Dead Rubber Bump

Dead rubbers are funny things – sometimes they bounce, as the Southern Stars did in their last series against England in Australia, where they romped home in the last two T20s despite having lost the Women’s Ashes; and other times they don’t, as when a clearly exhausted Australian team collapsed to one of their heaviest ever T20 defeats in Durham at the end of the 2013 tour.

Yet if this was a bounce, it wasn’t a very convincing one – really more of a bump. England’s openers bowled very well once again; but the batting was as fragile as ever and if anyone really believes this lumbering victory gives them Momentum Going Into The World T20™ then I’m afraid they need their head examined.

Lauren Can’t Win-Field

Lauren Winfield is a fine batsman who has scored oodles of runs at county, averaging 63 in domestic cricket this season. Obviously she is clearly struggling in an England shirt, but her tame (virtually identikit) dismissals at Chelmsford and Hove were indicative of mental not technical flaws in her game.

England seem to wonder why players like Winfield and Amy Jones bat at international level like they are afraid to say boo to a mouse; but maybe it is because they constantly stand on the precipice of being dropped, and that’s a scary place to be!

So cutting Winfield today was the worst thing England could possibly have done – reinforcing all those negative preconceptions going on in her head; and perpetuating the cycle of mental failure which bedogs her. It England man-management at its absolute worst; and especially crazy given the dead rubber nature of this game.

Sciver Owes Shrubsole

Nat Sciver took home career-best figures with both bat and ball today; but in the latter case she really owes a lot to Anya Shrubsole. England’s swing-star set the trap for the Aussies with her opening 4-over spell of 4/11, leaving them under severe pressure. Sciver then reaped the rewards as the Southern Stars looked to hit out, as first Ellyse Perry played-on off a pretty nothing delivery, and then Blackwell, Harris and Coyte all got caught as they attempted to force the pace through the final third of the innings.

Perry Ms Consistent

Ellyse Perry scored 16 off 21 balls today and took 1 wicket – it certainly wasn’t a match-winning performance. In fact, looking back over the whole series, Perry didn’t really produce the archetypal “match winning performance” at all. Her best displays were either overshadowed by others – Lanning in the ODIs and Jonassen in the Test – or in a losing cause, at Taunton.

And yet when all the numbers had been totted-up, there she was – at the top of the table with both bat and ball, having scored more runs (264) and bagged more wickets (16) than anyone else, to take the Player of the Women’s Ashes Series award for a second consecutive time.

Being a great all-rounder isn’t actually about the “great” performance – it is about consistency; and that is what Perry brings in bottles to this Australian team. The ICC are shortly supposed to be publishing new “combined” rankings for women’s cricket – if Ellyse Perry’s name isn’t at the top of the all-rounders list… then there is something wrong with the list!

Bowling Like Goblins

As at Fortress Chelmsford, having won the toss Charlotte Edwards handed her bowlers and fielders the responsibility of trying to hold-back the fearsome artillery barrage of the Australian batting line-up. And once again they bowled like goblins.

Anya Shrubsole was in especially malevolent mood, going for just 2.5 runs per over and taking two crucial wickets – Ellyse Perry for 7 in her first spell; and Grace Harris in her second.

Harris in particular was looking very threatening. As she almost effortlessly swept Hazell so far over cow corner that the farmer was starting to worry about his windows, we tweeted that England needed her gone… shortly after which Lauren Winfield dropped her at mid off – a fairly regulation chance made actually very difficult as it went straight through the beam of the floodlight. So it was a massive fillip for England going into the final overs when Shrubsole removed her LBW.

A word too about Heather Knight – asked to bowl just the penultimate over, after it looked suspiciously like Edwards had miscalculated, and having been a bit expensive in Chelmsford, Heather conceded just the five singles to Jess Cameron, who showed in the final over just how dangerous she can be – taking Nat Sciver for 13 and somewhat spoiling the all-rounder’s figures in the process.

Batting Like Gnomes

Meg Lanning conceded afterwards that the Aussies felt in the innings break that 107 was going to be very difficult to defend; and moreover their decision to drop a spinner (Osborne) in favour of a seamer (Rene Farrell) was possibly looking very questionable at that stage.

But if the Southern Stars were worried, they’d reckoned without the ineptitude of England’s top-order, who batted with all the elegance of garden gnomes who’d spent one too many long summer days sitting out in the beach-bleached Brighton sun.

The tragedy, as Edwards admitted in the press conference, is that we know these players can bat. We’ve seen Lauren Winfield play for Yorkshire this season, smashing it all over the shop against bowlers who aren’t Ellyse Perry admittedly, but aren’t trundling mugs either. But here she was once again tamely caught, playing an outfield shot into the infield, in an almost identical manner (albeit the other side of the wicket) to her dismissal at Chelmsford – hitting out without the “hitting” bit.

