All teams are highly flawed when playing away from home, or in certain countries at least, so yeah I'd agree the no1 ranking is a bit pointless at the moment anyway.

There's no clear, obvious standout team who can adapt to any scenario and compete toe to toe with every home side, dominating the majority of the time.

I think it's fair to say England are currently one of the 3 best test teams in the world, but any more than that is guess work.

totally agree even the players don't really care about it now.
England don't even want to be number 1 right now their got the target 2 yrs from now since they clearly see winning in india and then Australia bigger targets.

they will of course take it but not been much hoohah from the players like last time.

At the moment hard to separate pakistan, England, India and Australia.
then you got SA,NZ that are hard to beat as well and then to top it all off tough to beat sri lanka or if anyone goes to Bangladesh at their den.

Although got to be said not good for cricket when home series are one sided might be good to watch for a neutral if you hate a particular nation but not good for a contest.
this series been good to watch for the contest.

Why do few people rate Englands chances in India this winter? They won there last time....

Few people backed them win against Australia, they did, same with South Africa away, they did, and people are writing them off for India. We'll have to see how that goes.

we won last time because we had 2 spinners better than india did, we are nowhere near close to being in that position now

india will prepare pitches to suit spin bowling and we haven't exactly covered ourselves in glory batting against spin the last couple of years

Important late wicket for England evens up the day

Only 79.4 overs bowled but probably enough action for 100 overs' worth

liked mimik1uk said plus in Australia in 2010 england had better seam options than australia and a better batting line up, like wise with SA that basically weakened their own chances of winning because of quata stuff and top of that had injuries to their bowlers.

really if you think england can do it, England will have tasty odds for you in that series.

Hoping for easy money my self after SA, india were even priced all series, easiest 60 pounds of my life, the only game i didn't bet it rained for 4 days

not sure where you see that, when the ball turning Ali is a headless chicken, will never forget Ganguly destroying Ali couple of years ago in a T20 warm up game in an icc event when Nasser or Ather said he was good player of spin and then Ganguly basically destroyed ali by having rant that he isn't.
quite often Ali will come out the crease like a headless chicken when he not reading the turn.
a carbon copy of bell.
Someone that play turn well when the ball doesn't spin but when it does turn changes to a headless chicken.

Surely if he was a good player of spin he would have done better in the UAE or are you going to blame it on him opening,
or his record in the WI.

Anyway time will tell if Ali will score runs in india.

Time will tell indeed, but because he was out early 3 times to spinners in UAE isn't really that much data is it? Other 3 times seamers. Yes he was batting out of position too, aren't I allowed to mention that.

The West Indies, he was run out 2 of the 3 innings he played, stretching just a tad I would suggest.

You seem to want to stretch all the data here, but it's inconclusive at best, speculative to fit your bias at worst.

He has done very well with the bat these last two tests. He is good enough to bat at 7 but is he the best slow bowler we have ?


The tail would start at number 10 and he sometimes gets runs.

Happy to agree to disagree but surely you can see with Ali stats why opposition bowlers would be happy with him batting in the top 6 especially if he joined by Stokes in it.
not even about the stats, just looking how he bats you will feel as a bowler you can get him out of course would be times Ali scores runs but opposition at the moment won't be scared with the England batting order, yes it got depth but got a lot of vulnerability in it.
at the moment only really Root/Bairstow/Cook give the solid feel in the batting.
the rest and the opposition feel they can get them out.

the issue with having a 5/6/7/8 of stokes/bairstow/ali/woakes is going to be consistency

people can disagree with me on this if they want but a rule of thumb i have always used for top order test batsmen is you should expect a 100 roughly every ten innings and if you combine 50s and 100s then every 3 innings

ballance meets that ratio, cook meets that ratio, root is well ahead of that ration but thats why he is one of the top 3 batsmen in the world atm

go through as many players as you want and you will see that ratio on most batsmen who have had long-ish careers in the top order

now you can forgive a #8 for not meeting that given the restrictions of that position in the order but guys batting in the top 6 need to be meeting it or you end up being very hit and miss with the sort of scores you put up as a team

also they have to be quite consistent home and away.
so they have to be quite solid in all conditions otherwise the batting could be awful overseas but decent at home.
at the moment only Bairstow suggest he will be consistent enough to fulfil your requirement.

and if you ask him to bat at #5 history suggests that it will be tough to maintain that sort of performance and keep wicket

i still think the easiest answer to our batting problems is take the gloves off bairstow, let him bat at #4 or #5 and get another keeper

I suspect Hildreth might finally get his call up soon.


As long as that keeper isn't Buttler. Never have I seen so many words spoken and written about such a mediocre long format player.

i've mentioned hildreth a couple of times now, hes been on the fringes for a long time and if we can get a couple of years out of him, similar to australia did with rodgers and now voges, until the likes of bell-drummond and duckett are ready then it might be a good move

as far as buttler, i'll admit i'm biased, but his batting average in tests was the same as moeen ali's was before his innings today and alot of people on here want ali to bat in the top order. secondly look how much bairstow struggled at first in test cricket, he matured, made a couple of changes to his game and is deservedly an automatic choice for the test team now. who knows what development buttler has made that might make him a far better test batsman now as well.

If Buttler starts playing like Bairstow did before he got re-called then I'd be all for it, but he's barely played a proper game let alone averaging over 100 like Bairstow was.

I heard somewhere Foakes is highly thought of, and is having an alright season, wouldn't be surprised if he's there or thereabouts soon.

and i dont have a problem with that, hard for him to do that tho when he is playing so much ODI and t20 cricket. there could be an argument that he shouldn't have gone to the IPL but he did that with the management's blessing given the importance they want to place on limited overs cricket as well

Buttler will end up being the anti-Prior - Prior was always a great test player but not a very good limited overs player who was always being called up as if it would all somehow magically fix itself, whereas Buttler is a great limited overs player who'll forever be called up to the test side in the hopes that it's magically fixed itself and then end up getting dropped a few matches later.

He just seems a confused player in first class cricket to me, like it's been hammered into him that he absolutely can't play like he does in one dayers and he absolustely must block some, and he ends up neither here nor there.

yeah i cant argue with that second paragraph

couple of years ago before strauss retired he guested for somerset in a tour match against australia to get some game time and i believe he spent some time in the nets with buttler and he made what i thought was an interesting point.

he said in first class cricket and more importantly at test level you have to have a very specific plan about what shots and areas were your scoring zones, to play to your own strengths and to be disciplined about it. something i think ballance did very well when he first came into the team. strauss said buttler's problem was he had too many shots and rather than have a fairly binary approach to shot selection between, its in my area play it or its not in my area so leave it, that buttler didn't do that very well, and it wasn't so much as a technical fault he had as one of shot selection and knowing when not to play.

Just been watching last night's verdict and the piece they did on Wahab's no balls

Loads of them

They really do need to re-think how these are monitored and, as pointed out, why not use the 3rd umpire

The only downside is that the number of overs bowled would reduce even more with all the extra deliveries.....

Pakistan batting with determination this morning

No breakthrough yet and looks a good day for batting

That's at least 4 chances missed this morning. Not good enough especially on a decent batting deck.

Alex Hales needs to concentrate more on his catching and batting rather than sledging.

At work so only listening to TMS

Heard 3 of them -Hales, Jimmy and Finn's C&B but missed the 4th ?