Captain Backstabbin' Cooks Brave New Dawn of Exciting Cricket - English Summer Test Season Thread 2014

England vs Sri Lanka
12-16 1st Test, Lord's (11:00 BST)

20-24 2nd Test, Headingley (11:00 BST)

India in England 2014

June

26-28 v Leicestershire, Leicester (11:00 BST)

July

1-3 v Derbyshire, Derby (11:00 BST)

9-13 1st Test, Trent Bridge (11:00 BST)

17-21 2nd Test, Lord's (11:00 BST)

27-31 3rd Test, Southampton (11:00 BST)

August

7-11 4th Test, Old Trafford (11:00 BST)

15-19 5th Test, The Oval (11:00 BST)

22 v Middlesex, Lord's (50 overs)

25 1st ODI, Bristol (10:30 BST)

27 2nd ODI, Cardiff (10:30 BST)

30 3rd ODI, Trent Bridge (10:30 BST)

September

2 4th ODI, Edgbaston (10:30 BST)

5 5th ODI, Headingley (10:30 BST)

7 Twenty20 international, Edgbaston (15:00 BST)

Capn Cook had a shitty out of form knock of 17. Looked really out of touch (ie like in Oz and erm in england last summer)

Still cannot understand why he is the captain (and in the team atm) but still we gotta support em.

38th over: England 154-4

Got offered a ticket for the Saturday at Trent Bridge last night, just need to move some things around in my diary.

well done Joe Root!

Declared 575-9. Root 200 N.O.

dammit will these guys never stop failing

moeen batted like a prince for 48. i adore him. if he's dropped and tedious gary ballance retained i do declare i shall protest

root is good

england's bowling looks decent if slightly uninspired - there's only so much you can do with aggressive fast-medium right-arm seam'n'swing. moeen is not a prince of offspin yet, but these are early days in the innings let alone his international career

https://vine.co/v/MIe5UhBzqpH

lock thread

lock life

they don't make #11s like they used to

ANderson's reverse sweep has a cultish appeal

bit of swing for sharma. Anderson fivefer next innings.

R

I

P

Vaughan is saying "Cook out" on TMS, pretty much.

I reckon Prior will go/get dropped at the very least. Jordan back in for Stokes probably, 3 ducks in a row for him.

Is there a virus going round? wtf is it with those shit short balls that worked?

Vaughan is saying to not only sack Cook as captain but take him out of the game for six months to give him a break.

Some weird collective brainstorm, spooked after Moeen went just before lunch perhaps?

I think Anderson and Broad are both knackered, and Broad is carrying an injury too. Prior has now retired pretty much, with hindsight he should have gone at the end of the winter, god knows why he was picked if he was carrying an injury.

Great test match and strong narrative's been established for the rest of the series. India have been fantastic- would love to see Kohli and Dawan fire though.

There is a tiredness for sure. The weird thing is there was no need for this terrible sequence of results -- unlike the football team.

Mismanagement more than anything.

Blimey.

Dhoni has to go

(unless he masterminds something astonishing here)

He really does.

He's one of only a very few current cricketers that I actively dislike, too

Anderson enjoying himself then..

MSD's standing back to the spinner at... the Rose Bowl was it?, which was utterly bizarre, gave me an unwelcome reminder that a number of hacks have suggested his is one of the names in the mugdal envelope.

Mudgal sorry.

Backstabbing Cook ftw!

his bowling attack ftw, tbrr

The opposition are clearly lacking too.

Cook has been rightly given share of the credit - you can't demand a sacking when the team doesn't perform (or the critics better do that! I know Vaughan has turned around and said he was wrong) and then not give any credit when the team turn it around.

India getting into a lot of trouble not knowing which to play and which to leave.

Kohli's dismissal kinda lol - dude can't catch a break

Alastair Cook thanks his wife for helping to steer England back on course

:-)

Stab away Cook...stab away...

More seriously, felt like the end of test match cricket - India truly don't care...more widely we see what TV has bought to sport. In tennis its the tie-breaker; in football we had experiments with Golden goals and of course penalty shoot outs, all the weird scheduling. All because of time-keeping, the deliverance of results and news at a faster pace. Usually you could live with it, its a compromise that most people aren't aware of. In Tennis I haven't even seen matches played w/out a tie-break!

What we have though is the prospect of the first sport to be phased out almost completely because of format changes bought about due to TV. Does anybody gives test match cricket another 50 years? They are already in trouble, attendance wise, for a long time in most of the world bar Eng and Australia - but how long is that situation really going to last for? People were barely turning up at the gate to see a team that didn't want to be there, and why should they?

yes, it's been a serious worry for a good decade now. if anything the long game is in even more trouble at County level, day after day of near-empty grounds probably being subsidized by 20-20 money and corporates. can evisage the Ashes hanging on as a legacy of a game that doesn't exist elsewhere. :(

the County game has always been "in crisis" though, yet it does seem to endure, and I think attendance hasn't actually been so bad in the last few years.

Test match cricket is a worry, though. Vic Marks made the point that the recent BCCI/ECB/CA stitch-up was supposed to bolster test match cricket in India, but if that's going to happen there hasn't been much evidence of it this series just gone.

On TMS they were suggesting that India's demise was a lot to do with the scheduling of back-to-back tests. It's long been assumed in any tour that the visiting side will get the opportunity to acclimatise, try different options, build up confidence, etc in a handful of games vs county/regional/U-21 sides. Here India have just gone from test to test and once the slide started, they couldn't arrest it.

The 5-day format doesn't have a future if three-day batterings become the norm.

Aggers and Boycott did make me laugh yesterday. Boycott: "This morning it was rubbish bowling, rubbish fielding and rubbish captaincy. And now they're in, it's rubbish batting." Aggers: "At least they're consistent, Geoffrey."

Boycott is always good broadcasting.

Back-to-back tests have been a thing for quite a while though? But yes, that has never felt right. India - who are usually very strong and knowing of their power in cricket and not to have anything dictated to them - should've scheduled the one-day series before tests at the least to give them more playing time.

There has been talk of four-day tests for a long time? That day seems to be drawing closer.