England fans got an early look at the possible tactics of our Twenty-20 batsmen in the Stanford trophy later this year, as the one-day game against South Africa was shortened due to rain and became a 20 over run chase.
While the openers appeared to get a little carried away with the idea of scoring boundaries and managed to get themselves out, Owais Shah, Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff showed that the middle order have the ability to improvise, take advantage of poor deliveries and manage a run chase. Flintoff in particular looks in fantastic form and played with maturity. Since coming back from injury he has played himself in and then looked to start swinging instead of swinging every ball and hoping it worked. His confidence with the ball appears to be helping him with the bat.
Bring on the West Indians and Middlesex!
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3 comments:
The Stanford series is a bit of a bad idea in my opinion. Does no one else feel it's just completely for the money; cricket is changing for the worse in this respect; we'll have cricketers driving around in their tacky Bentleys with more money than sense!
The whole Twenty20 circus is too much in my opinion. The IPL worked well and I would like to see that continue along with the world cup as it is a good way to get kids into the game. Hopefully they will then become interested in the other forms and start playing.
However the Champions League and the Stanford Trophy appear to be bad ideas. The Champions League scheduling has pushed back the start of the Aus-SA series in Dec so that there are 3 back-to-back tests. For a series that is supposedly going to decide the best team in the world that's unacceptable.
The ECB's plans for an EPL are ridiculous. Why do we need 2 domestic tournaments with exactly the same teams and players. Just utter madness and created to chase the pounds in my opinion.
Yep, money is certainly taking over; i've had a massive rant earlier today on my blog (The Popping Crease) about it all - feel free to read and comment!
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