England vs NZ

This is sh@thouse, Keepin a low profile this weekend. Awesome bowling by TImbo and Maca swinging the willow.

With this England bowling performance all 33,000 of us could become millionaires.

KP must be laughing into his biltong. Jesus.

He'd do well to be a bigger joke than our last two performances.

I checked the score in the middle of the night and England were 90-3. Not great at that stage but not an unmitigated disaster. When I next woke up a few hours later it was all over.

The World Cup campaign isn't all over but if we have one wash out in our remaining games we will be in trouble.

We aren't very good but we should be better than this. There is no excuse for the number of times we have failed to bat 50 overs recently.

There is no excuse for bowlers with over 10 years experience in ODIs to not be able to deliver a yorker at the end of the innings. It's staggering how stubborn they are. Even when we're getting carted for 15 an over we still bowl short. Surely it's better to be hit trying to do the right thing? Where is the confidence to back your skills?

There is no excuse for failing to pick a balanced squad. We have too many top order batsmen in the squad and so when Bopara lost form we had to completely reshuffle the batting order to accommodate Ballance. If they didn't want to pick Stokes then Bairstow or Roy would have been better options (not just hindsight, I said as much when the squad was announced).

There is no excuse for changing your opening bowling combination on the eve of the World Cup.

I would think that Moores, Downton and Whitaker will come under pressure soon. On the whole, our players are not improving when they come into the international set up. Who was the last English bowler to fulfill his potential? James Anderson I reckon.

It's a mess and I don't see any improvement on the horizon.

I think the domestic game needs to be looked at. I would consider playing fewer first class matches. Maybe have three divisions of 6 with one up from each league. Ten first class games a season would be enough I think. We certainly need to play more first class cricket in August so that our spinners are able to learn how to win matches on dry pitches rather than learning how to bowl defensively in unfriendly conditions. We should also stop the pitch inspectors punishing teams every time a track turns on Day one.

I'm not sure the young player quota rewards that the counties are offered work. Decent players drift out of the game as counties can't afford to keep them. They are replaced with substandard youngsters so counties can maximize their revenue, which is great on paper but I think it dilutes the standard. Some sort of incentive scheme is a good idea but I'm not sure the balance is right at the moment.

I think I would play a 20 over knockout competition including club sides, minor counties and first class sides if possible. The first class sides could join with no more than 5 matches left to play.

I hate myself for saying this but I think we should also look at a franchised T20 competition. To attract the best players and the maximum audience I would schedule it for four weeks at the end of July and start of August. The money made should be given back to counties / grass routes and counties would still have the knockout competition to compete in.

I think the number of 50 over games played is about right. Personally I prefer the 40 over format but it makes no sense to play 40 overs domestically and 50 internationally.

I think the franchised T20 event should be shown on terrestrial TV and highlights of the other two one day competitions should be on free to air TV too. I'd like to see at least three tests a year on free to air TV too. I know the ECB would lose money on this but it's pointless having money to invest if no one has the means to become interested in the game. The balance is wrong at the moment.

It's a big five years for cricket in this country and domestically. It's becoming irrelevant in too many places in the World and the ICC aren't doing enough to grown the game in places like Ireland. I'm not sure what else they have to do to get full member status?

The problem with franchise cricket I think is that it misunderstands the nature of the cricket watching audience in this country and the realities of playing cricket in England.  The idea that you could get an all singing all dancing cast together and drag in big crowds of casual fans doesn't square with the reality which is that cricket doesn't really seem to have a massive potential casual audience.  What it has is a hardcore of people who go if they have the time and the competition looks attractive.

I just don't really see crowds jumping from 1500 to 10,000 just because Chris Gayle and Virat Kohli happen to be playing. It'll boost the crowd a bit sure but the idea that we could have an equivalent of the Big Bash in England just doesn't seem very likely to me (obviously IPL comparisons are just laughable).  Cricket has more cultural significance in Australia - it has a far bigger casual audience and it's also much more pleasant to be outside in summer evenings in most of Australia.  There's no getting away from the fact that in England for most of the summer it gets cold when the sun goes down and there's no guarantee of predicting which days will have warmer evenings etc.  If you bunch a franchise tournament together and then we have dreadful weather for a month it'll sporting and financial catastrophe.  That's the problem.  I'm not against trying to find ways of making cricket more sustainable but I think we need our own model that builds from existing strengths rather than using a template that may really struggle to take off in English conditions.  When we did T20 in that contained format before people just weren't prepared to go 3 times a week once the novelty had warn off. I don't really see how franchising gets round that.  I think we need to start from having 18 cricket bases and work outwards from there.  I would want to see counties being forced to have much closer relationships with the grassroots game - I think that would be a good start.  In any case the issue here isn't our struggles in T20 cricket; we're actually pretty good at that.  It's out continual abject performance in ODI's.

I'm not sure the CWC neccesarily shows the English game in crisis though - just the ODI aspect of it and that really is a question of emphasis.  For other countries ODI's are cricket; for us they're a minor part.  Graeme Swann basically admitted that England Test players didn't really want to play in ODI's.  They found them boring.  So there's a bit of a cultural thing in our game where it's just not seen as much of a pinncale.  I mean look at India v Pakistan and how much that meant to everyone involved.  It was a genuinely massive global sporting event.  England v Australia was not on the same level; there just wasn't the same level of passion you'd see in an Ashes game.  So there's an issue there.  In Test Cricket we are still a very good side; we're pretty decent T20 team but we just don't seem to get this format on any level; tactically, culturally, from a media perspective etc.  It's very much treated as the format the cat dragged in which is a problem if everybody else gives it far more importance.

In terms of immediate concerns; our batsman just seem completely shot.  The key to ODI success is normally the lower middle order and in general they have been utterly woeful for a month now.  Also NZ is a very good team chocked full of players in their prime or just entering their prime whereas we seem to be full good of players who have never quite mastered the format (Bell, Anderson etc), talented but very inexperienced players (Ali, Root etc) and guys who have been there for a while but never quite convinced (Morgan, Treadwell). So it's not really that surprising we lost.  It is surprising we were annihilated though.