Cricket: Englishmen sliding to bottom of ladder

By Don Cameron

Might it be charitable not to rub salt into the England wounds which the New Zealand cricketers opened up with their nine-wicket win at Lord's last weekend?

Might we not tug painfully on the tail of the gaunt old lion who gave us this exasperating game?

A tosh for charity or sympathy. By losing to New Zealand, England are skidding down toward the bottom of the international test ladder, the place where the patronising Poms and their international rating system always seem to place New Zealand.

The system was started by the Wisden editor Matthew Engel, and given further use and credibility by a very good English magazine, Wisden Cricket Monthly.

The countries are rated on their recent test series results (not necessarily separate tests won or lost) and by the start of the present series England were seventh at 0.71, Zimbabwe eighth at 0.70 and New Zealand ninth and last at 0.56.

Should New Zealand tie the four-test series England will drop to eighth, 0.64, compared with New Zealand a whisker away at 0.63.

Should New Zealand win the series - and considering the abysmal England play at Lord's and the breast-beating which followed a New Zealand series win is not impossible - England will slip to ninth and last on the table.

If this should happen one can picture the English newspaper critics consigning the whole of the cricketing Establishment - MCC, ECB and any other acronym you could shake a bat at - to the murkiest dungeon in the Tower of London.

The critics had some useful practice these last few days. They have ridiculed a team organisation that has Alex Tudor, the unlikely match-winner of the first test, pulling out just before the test when Surrey had found Tudor unfit after a scan the day before the test - and the England camp was unaware Tudor had any injury problem.

Angus Fraser was hurriedly summoned from Somerset, was within an hour of Lord's before being told he was not wanted, and had to return home.

Others are chipping an organisation which has the new coach Duncan Fletcher (due to start in October) being on holiday in Scotland and not at Lord's watching his future charges fail.

Now the call is for Michael Atherton or Robin Smith or Graeme Hick, or all three, to be recalled for the Old Trafford test next week.

People are asking whether Lord MacLaurin, who took over the chairmanship of the English cricket board with the mission statement labelled "Raising the Standard", should now resign when the rallying flag has become stuck at half-mast.

Martin Johnson, who plies his wicked wit in the Daily Telegraph, wrote: "Until England's cricketers are bred for the Derby, rather than a summer season of carting children about on Skegness beach, it should surprise no one when they consistently lose test matches - even against New Zealand."

The senior DT writer Michael Henderson used some very pertinent statistics to illustrate the wayward ways of the recent England selectors.

Henderson said there were 66 present county players who had won test caps, and 32 of them had played fewer than 10 tests. Unfortunately Henderson did not number those who had been picked, dropped and picked again.

But Henderson did strike the precise point. The quality of county cricket maintains a steady decline, in spite of bringing back four-day matches and making the ball and pitches so batsman-friendly.

Too many players are thrust forward as future champions after a handful of good county innings, and too many fail in the harder, unforgiving world of test cricket.

One radio commentator praised Aftab Habib as being the scorer of several county centuries at a time when Habib was struggling to stay afloat at Lord's.

Habib has recently played Shell Cup cricket for Canterbury and neither there nor at Lord's (where Martin Crowe wondered at the technique of a batsman who made three distinct movements as the bowler approached) did he appear to be of test class.

Perhaps the England batsmen, and the New Zealanders, too, have sacrificed test technique on the altar of the one-day game.

Praise the Lord, then, for the unglamorous but hard-working test-quality batsmanship of Matthew Horne, the man who turned the test.

Praise, too, for Chris Cairns and Daniel Vettori and Geoff Allott - and for that absolute blinder of a reflex catch that Adam Parore took from Nathan Astle's near-wide to dismiss Graham Thorpe.

And a pox on those pedants who rate New Zealand as ninth out of the test match nine.