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Get Vaughan to open again

villaturk

Cricket Spectator
I dont know what the skippers average is batting at 3 but he was ranked 1 in the world when he openned against the Aussies 2 years ago.So get him back as opener alongside Tress and drop Strauss to number 3 so we can have a left/right opening partnership again.
I would also bring in Paul Collingwood in for Ian Bell as he would take the fight to the Aussies and in a perfect world have Thorpey in place of Giles to give the batting depth.
Both situations in the ist test,England 22-4 and then 4 quick wickets in the 2nd inns,were man made for Thorpe to save us.He is a street fighter and like Collingwood,aint scared of Pontings boys.
Like many shrewed judges i always thought the Aussies a step above us in the cricketing world and after 20 years of getting hammered by them,i would love to see a tight series but we need runs.My team is well balanced,our best batsmen and four good pacemen with both Colly and the skipper to help out.
As a Warwick fan i cant be called biased and Gilo is not a real threat against the best,his batting is shot to pieces against the short ball and Belly against Thorpe is no contest.
I would give Gerraint Jones 1 more chance but if he fails again call in Chris Read.
Graveney are you reading..........1 Tress 2 Vaughan 3 Strauss 4 Thorpe 5 KP 6 Flintoff 7 Colly 8 GJones 9 Harmie 10 Hoggie 11 SJones
 

luckyeddie

Cricket Web Staff Member
It seems nowadays that the position for an England captain is batting at 3 (or at mid-off is Steve Wayward-Harmison's lug-hole). Why that should be I really don't know, unless it's just a case of copying everything Australia do in search of that 'magic' formula.

Thorpe's gone, never to return (a case of two skipped tours and a premature retirement which was badly handled from both ends), so Bell is the logical replacement there. Collingwood might well come into the reckoning if Giles is again under-used and/or under-performs and we go 2-0 down (when we go 2-0 down?) so you're not actually far off the mark.

Ooooooroight?
 

Barney Rubble

International Coach
I think the thinking behind Vaughan at 3 was simply that when Strauss came in, MPV was still living off the purple patch against India and Australia in 2002/3, and people were saying "now we've got another opener who's good enough, we should put our best batsman at 3 or 4 like everyone else - the Aussies have Ponting there, India have Dravid and Tendulkar, SA have Kallis, WI have Lara etc", and Butcher was solid at 3 so they stuck Vaughan at 4 when Nass retired, and hoped he'd do well. Then after Bell started doing so well, they thought "well, he's got to stay in the team, but we can't have him at 3 against the Aussies, it's too much pressure" - it seemed like a logical progression really, but when you think about it it's not really worked that well so far!
 

PY

International Coach
Barney Rubble said:
....so far!
Most important part of your post. :p

I'd give him another go yet before we start panicking. And the fact that Strauss and Trescothick average 58 (?) together is another reason. I'd be very surprised if anything like that happened because Graveney has been very vocal on the topic of not rush-changing everything because of the first game.

Right or wrong? Let the results decide in my book.
 

Barney Rubble

International Coach
I made sure I put "so far" at the end! :D I think MPV will come good this summer actually - a hundred at Edgbaston wouldn't surprise me. Likewise Ian Bell. He has taken a massive amount of totally unjust flak since getting the only Shane Warne leg-break in history that didn't turn (Warnie pretty much admitted it wasn't a slider after it happened - but then McGrath was saying today in an interview how he'd told the Aussie boys it was! Cheeky b'stard. :D ), and people don't seem to realise how talented he really is. He shouldn't be dropped now - imagine if his replacement scored a hundred. He might never get back in, and one of English cricket's brightest talents would be left to rot.
 

tooextracool

International Coach
i think what people seem to be forgetting was that vaughan was struggling at the top of the order ever since he took over the captaincy. which is why he was pushed down to 4 in the first place. even before strauss came into the side, the selectors were considering batting vaughan at 4, and strauss only convinced them even further. AFAIC it always is a big gamble to give someone captaincy when hes in the form of his life because captaincy always effects them negatively.
 

BoyBrumby

Englishman
I agree with TEC here. As good a captain as Vaughan has undoubtedly been, it has had a marked effect on his batting. He was number one in the world, averaging something like 62 before he took over & is now hardly in the top 30, averaging only 37 since donning the mantle.

Strauss is clearly next in line & has at least started his drop in form before ascending to the captaincy! :p
 

aussie

Hall of Fame Member
tooextracool said:
i think what people seem to be forgetting was that vaughan was struggling at the top of the order ever since he took over the captaincy. which is why he was pushed down to 4 in the first place. even before strauss came into the side, the selectors were considering batting vaughan at 4, and strauss only convinced them even further. AFAIC it always is a big gamble to give someone captaincy when hes in the form of his life because captaincy always effects them negatively.
well said Tec, very well put....
 

age_master

Hall of Fame Member
Barney Rubble said:
I think the thinking behind Vaughan at 3 was simply that when Strauss came in, MPV was still living off the purple patch against India and Australia in 2002/3, and people were saying "now we've got another opener who's good enough, we should put our best batsman at 3 or 4 like everyone else - the Aussies have Ponting there, India have Dravid and Tendulkar, SA have Kallis, WI have Lara etc", and Butcher was solid at 3 so they stuck Vaughan at 4 when Nass retired, and hoped he'd do well. Then after Bell started doing so well, they thought "well, he's got to stay in the team, but we can't have him at 3 against the Aussies, it's too much pressure" - it seemed like a logical progression really, but when you think about it it's not really worked that well so far!

