full England gear, often outnumber the actual players sat scattered amongst them. How many coaches and 'analysts' do eleven men need? Peter Moores kept talking in today's post-match interview about 'analysing the game data'. What the heck is he talking about? You don't need a 10-page spreadsheet and a meeting with a team of data analysts to figure out England are bloody woeful.

I can imagine the scene now. Put yourself in, say, Moeen Ali's shoes. You've just got yourself out for 10-or-so after nicking a pretty decent ball through to the keeper. You're a professional cricketer, you already know what went wrong - maybe you weren't moving your feet enough or the ball just got big on you when you were trying to tick the score over. You just need to sit down, have a cup of tea, maybe work on it a bit in the nets and come back next game. But instead, no sooner does the game end that you're called into a meeting with two coaches and three analysts getting in your ear showing you video replays of every ball you faced, and how that particular bowler often swings it away at an average of 3 degrees, so the back foot cover drive is a shot with a 78% scoring percentage. This is followed by several other 'team meetings' where Peter Moores is telling you all that if you score 239 you will win 72% of your games (http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cricket/28926219).

This cricket-by-numbers seems to have been growing as a 'thing' for the England setup since around the end of Duncan Fletcher's tenure/beginning of Moores' first stint. I've read Kevin Pietersen's book and while I take everything he says in it with a pinch of salt it does very much corroborate what Swann and others seem to be indicating with the ECB's obsession with statistics. You can't model a game of cricket. There are far too many variables to even start thinking about it. It's never worked, either, for ODI cricket at least. England are far worse now than they were in the mid-2000s, when the last occurrences of the 'beer cricketer' such as the likes of Darren Gough, Phil Tufnell and Matthew Hoggard et al were filtered out of the new ECB machine, to be moulded into the Alistair Cook-style Yes Man England cricketer we have today.

So where now? Moores won't get the chop, and neither will Morgan (I think). I don't think that it would be a good idea anyway, though for actual cricketing reasons rather than the political reasons that will dominate (and have dominated) any decision on personnel the ECB will make. Morgan's complete evaporation of form and consistency in the last few years is still a puzzle, and I'm not sure it's something that even a break from the ODI game will cure. Who would replace him as captain? They're all rubbish. You have to stick with Moores to see if he can turn a fundamentally failing England team around in more than the 6 or so months he's had prior to this tournament, though I personally believe that their continued troubles are a result of his own methods, both past and present.

The ECB will also be reluctant to do away with him because, crucially for their own seige-mentality-stricken minds, it gives Kevin Pietersen the last laugh. He was (unfairly) made the scapegoat of the Australia tour-which-shall-not-be-named at a time when they were already looking for any reason to dispose of a man they disliked. They came up with a cock-and-bull story of needing a 'new start', even naming themselves 'New England', fed the public with the illusion of a root-and-branches shakeup, before including the jettisoning of Pietersen as the only forthright act in this shakeup and then just continuing on as normal. They even brought back the man who epitomised 'Old England' in Peter Moores. They also made a lot of fuss about 'backing Alistair Cook'. We all know how that worked out. So if they were to turn their back on Moores now it would be a tacit admission that maybe Pietersen was right all along. It's still too late for him to make a comeback though, really. His England career is, like a lot of last-ditch options available to England right now, too risky to resurrect, and will likely just cause even more of a mess.

[Loony BoB]

I'll read it, Manus. I'll read it for you.

EDIT: Okay I've read it. I agree with you regarding almost everything, really. England is a mess and for me, it's because of the ECB and the selection panel. The players aren't bad, they're just not selected to win. They're selected to be an England cricketer, nothing more, nothing less. The players have become the call center workers, the management supervisors analysing reports to see which ones they can use to back up themselves instead of noting the big statistics that ring true - the runs, the wickets, the wins. They need to bring in a proper British English bulldog who is willing to sack the selectors for newer ones that are willing to shake things up, to get their hands dirty and to hire mavericks. God, they need mavericks. They don't have to be Kevin Pietersen but he's better than what you've got right now. The other players don't get along with him? Man up, you're at work. Perhaps they should be encouraged to stop crying and get on with it. If the English don't want players who will take risks and play a dangerous game, they will end up looking like Engla-- ah. Right.

