Time for change for England? Benny's World Cup Blog Continues
17 March 2015
In the fourth of his World Cup blogs for the Western Morning News in association with St Austell Brewery, Benny Howell looks at where England went wrong and where they go from here.
There has been a lot of anger and emotion from England fans and the media since the team’s early World Cup exit but sometimes it is more powerful to simply let the facts speak for themselves.
Eoin Morgan’s team may have finished their campaign with a win over Afghanistan but let's recap on what went before…
Against Bangladesh England won the toss and bowled first on a good batting wicket. Bangladesh scored a respectable 275. England were then bowled out for 260 meaning Bangladesh qualified for the quarter finals and England fly home in a week.
But how has this happened? Why have we not learnt our lesson? Are we scared of winning? Where do we go from here? I'm sure these are some of the questions being asked in the English dressing room.
The answers may be harder to find.
I don't know what goes on behind the scenes with England so I wouldn't know who exactly is to blame for this failure. But from watching them throughout the tournament there a few obvious failings that led to the illustrious trophy slipping out of reach.
To succeed these days you must be adaptable. Switch hitting, ramping, swatting, lapping, dinking... Name a word and it will be a type of shot. The precision, power, courage and even the pure execution that goes into these skills is mind-blowing and extraordinary to watch. Scores of 300 in 50 overs is only par these days and it is growing.
The English batsman are good enough to be equals with the top nations, even though they failed to gel as a unit this time round. There are some extreme talents in and around the team which suggests that some of the issues were more down to tactical errors.
But despite failing to chase down what should have been an attainable target against Bangladesh, the real concern is the bowling, where we seem to be in limbo, without being able to find the way out.
At times you need to be simple and bowl fast into the block hole. Other times you will have to think outside the box and use your precise change ups - leg cutter, off cutter, back of the hand, split finger, knuckle ball. I could keep going...
England haven't managed to bowl fast enough or with any real subtle variation. There was no conviction, especially towards the latter overs of the innings. It's frustrating to watch as they are still clearly stuck in their old ways.
As Michael Vaughan tweeted: "What disappoints me more than anything is that England didn't compete and played a brand of cricket from another era!"
Inevitably the questions being asked at the moment are "why?" but it's time for everyone involved to start asking "how?"
How are we as a nation going to be world number one? There are any number of answers but number one has to be to start doing things differently
We have four years...
