‘We have been crap’: Have England hit rock bottom or are they still falling? | Cricket-world-cup News

Ben Stokes sat speechless for ten seconds. It was relatively a lighthearted icebreaker question: ‘Has there been any happy or funny moment on this tour’. The seconds ticked, before he muttered, “Sorry, I didn’t expect that question”. Five more seconds went before he added with a smile, “Ask me tomorrow again!”A short while back, on the eve of the clash against Australia, he had summed up the hellish ride that England have endured in this World Cup. “We have been crap … not having an answer and being able to understand as to why it’s gone wrong is very simple. That’s the answer. Because if we knew what had gone wrong, we would have been able to fix it. But unfortunately, we don’t. It’s just been one of those tournaments where, yeah, it’s just been a disaster. And there’s no point sugarcoating it … the problem is that we’ve been crap,” Stokes had said.
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It’s been that kind of a tour. A total “crap”. Where even someone like Ben Stokes can’t think of a single happy moment. Watching England play has been a bizarre experience; imagine how the players feel. They just don’t seem to know what has hit them. It’s one thing to be part of a series where the problems are obvious, known, and the slide into the ass can be tough but understandable hell – players generally tend to mentally check out of such tours and look to getting back home.
But here in India, they have been ambushed an invisible enemy. Or so they feel. There have been murmurs from beyond the boundary, first from Eoin Morgan, the former captain who turned around England’s ODI hory, who hinted at team morale and the coach Matthew Mott’s mixed messaging to the team and his tactics in selections. Then Michael Vaughan too piped up with issues relating to contracts – The players have been in negotiations with the board over the contract monies. But the players aren’t buying all that argument. But something has indeed gone horribly wrong.
It probably showcases how brittle sporting success is. Mercurial sporting gods bestow greatness and then seemingly on a whim, take it away. If a team doesn’t nurture it, be careful with it, it can just vanish.
The other day Joe Root was on a BBC radio podcast, trying to explain the unexplainable.
“I have been around for a long time and experienced lots of times where things don’t go to plan, but this (World Cup experience) doesn’t remind me of any previous experience. It’s very much unique. I haven’t gone, ‘here we go again’. It’s been unique.”
A day earlier, the pacer Mark Wood, who has been below-par this tournament, was put on the hot seat on BBC again. “Does the coach have the support of the team?” Wood, usually a very jovial chap, stiffened up. “For a World Cup-winning coach? Support for a World Cup-winning coach? Absolutely.”
Wood then tried to detail the bizarre situation: “We the players get every support we need. Nutrition, strength-conditioning coach, physics, local Indian coaches helping out, we get the tactics, we got the analysts … We players have to take up the responsibility. I haven’t performed; I am frustrated and hurt. You can’t just pin it all on the captain or coach.”
Some have also talked about the effect of Bazball. But if anything, this team has been timid with the bat. Take the chase against Afghanan for example; if a more timid English batting had to be seen, a rewind to any 90s England game in this region would do. Just the faces changed, and the approach was similar.
Perhaps it’s just a combination of things: tactical (some toss decisions like the decision to chase against Afghanan and South Africa in humid Mumbai were puzzling), selection (not deploying Jason Roy at all), misplaced confidence in composition (Mooen Ali averages over 100 as a bowler in ODIs in India; even Jos Buttler averages just 13 here), perhaps some embers from contract discussions – but above all the players, as Wood and Stokes put it, have been poor.
Australia, their opponents on Saturday started the tournament similarly. And the time their game against Sri Lanka unfolded on October 16, they looked down and out. Sri Lanka were cruising at 125 for 0, then 157 for 1, but suddenly collapsed to 209 all out. In a blink, their tournament began to change. From that third game on, they began to fire one one.
On their last tour of Sri Lanka, in the midst of an economic disaster in the island nation, on their last day of the tour, a vast majority of the Sri Lankan crowd had turned in yellow jerseys to show their gratitude for Australia choosing to tour their country in tough times. Perhaps, the Sri Lankan players took that a bit far in this World Cup game, collapsing as they did, and helping Australia to stand on their feet again.Most Read
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However, they haven’t been standing on their feet all that well. Glenn Maxwell lost his footing from a golf buggy of all things and is out of the game against England. Mitch Marsh is back home for family reasons. They do have the personnel to fill in with Cameron Green and Marcus Stoinis stepping in for the England game. England can’t see the twin absences as any magic portal that has opened up for them to barge through, but considering they don’t know the hole in which they have fallen in India, they will take the developments in the Australian team as good signs for them. Even Afghanan would hope so; if England can win here, the Afghanan vs Australia game on November 7 would be a cracker.
Ultimately, it’s a contest between Australia, a team that has found its stride, and England, a team that doesn’t know what hit them. “Everything we’ve tried throughout this World Cup, through trying to put pressure back onto the opposition in a way in which we know or trying to soak up the pressure in a different way, which we know we’ve done before and been successful with, it’s just not worked,” Stokes said.
Generally, the sporting cliche is that the only way from the bottom is to move up. But the question is: have England hit rock bottom or are they still falling?