| Series | Countries | Live Scores | Fixtures | Results | News |
Features
|
Photos | Blogs | Statistics | Archive | Video & Audio | Games | Mobile | |||||||||||||||||||||
« Old timers Twenty20 XI- Part 2 | An aggressive makeover »
September 7, 2009Posted by Mike Holmans on 09/07/2009 in Mike Holmans
The Wright road to follow
 |
 |
Strange though it is to remember now, there was a time when Fred Flintoff was not the darling of English cricket and his omission from the England side was seen as a reason to praise the selectors for finally seeing sense rather than as an excuse for the team's dismal performance.
He had attracted a lot of attention as a young player with Lancashire. He was a huge and hugely powerful middle-order batsman who was a pretty good bowler, allegedly of the fast variety. England, so desperate for a new Botham that they had been picking players like Mark Ealham, Adam Hollioake and Ronnie Irani, could not resist the temptation and picked him for both the Test and one-day sides. Over the next couple of years, though, it became apparent that he was too fat to bowl fast and too indisciplined to offer anything more with the bat than the occasional lucky explosion. England sent him back to Lancashire with the stern message that he need not worry himself about future selection unless and until he was fit enough to bowl as fast as his early billing had suggested – and, as history now records, he went off and shaped up with fairly dramatic results.
The point is two-fold. One, is that, what a player is like when he first plays for England may bear very little relation to the cricketer he eventually becomes. The other is that the gulf between English domestic limited-overs cricket and the international variety is far greater than between the four-day championship and Test match cricket. What makes you a very useful allrounder in the county 40 or 50-over formats, is nowhere near what is required to fulfill a similar role internationally.
Over the last two to three years Tim Bresnan has been building a considerable reputation in county cricket, but his nine ODI appearances for England have given little hint of why. His bowling has been tidy enough but has posed no problems for batsmen, and even though he has had several opportunities to do some whacking in a death-or-glory bid to rescue yet another dismal England batting performance, one struggles to remember him even playing an aggressive shot in an ODI. Though the England management are presumably being encouraging, it must have dawned on him by now that he is going to have to improve considerably if he is to have much of an international career.
That it can be done is shown not only by Flintoff but also now by Luke Wright, to whose presence in the England team I am now warming. Nor am I the only one: the gentleman who sat next to me on Sunday morning was also pleasantly surprised by how good Wright's bowling now is. After some discussion in which Barry Knight's name surfaced, we agreed that Wright is the reincarnation of the young Darren Gough. That's the Gough who was a quick but not very subtle bowler and a cheerful biffer capable of hitting Shane Warne and Craig McDermott all round the Sydney Cricket Ground. He was also a great trier; one who would always go down fighting because he didn't believe a game was lost until the last ball was bowled or the last wicket fell.
Gough's batting fell away after he was hit later on that 1994-95 tour, but Wright has played higher up the order often enough to suggest that the batting he clearly learned at an agricultural college is likely to remain a permanent feature, so if his bowling gains some of the guile that Goughie acquired, he could yet become an important part of the set-up.
The big change since Wright's debut is that he has moved up from being a 75-80 mph bowler to an 85-90 mph speedster with a dangerous, skiddy bouncer – that lifts him from being a county all-rounder to an international-class bowler-batsman. It will be interesting to see how he progresses from here. It will also be interesting to see whether Bresnan can effect a similar improvement.
Posted by: Steven Gibbons at September 8, 2009 10:40 AM
Excellent little article. Have seen Wright on a few occasions, and seeing his increase in pace as a bowler, allied with his powerful hitting makes him an exciting player to watch.
Let's hope he gets viewed as the 'first Luke Wright', just as Stuart Broad should be given time to develop more consistently as a bowler before all-round status is conferred too readily.
Hopefully Wright'll get a chance to tour South Africa, and have the chance to play Test Cricket this Winter, and not end up as another Mark Ealham, who, one feels, could've been given more of a chance in Test Cricket, but was never given a proper run in the side.
Posted by: Kunal Talgeri at September 8, 2009 12:13 PM
That guy, Luke Wright, has spunk while playing! Good to watch on the cricket field in a limited-overs match. It's not what you can say of the rest of England's one-day side. Miss Gough!
- Shanaka Amarasinghe
-
Shanaka Amarasinghe Possessing the best disguised googly in Sri Lanka (because no one has ever really seen it), Shanaka is the finest legspinner to never have played top-level cricket. He is a popular cricket analyst and host of The Score, the No. 1-rated, if slightly infamous, sports show on radio in Sri Lanka. While in England playing rugby, he earned his LLM at King’s College and is a lawyer by training if not inclination. He is also an actor, a journalist, a writer, and thinks he is a comedian.
- Mike Holmans
-
Mike Holmans, a database consultant by profession, has spent thirty summers (and a few winters) going to the cricket. Brought up in one and working in the other, his dearest wish is for a season to end with Yorkshire winning the county championship by beating runners-up Middlesex by one wicket with five minutes to go. If it’s also a summer when England win the Ashes, so much the better.
- Michael Jeh
-
Michael Jeh Born in Colombo, educated at Oxford and now living in Brisbane, Michael Jeh (Fox) is a cricket lover with a global perspective on the game. An Oxford Blue who played first-class cricket, he is a Playing Member of the MCC and still plays grade cricket. Michael now works closely with elite athletes, and is passionate about youth intervention programmes. He still chases his boyhood dream of running a wildlife safari operation called Barefoot in Africa.
- Saad Shafqat
-
Saad Shafqat takes special pride that his cricket-watching life began during the three-month interval between Javed Miandad's debut Test in Lahore and Imran Khan's 12-wicket haul at Sydney. Although a practicing neurologist based in Karachi, cricket has never been far from his activities. He has co-authored Javed Miandad’s autobiography Cutting Edge and has been a contributor to Cricinfo since 2005. His regular column Reverse Swing appears fortnightly in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English daily.
- Someone, please explain the D/L method
- Should we love them more? Or less?
- George Bailey: charm and larrikin in one genuine package
- Can England really be that bad again?
- Stop blaming "bad" pitches for defeats
- To whom is it an insult anyway?
- Is Kallis the greatest of them all?
- The importance of Tremlett's scare factor
- Going over the top
- England aim at unfamiliar heights in unfamiliar conditions