[Old Manus]

Management supervisors is the phrase I was looking for. They have to justify their jobs when players are doing badly, so I imagine they're like a pack of rabid dogs at the moment. There's still a Flintoff-shaped hole in the team - someone who can take the game by the scruff of the neck and turn it on its head, someone who the opposition legitimately fear. KP fulfilled that role for a while before he lost his edge, along with that whole 'left arm spin' kerfuffle. The big teams have these players - McCullum, De Villiers, Warner/Faulkner, Sangakarra. England have nobody. Their most enterprising batsman is Jos Buttler, who you wouldn't say had any sort of stage presence. One might say that England can't have these players - the way selection works and the way their careers are micromanaged these days doesn't allow it. You need to keep your hands off these players and just let them go at it. The best example of that is David Warner - under the previous rudderless leadership at Australia he was seen as a troublemaker in a team that was in a mess. Now look at him. I imagine KP's stubborn refusal to be put in a box played more than a small part in his problems with the ECB.

[Loony BoB]

NZ are at the moment the anti-England. If you look at our lineup and their strike rates, and compare that to those of the English team, you'll very quickly see which bit of data the selectors are selectively overlooking.

Guptill - 80.13
McCullum - 93.87
Williamson - 82.80
Taylor - 82.27
Elliott - 74.66
Anderson - 125.34
Ronchi - 124.06
Vettori - 82.69
Boult - 76.47
Milne - 50.00
Southee - 89.85

Looks okay, right? Let's change that to only include results since the start of January 2014.

Guptill - 73.58 (lower!)
McCullum - 135.87 (higher)
Williamson - 88.82 (higher)
Taylor - 84.58 (higher)
Elliott - 91.89 (higher)
Anderson - 129.82 (higher)
Ronchi - 125.04 (higher)
Vettori - 113.18 (higher)
Boult - 81.48 (higher)
Milne - 62.79 (higher)
Southee - 104.65 (higher)

Massively higher on average. Average strike rate of 99.25, average strike rate of the top seven 104.23. Only Guptill has gone lower than his career strike rate, and we have nearly all players with a 80+ high strike rate (five 100+). Let's compare this to England in the same time period...

Ali - 103.09
Bell - 89.22
Hales - 71.83
Root - 79.62
Morgan - 80.85
Taylor - 78.69
Buttler - 107.43
Woakes - 80.68
Jordan - 95.16
Broad - 78.43
Anderson - 72.00

Two 100+, five below 80 including three of your top six. Average strike rate of 85.18, average strike rate of the top seven 87.25.

In short, NZ may on occasion get scuttled because of our aggression, but that's better than being scuttled despite a complete lack of it. Time to bring back your big hitters. You must have some.

[Old Manus]

I'm thinking hard. KP is a big hitter, we know that. Other than that, Buttler...Morgan is supposed to be a big hitter! Then we're onto unproven players. Stokes? Jason Roy? Genuinely lost otherwise, I don't keep up to date with county cricket as much as I should do. God knows Broad used to be able to smack the ball around a bit. There really is a dearth of options.

[Loony BoB]

http://www.espncricinfo.com/county-cricket-2014/content/player/297628.html
http://www.espncricinfo.com/county-cricket-2014/content/player/12450.html
http://www.espncricinfo.com/england/content/player/298438.html
http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/player/249866.html

Maybe? The biggest change that has to happen (selectors aside) is the mentality, the licence to actually TRY to bash their way around. They're all playing T20 these days - they should be getting pretty good at it.

[Spuuky]

I try to look at box scores/etc sometimes because it'd be cool if NZ won, but I literally can't even tell who is ahead, when I do. Cricket is the only sport I've seen where I can look over a box score and have no clue at all who is winning.

[Loony BoB]

Is England on the scorecard? If so, the other team is winning.

[Spuuky]

Oh, so it's like every other World Cup.

[Old Manus]

What a game