The Aussies are in town and the battle for the Ashes is upon us: England won the Ashes the last time battle was engaged on English soil, the Australians won them back shortly afterwards, in Oz.
How has England been preparing for the up and coming Ashes series?
- A poor Test series in the West Indies last Winter
- A poor one day series in the West Indies last Winter and early this season in England and now, ignominiously
- By losing to the Netherlands in the Twenty20 game in rather an embarrassing way
It's embarrassing that England has lost to the Netherlands but to lose when firing on one out of four cylinders is unacceptable.
It's trite now to say that England took cricket to the world, although of course it is undeniably true; but we really ought to be unbeatable by a country mile by the likes of the Netherlands.
Football
As an aside, the England football team takes on Kazakhstan this weekend in the qualifying rounds of the World Cup to be held in South Africa next year. When they played the Kazakhstan team at Wembley they got a shock as it turned out not to be so easy as they thought it would. Then the Kazakhstan team did what lower level teams do, which is to run out of steam. Up until that point however, the likes of Terry and Rooney were in danger of suffering significant embarrassment. No doubt England will take at least a point away from Almaty this weekend and leave all of the embarrassment to the England cricket team
DW
2 comments:
I have just been reminded that England not only took cricket to the world but it took Twenty20 to the world too.
We can dream, we can invent but we cannot perfect and develop.
DW
England Twenty20 captain Paul Collingwood is reported to have said, when asked about the dreadful performance against the Netherlands, that his team was, "Easing itself into" the competiton.
In an interview with Collingwood immediately before the game I heard him say "hopefully" three times in one paragraph.
Why do we give such positions of prominence and importance to these people?
DW
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