Winter is coming and the bails are off

After a long summer, and definitely not a barbecue one, the cricket season has entered its final month and after winning the ashes back from the Australians the England team have put in some lacklustre performances in the One-Day arena and now find themselves 2-0 down with 5 more to play. Yes I know what you are saying, 7 One-Day Internationals at the end of a long summer when we've already won the ashes, yes even my thoughts are not entirely on this series.

What I cannot understand is that we appear to have a world class One-Day squad and yet we consistently find ourselves struggling to compete with the top teams from around the world and I believe that it shows up just how much of a gap there is between One-Day Internationals and One Day County Cricket. We have what is regarded as the second best County Set-Up in the world (second only to Australia) and yet the people we are producing and bringing through seem to struggle to step up when they are up against really class teams such as Australia, South Africa, India and Sri Lanka (currently the 4 teams above us in the ICC One-Day Rankings.)

Players such as Ravi Bopara and Luke Wright have been outstanding for their counties this year, both in County Championship and One-Day games, and yet they seem to find the step up to the international arena a big one with Ravi failing in the Ashes Series and Luke Wright having some problems with his batting when faced with the likes of Brett Lee and Mitchell Johnson running in hard. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of pure pace bowlers in County Standard Cricket, apart from Saj Mahmood at Lancashire and a few of the Durham Bowlers there are not enough bowlers that can get the ball up to the magic 90mph mark and even less people that can do it consistently meaning that when the step up is taken the players end up facing quicker than they have done before and maybe just being found out a bit by the world class bowlers bowling to them.

So my plan would be to crank up the bowling machines and get the boys used to facing extreme pace of 90mph or more because they are definitely going to need it this winter when they are out in South Africa for their 4 Test Match and 5 One-Day International tour later this year, and with people like Dale Steyn and Wayne Parnell bowling at 90+ the boys that want to be on that touring party had better get used to facing this and get used to batting normally against it and more importantly scoring big runs. If they can do that then just maybe we can continue the good work in the Test Arena and maybe start to become a good One-Day Team.

For now I have about 4 hours to kill until the 3rd One-Dayer between England and Australia and I may just go and take a nap before the start. Come on England!!