Australia had Tubby Taylor opening and captaining for a fair while, Greame Smith still opens doesn't he?
 

kendall

U19 Vice-Captain
Yes i dont think that you can puts vaughans poor form down too the fact that he is not opening. I think that Trescothick and Srauss make a good opeing parntership and i hope that continues for a good few years. The only possible change in the batting order would be too put piterson up too number 4 and bell too 5 although that might not make a great deal of difference. wharever he bats vaughan must start scoring some runs
 

SJS

Hall of Fame Member
This reminds me of a joke.

There was a singer who was singing before a massive live audience. He started singing one of the most popular songs of the time.

As son as he finished, the audience started screaming, "once again, once again"

He smilingly obliged singing the entire song all over again.

No soner had he finished that the audience was on its feet and yelling unanimously for him to sing once again.

So he sang it al over again. But the audience wasnt satisfied.

After he had sung the same song half a dozen times and being asked to sing the same song yet again, the singer told the audience very politely, " I am indeed touched by your love and affection and appreciate the fact that you really liked this song and my rendering of it. But I hope you wil understand that people will be wanting to me to sing other songs too."

One man in the front row stood up as the audience started yelling , NO, no, no"

and said, " I am afraid, we are going to make you sing the same song again and again until you get it right !" :D
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
BoyBrumby said:
I agree with TEC here. As good a captain as Vaughan has undoubtedly been, it has had a marked effect on his batting. He was number one in the world, averaging something like 62 before he took over & is now hardly in the top 30, averaging only 37 since donning the mantle.
The effect on Vaughan's batting of the captaincy is massively overstated.
What affected Vaughan's batting was not the captaincy, it was the fact that his luck - which he benefited from copious amounts of in 2002 - dried-up.
I was never, ever in favour of Vaughan opening and I was justified in that he regularly got out to the new-ball but when he got through it tended to do extremely well. His first-chance scores as an opener: 27, 0, 7, 34, 27, 36, 64, 28, 46, 36, 24*, 0, 50, 19, 55, 15, 195, 47*, 33, 0, 19, 41, 34, 9*, 11, 145, 0, 183, 8, 20, 156, 22, 33, 29, 1, 5, 15, 21, 23, 13, 24, 8, 52, 105, 18, 14, 15, 11*, 0, 23, 17, 32, 7, 140. That, believe it or not, is 29 scores out of 51 (in which he was dismissed) between 10 and 49, which says one hell of a lot as most of these were quickfire innings.
Yet it's also only 9 50-plus innings out of 51 - less than a fifth.
And not once was he out between 55 and 105.
In short, had Vaughan been batting at four in this time - which he would but for an utterly bewildering decision to make him open in New Zealand - he might very, very well have done sensationally, and if he'd had as much luck as he did, well, Heaven knows what might've happened.
In South Africa he did well in a single Test out of 5, but still played a big part in the series, which wasn't a bad achievement, and he's been totally out of form this summer (except, of course, against Bangladesh) which was apparent when he missed a straight ball in the last Test.
I'm still not too worried, and I feel that if everyone treated ODIs as separate as I do that the problems wouldn't seem quite so bad as they do.
 

Steulen

International Regular
tooextracool said:
i think what people seem to be forgetting was that vaughan was struggling at the top of the order ever since he took over the captaincy. which is why he was pushed down to 4 in the first place. even before strauss came into the side, the selectors were considering batting vaughan at 4, and strauss only convinced them even further. AFAIC it always is a big gamble to give someone captaincy when hes in the form of his life because captaincy always effects them negatively.
If you take this statement literally, it's actually completely nonsensical. Being in the form of your life means you are doing better than you ever have and ever will again. Logically, your results will go down after this period of brilliant form. Whether or not you're captain has nothing to do with it. FYI, in my job we call this the natural course fallacy, although you could make a case of it being regression to the mean :book: :ph34r:
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
And that's just why it's such a terrible idea to give someone the captaincy at that point, because of the fact that the comedown which will likely be down to the precise reason you suggest will inevitably be blamed - wrongly - on the captaincy.
 

Pedro Delgado

International Debutant
What we've lost as a batsman, we've gained as a skipper. To be honest though who knows, it could be argued that Mick wouldn't have kept his form up to that standard anyway regardless of the captaincy.
 

Richard

Cricket Web Staff Member
marc71178 said:
Here we go again, it's non-existant first chance average time.
Here we go again, it's time to try and pretend statistics don't exist when we know perfectly well that you can't stop a statistic existing once it's been compiled.
 

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