English Chess Forum

What do people think of the Pietersen dismissal?

KP? Nuts, he's the Mel Gibson of cricket - brave & bonkers.

"Should never have been allowed to play" is not on the voting list so I can't vote.
(England should be renamed - Home & Colonial & Imperial.)

I started to stop watching cricket when it left the BBC.
Cut down further after it moved to Channel 4 as the commentary team were often better than the cricket team.

Stopped watching (TV) altogether after the great digital rip-off.
(The former BBC boss just said 'sorry' to MPs for overseeing the wasting almost £100 million - on a computer project called Digital Media Initiative, thank the gods it was only an 'initiative' - for which he was paid off handsomely and promoted to his new job as CEO of the NY Times! For equality's sake the female former BBC 'chief operator' was also punished by being let go with a £700,000 golden goodbye plus a £2 million golden pension pot.)

To my lasting shame I continue to eavesdrop with an illicit analogue wireless.
The commentary team are now always better than the cricket team so that suits me fine.

Paul McKeown wrote:What do people think of the Pietersen dismissal?

I don't think the public are being treated to the full facts of the situation, so it's impossible to form an opinion on the personal relationships.

However, it seems to me to be a pre-requisite to get your best XI out on the field for every game, with variations depending on the pitch surface. (E.g. England's best XI might be 3 seamers and 1 spinner, but doing that in India would be laughable.) Pietersen is undoubtedly one of England's best XI, particularly with Trott's unfortunate demise.

It's not even as if England have a queue of people to replace him. We thought there was depth in the batting with up-and-coming players a couple of years ago: Stokes, Taylor, Ballance, Bairstow were all promising in the county game. However, Ballance and Bairstow have yet to take their opportunities. Taylor has sunk without a trace. Stokes is the only one to perform so far.

England knew its best XI with perhaps 2 questions 12 months ago: Who opens with Cook, and who was the third-seamer. I'm now struggling to work out which 11 names will find their way onto the team sheet for the 1st Test this summer.

I read a good comment somewhere that there are only five individuals who are anywhere near certainties for the first test of the summer - Cook, Bell, Stokes, Broad, Anderson - and on recent form arguably 3 of those should be coming under pressure if there were any serious competition for places at present (and not withstanding his highly promising start, it's not clear that Stokes is quite good enough, yet, with either bat or ball to full hold down a place with either (the ideal in an allrounder - although no real problem if our keeper, whoever it is (and it really should be Prior), starts scoring runs again). No doubt Root will also continue to be picked, despite apparently having no requirement to score any runs and beyond that, who knows? (Monty should be in, but Cook seems completely clueless at knowing how to manage him).

I found one particular selection in the squad for the ODI/T20 really bizarre. I follow county cricket reasonably closely, but I've no idea who Stephen Parry is. Research indicates he's Lancashire's #2 spinner in one day cricket. He's made 6 first-class appearances, having been kept out of the side behind Simon Kerrigan, who had a poor Test debut at The Oval. I didn't see Kerrigan in the squad, though.

I think Root did a decent job in summer opening the batting. I've no idea why they suddenly dropped him back down the order again. Possibly the problem was not Root but a lack of middle-order batting options. I seem to remember the vacant spot in the batting order was Carberry v Ballance, and then in the warmup game, Carberry made 150odd not out. So Root moved down to make way for him. To move Root from 6 to 2 to 5 to 3 and back to 5 again doesn't really do him any favours.

Moeen Ali isn't that surprising to me, as a Worcestershire fan, he and Alan Richardson have carried the team for the last two seasons.

All very strange: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cricket/26067340

Root has certainly been mucked about, but any claims that he 'did well' opening during the summer really rest solely on his Lords innings where he should have been out in single figures (personally i think the Compton dropping to bring Bairstow into the middle order was where it all started to go wrong, and England's muddled selection thinking has got progressively worse since that point). However we now have a situation where he is scoring slower than Boycott (when he scores at all) and seems to be holding his place in the ODI side almost entirely because of his bowling.

I agree with Richard (& with Alex's confusion). Compton was a serious exclusion, amplified by the departure of Trott (for whom Compton is a like-for-like replacement). I don't greatly rate Carberry; and do think Root should be persevered with. But there are limits - being tested. What to do with Bell now? Senior player - but at 3 or 4? And if either, who at the other spot? And at 6? Stokes, surely. Richard is right. But what else can be done?

Moeen Ali? Very odd. Warks threw him away to Worcs as not good enough. He once scored 236no in a 20-20 game for his school (fyi, Moseley, Alex). Has come on, but only in Div 2. Steven Parry? Just bizarre. Just like the selection, then dumping, of Woakes (& Kerrigan). OK, Stokes 'solves' the Woakes question. But the spinner problem? Where now - Briggs, Borthwick, someone?

Richard Bates wrote:Root has certainly been mucked about, but any claims that he 'did well' opening during the summer really rest solely on his Lords innings where he should have been out in single figures (personally i think the Compton dropping to bring Bairstow into the middle order was where it all started to go wrong, and England's muddled selection thinking has got progressively worse since that point). However we now have a situation where he is scoring slower than Boycott (when he scores at all) and seems to be holding his place in the ODI side almost entirely because of his bowling.

He's played 15 matches, 29 innings, and has a Test batting average of 36.73, with 2 100s and 4 50s. I take the point that his 180 was relatively fortunate, and take that innings out, he averages about 27. This notwithstanding, I reckon that with a decent run in the team in one spot (and opener is surely his long-term future), then he'll come good.

Root, Ballance and Bairstow have all been excellent players for Yorkshire over the past few seasons. Root and Bairstow average in the 40s, with Ballance in the 50s. With one county having lots of high-scoring batsmen, I wondered if there's something afoot. Is Headingley a good batting pitch?

