Where's the button marked 'panic'?

Yeah, that's right. A couple of posts ago I was going on about how solid the England team were looking. It didn't take too long for that to change. The question about which spinner to pick doesn't seem so quite so important anymore. There are more pressing concerns, like who's going to captain the team, who's going to open the batting, where the hell are the runs going to come from, for Christ's sake? Oh and does anyone have a cure for stomach bugs (lots of Coca Cola, kills everything)?
Leaving medical matters to the more medically minded, I do feel a bit as if my constant questioning of Collingwood's involvement in the team has been vindicated by the news that the management are sending for another middle order batsman from the A tour. This seems like an admission that Collingwood isn't really up to the job. I'm not sure that Bell is either. I mean, he scores a few runs, but he never seems very secure. Pietersen's lost form. So have Strauss and Flintoff and Vaughan (his loss is starting to have a look of permanence about it). I was pleased to see that Alistair Cook was summoned from the A tour, as he's very young and seems very promising, but I think that the middle order batsman who arrives should have been touring in the first place.
Look at it this way, if selecting a combined India and England team (as I often did as a kid when playing dice cricket, for some reason), on current form at least, you'd probably have to include all the Indian batsmen, especially now that Trescothick has gone home. Dhoni would also get in ahead of Jones (whose batting hasn't come along either).
I guess that England have a bit of a record of doing badly in warm up matches and then performing well in the Tests (think of the last South Africa tour, and even recently in Pakistan when the performance during the first four days of the first Test was tip top). This time though, without key personel, with most of the rest of the team out of form or suffering from something nasty, or both, I'm finding it harder to imagine that England have much chance in the First Test, especially given that it's likely to be played on a raging turner.
Where's that button?

The best English spinner

Disturbingly, there seems to be some sort of consensus developing that Ian Blackwell is England's best spinner (apart from the currently incapacitated King of Spain, naturally). That was before today anyway, because stone me, wee Gareth Batty has gone and taken 7 for 23 playing for A team in Antigua. Those are pretty impressive figures, Gareth. Have you been working on a couple of special deliveries over the winter? A doobla doosra or something? Or were the Antigua XI carrying on in the great tradition of teams past (think Sydney in the 80's and Alan Border, 1995 at the Oval) of getting out to innocuous spinners? It doesn't look as if they were slogging too much, or at least not very successfully, because 5 of Gareth's (that's Mr Batty to you, sonny) overs were maidens. Anyway, I haven't been able to find a match report yet. Still, it's very exciting.
As for the best English spinner in India at the moment, I'm still not convinced that it's big Ian. OK, so he took four wickets in the first innings, but let's look at the manner of those wickets shall we? Stumped, caught in the deep, caught in the deep... you get the picture. Derek Pringle seems to think that he was actually bowling best of all the spinners, but then he probably thought of himself as a front line bowler too (ouch). Which leads to the question: if Ian Blackwell is picked, would he have the worst first class record of any front line bowler ever chosen to play for England? That his classification as a front line bowler seems a bit dubious only proves my point, I think. Could we please leave the picking of bits and pieces cricketers who are good at neither one thing nor the other back in the 80's and 90's, back where they belong (yeah, I'm talking about you, Geoff Miller, Derek Pringle, Mark Ealham, the list goes on)? I fully expect big Ian to now go and take a 10 for in the first test. If he does, I shall consume as many meat pies, one after the other, doused in ketchup. I hate ketchup.

The Underdogs

So another test series involving England is soon to start. I'm getting excited. After Australia, India are probably England's greatest rivals and the passion for cricket over there means that the atmosphere at the Tests should be great (or do the locals ignore test matches in favour of the one day stuff - I don't know). It also seems as if the England team are prepared for this one. Simon Jones has been out in India for a while, getting used to bowling with the SG ball (the one used over there), getting it to swing, which is encouraging. Andrew Strauss says he's been concentrating on playing spin and knows that he has to do better than he did in Pakistan. In a press conference last week, Vaughan made a similar comment, about the team in general. Pietersen has even shaved his head. It seems that there is a collective determination that there wasn't for the series in Pakistan. After the Ashes series, I guess they were favourites this team (although I thought it would be evenly balanced). This time around, they are definitely the underdogs, but, as was evident in that Ashes series, perhaps they enjoy a challenge. We'll see. I can't wait.
Interesting to see that the ICC have decided to end the ridiculous super-subs experiment, which seemed flawed from the start. They say though that they're trying to think of other ways to make one day cricket more exciting. Why not just play less of them? The biggest reason for many one day matches being dull is that they're largely meaningless. The players aren't bothered. The cricket watching public see too many of them. Now we have he ridiculous situation in which the next Ashes series is going to be squeezed into 6 weeks between one day competitions which no one could be bothered about.

Progressive Aussies?

Contradiction in terms? Obviously not. Look at Germaine Greer, for Christ's sake. Still, it does make you think when you see that Greg Chappell has been having a go at Shoaib for his action, while crowds in Australia continue to shout "no ball" as Muralitharan bowls. Do they realise, I wonder, that they're watching one of the best bowlers ever? Would they be so vociferous if he were Australian? Obviously not, but you see what I'm getting at. That made me laugh a couple of years ago when it was revealed that pretty much all of the Australian bowlers exceeded the legal limit at the time. Suddenly a lot of ex players down under went a bit quiet. I don't know, but they may just be a link between what is said in the papers and what's said in the stands (by the likes of those who have been having a go at South Africans, for example).
So is this article by Peter Roebuck tongue in cheek or not? He makes such a habit of saying ridiculous stuff that it's hard to tell. Also, whenever I read his articles, not only do they piss me off because of his ill informed views on the cricket (suggesting, for example, that Ian Blackwell should replace Ashley Giles after the Lord's Test last summer), but he also seems quite happy to slip in more than his fair share of near racist comments (a fair share being none). I quote: "People keep banging on about rights and so forth (though not in China)". Mmm... is he trying to suggest that no Chinese people support human rights? Stick to the cricket, Pete. Actually, stick to something else in which I'm not at all interested, like errr... I don't know. Badminton?
Finally, and 'cause it's a bit related, and 'cause it's pissing me off: those cartoons by that Danish paper. Not big, not clever. Very sad, in fact, as is their reproduction throughout Europe. I've got nothing against freedom of speech, but there's a difference between speaking freely and being extremely insulting.