XPost: uk.sport.cricket, aus.sport.cricket

I think England's losses have MORE to do with team selections and two
bad decisions AFTER winning the toss than lack of enough ODIs running up
to WC2023.


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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/oct/23/joe-root-england-cricket-world-cup-50-over-increase

Joe Root calls for increase in 50-over cricket if England are to thrive
again

Defending world champions hurt by lack of ODI preparation
Root defends the captaincy of ‘incredible’ Jos Buttler


Joe Root has admitted English players no longer experience enough
50-over cricket either for their counties or their country to go into
global tournaments with any realistic prospect of success.

England are bottom of the World Cup table after Afghanistan’s
eight-wicket victory over Pakistan , having lost three of their opening
four games. Root’s experience illustrates the fading focus on the format since they hosted and won the tournament in 2019.
Brydon Carse in action against New Zealand last summer.
‘Junior Plunkett’: England summon Brydon Carse to replace Topley
Read more

In the summer of 2017 alone Root played 14 one-day internationals and a
further five games for Yorkshire in the Royal London One-Day Cup. But he
has since played only once in that competition, in 2018, while squeezing
just 16 ODIs into the three and a half years between February 2020 and
his arrival in India at the end of last month. “Whether it’s
domestically or internationally, I don’t think we play enough of it if we’re going to continue to compete in World Cups,” he said.

While the 32-year-old is clear that “I don’t want it to be seen as an excuse” for England’s recent failings, he said the lack of games has had
a profound impact on the team. “We definitely would have benefited from
more 50-over cricket,” he added. “It would have been nice to have a
proper run-in over a six-month period, where you slowly work things
through as a group.” A further issue, Root said, was that “when you’re not playing the format, it’s hard to know who the best players are”.

Amid rumours that the Hundred – which runs concurrently with an
enfeebled One-Day Cup – may end up being reformatted as a T20
tournament, Root suggested that the Blast could make way in the domestic schedule for a 50-over competition, though “there’s talk of whether this format is relevant any more anyway”.

“It’s got a huge amount of history and it brings a lot to cricket,” Root said. “It will always hold a very special part of my heart for what it’s given me throughout my career. I think its [future] is a question that
should be posed to the next generation of players, and to everyone
watching the game. It shouldn’t be down to: ‘Is it bringing the most
money for the sport?’ It should be down to what people want to watch,
and what’s going to engage the next generation of players.”

England’s lack of proper pre-tournament preparation has clearly not
helped their World Cup campaign – though the only other team that
arrived similarly undercooked was South Africa, who have not found it
such a hindrance. In the six months before the tournament, and
discounting the series against Ireland last month played with a reserve
squad, England scheduled just four ODIs, one fewer than South Africa.
Meanwhile Sri Lanka lined up 17, Bangladesh 14, Pakistan 13, India and
New Zealand 12, Afghanistan 11 and both Australia and the Netherlands eight.

The result has been not just disappointing individual performances, but confusion about the team’s direction and selection. Their uncertainty is demonstrated by the fact that England went into their opening game with
four all-rounders in Moeen Ali, Liam Livingstone, Sam Curran and Chris
Woakes, giving the side tremendous batting depth. But just two weeks
later all of them were out and England were dealing with a long tail.

Jos Buttler has won two tosses and made two desperately bad decisions,
deciding on both occasions to bowl first, and his team has handled their
run chases terribly. Against Afghanistan Buttler erroneously assumed
conditions would change to benefit batting later in the day, and against
South Africa he threw his side into the full furnace of a Mumbai
heatwave, in which they promptly wilted.

“I’ve not played in anything like that before,” Root said of a day when the temperature in Mumbai peaked at 37.4C (99F), the third hottest
October day in a decade. “I’ve played in hotter conditions, and probably more humid conditions, but it just felt like you couldn’t get your
breath. It was like you were eating the air.”

Root feels it is too soon to criticise Buttler, and that England’s
white-ball captain has suffered from unfair comparisons with his
predecessor, Eoin Morgan. “The way Morgs instilled a completely
different culture, and the way we looked at white-ball cricket, was a once-in-a-generation bit of thinking,” Root said. “For Jos to be
compared to that I think is a little unfair. I think he’s done an
incredible job in the time he’s had, and the performances that the
players have put in are not a fair reflection of his leadership.”

For all the mitigation there is little to explain how poorly some
experienced players have performed in the tournament so far. “There’s no magic pill that you can swallow overnight to improve performances,” Root said. “But it’s not beyond our reach as a group. We’ve got the talent
and we’ve got bags of experience. We just need to put those performances
in that we’re more than capable of doing.”

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