Yorkshire had 49 batting bonus points in 2013, the most of any Division One team.

Batting in 2013 (notable scores included):
96 (Bairstow 29) & 248 (Ballance 63) v Sussex @ Leeds
177 (Root 49) & 339/6 (Root 182) v Durham @ Chester-le-Street
677/7 dec. (Root 236, Bairstow 186) v Derbyshire @ Leeds
505/9 (Rashid 180) v Somerset @ Leeds
407 (Rashid 110*) v Warwickshire @ Edgbaston
450/5 dec. (Lyth 105) & 104/4 dec. (Lyth 57*) v Somerset @ Taunton
572/8 dec. (Gale 272) v Nottinghamshire @ Scarborough
390 (Gale 103) & 4/0 (Lyth 4*) v Middlesex @ Lord's
433/9 dec. (Gale 148) & 254 (Plunkett 68) v Surrey @ Leeds
617/5 dec. (Lees 275*) v Derbyshire @ Chesterfield
302 (Ballance 112) & 180 (Ballance 45) v Warwickshire @ Leeds
407 (Lyth 95) & 12/0 (Lyth 12*) v Nottinghamshire @ Nottingham
274 (Williamson 84) & 419 (Jaques 152) v Durham @ Scarborough
326 (Lyth 93) & 81/2 (Lyth 40*) v Sussex @ Hove
210 (Gale 66) & 194 (Ballance 90) v Middlesex @ Leeds
434 (Ballance 148) & 265/6 (Ballance 108*) v Surrey @ The Oval

In 1st innings @ Leeds, Yorkshire averages 2223 runs for 55 wickets, 40.42.
In 1st innings elsewhere (including home games at Scarborough), Yorkshire averages 4054 runs for 88 wickets, 46.07.

So it can't really be that Yorkshire batsmen have high batting averages because Leeds is good for batting.

Anyway, I think all that shows two things:
(1) Root, Ballance and Bairstow must be excellent batsmen
(2) If Yorkshire averaged 43.87 per wicket in 1st innings in 2013, which is too high, but is probably a function of the ECB's approach to marking down pitches where the bowlers actually have a chance of taking wickets. I wonder if this then hurts the batsmen when they take on good bowling? I can't use numbers to test that.

David Robertson wrote:Moeen Ali? Very odd. Warks threw him away to Worcs as not good enough. He once scored 236no in a 20-20 game for his school (fyi, Moseley, Alex). Has come on, but only in Div 2.

The PCA have a statistical MVP thing, which Moeen Ali won last year. It covers all forms of cricket, and Moeen undoubtedly benefits from his bowling too: http://www.thepca.co.uk/mvp-explained-13.html

-- Deviation --

The explanations behind it do not fill me with confidence in their mathematics (which, unlike baseball sabremetrics, can't be verified because the formula is not in the public domain).

Some examples of explanations:
"Players tell us that"
"It's widely recognised that"

It also gives extra bonuses for scoring more than 30% of the runs scored. Intuitively, if I score 31 out of a total of 100 instead of 30 out of a total of 100, the difference in an individual's contribution is no more than the difference between me scoring 30 out of a total of 100 compared to a total of 29 out of 100. At the very least, 30% appears very arbitrary.

It also gives extra bonuses if you score 100; again, the difference in contribution between a score of 99 and 100 should be the difference between a contribution of 100 and 101.

It also adds bonuses if you win games, which is bizarre. The whole point of measuring a player's contribution is that you help your team to win games because of the value of your contributions. Winning a game of itself is not one of these contributions.

-- End of Deviation --

Anyway. Maybe that's why he's been selected? He has been on the Performance Programme tour, so perhaps they're impressed with what they've seen?

At least Moeen plays county cricket regularly, unlike Parry.

David Robertson wrote: But the spinner problem? Where now - Briggs, Borthwick, someone?

Malcolm Tucker

Parry has played 56 20-20 matches for Lancs, that's why he has been picked for the 20-20 team

20/20 also really not the place to try and blood young spinners!

Conversly the 'fearsome' bowling attacks we're going to be facing this summer should offer a rather excellent opportunity to get young batsmen started. This is all definitely well timed in those terms.

With Ali/Borthwick there has to be the chance they might try to act like South Africa have done at times in tests with Duminy and not use an outright specalist spinner. Not insane for some UK/SA wickets.
(Borthwick was batting at 3 for Durham last season, averaged 39 to Stoke's 28 etc )

With Woakes too, not going to be at all short of all rounders going forward. Could end up with a NZ style team with lots of runs coming from 8/9. Wickets could be a bit harder.

The cricket authorities do seem to have a habit of doing things like this. e.g. obviously Chris Read upset people or he would have played a lot more. It was clear that Captain Bob Willis couldn't stand Norman Cowans. Trueman was once fined for being drunk in a hotel when the culprits were Compton and Edrich!

If KP has been dropped for being unpopular with his team-mates, that is illogical, plenty of people have been unpopular, Boycott, Illingworth, Gooch, Stewart, Hussein, Atherton, Edmonds etc and abroad, Ganguly, Lara, Ponting and Bradman etc. But they kept playing for the most part...

I wonder what the authorities do sometimes. They took Adil Rashid on a tour, totally changed his bowling action, never used him in a match, and then forgot about him. He then spent two years struggling to get selection for Yorkshire (where we have a history of "difficult" people in charge), before doing pretty well last season. I assume he has got his old action back.

Whitaker's soft press conference http://www.espncricinfo.com/england/con ... 16965.html doesn't bode well.

I would like to know the real reasons they dropped KP.

As ever, another intelligent piece of writing, on the Pietersen affair, by Ed Smith. His book, Luck, is a good read. And his regular column in the New Statesman is excellent too