Only Danni Wyatt’s all-too-brief cameo displayed the positivity that England have been talking about all summer – looking for the scoring strokes and scampering between the wickets, like an open-topped roadster roaring down the highway, leaving the soccer mums in their minivans for dust; and the way she got out was desperately unlucky, given how rarely her chances seem to come around.

Heads In Places

For England fans, it was deja-vu all over again. Unless Edwards or Taylor make runs, we are so often left with Lydia Greenway shepherding the tail – a job she has done so successfully that she is now England’s highest run-scorer in this series; but it betrays huge problems further up the order.

When asked what new head coach Matthew Mott brought to the Southern Stars, Meg Lanning credited him with getting their heads in the right places.

England’s aren’t; and that’s the real story here.

We were at the Gate Picture House in Notting Hill last night to see Death of a Gentleman and hear a passionate Q&A by writer-director Sam Collins.

Although it focuses exclusively on men’s cricket, Death of a Gentleman offers a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of food-for-thought on the state of the game and its governance.

Perhaps somewhat incongruously, women’s Test cricket is actually in a slightly better state right now than it has been for some years. There were 3 Tests played in 2014, involving four different countries – England, Australia, South Africa and (amazingly, given the general attitude of their governing board to both the women’s game and Test cricket in general) India.

2015 will probably see just one Test – the much derided recent encounter in England – but at least the multi-format Women’s Ashes seems to have secured some sort of future for women’s Test cricket in the medium term, as the points system appears to have already acquired for itself the aura of a tradition which will hopefully insulate it against the base commercial pressures it is nonetheless certain to face.

Nevertheless, it is clear that if men’s Test cricket is a ship awash upon an ocean of troubles, the women’s equivalent is more of an open lifeboat in a gale-force storm, the ship having long-since sunk. The Women’s Ashes alone can’t sustain the format as anything more than a quaint anachronism.

To be fair, the ECB, the BCCI and CA have shown that they don’t want the format to die completely, having all played Tests in the past year. The challenge now is to begin to rebuild – for Australia and India to schedule a Test when they meet next Easter; for England to invite Pakistan to play a 4-dayer when they are here in 2016; and for the ICC to set up the redistributive mechanisms which can bring the game back to the smaller nations.

Because if men’s Test cricket is worth saving, so is women’s – we need to change our cricket too!

Less Swagger More Dagger

This wasn’t a swaggering victory of the kind we saw in the 1st ODI, but it was in a way more convincing. There at Taunton England won with 9% of their balls remaining, which is a good margin to-be-sure, but they were 6 wickets down at the end and it they’d lost another one it would have been touch and go. Here at Chelmsford, they cruised over the line with a whopping 13% of their innings to spare, loosing just 3 wickets along the way, with Knight, Greenway and Wyatt all still in the traps.

Won & Lost In The Field

England bowled well to restrict the Aussies to what was by their own (very high) standards a below-par score; and they batted well too of course. But it was the fielding that was the real difference between the teams. Danni Wyatt set the tone early on with an excellent stop on the edge of the circle, and from there England were at the top of their game, as testified by 4 catches, 3 run-outs and the concession of just 9 boundaries against the biggest-hitting unit in the business.

In contrast, Australia were poor between the wickets. Grace Harris appeared to make the rookie error of assuming the ball was dead; while Erin Osborne got into such a mess with Jess Cameron that Sarah Taylor had time to stop and tease her before she removed the bails.

Then in the field the Southern Stars made fumble after fumble. Elyse Villani missed a fairly straightforward chance to run out Charlotte Edwards early on; and then when presented with a golden opportunity for redemption, dropped the England skipper at mid off. Late in the innings, not one but two Aussies got easily to a ball that was almost trickling to the boundary; but each seemed to think the other would actually field it – in the end neither did, and it popped over the rope for 4.

Wyatt Whyatt?

In 3 T20 series since the last Women’s Ashes in Austrlia, Danni Wyatt’s batting record now reads as follows:

DNB, DNB, 0, DNB, DNB, DNB, DNB

That’s 6 “Did Not Bats”, and one sort-of* duck incurred when she was looking to hit out as she came in with just 7 balls remaining against South Africa in Birmingham last September. (* She ran a leg bye of her first ball to retain the strike going into the final over… which I sometimes think on occasions like this should count for something!)

To be fair, she has of course bowled in that time… one over, against New Zealand in the winter.

I’m sure that if you asked her, she’d say she’d rather be playing than not, especially when the team is winning; but England need to be careful how they manage their asset here – it is exactly this kind of treatment that made the highly talented Susie Rowe shrug her shoulders in despair and go back to hockey.

Wyatt doesn’t have that particular option, but she might find herself with an interesting dilemma come next January: star in the final of the WBBL… or come back to England to prepare for a tour to South Africa where her contribution is likely to be equally minimal, if indeed she is picked at all. Under such, it would be difficult to blame her if she then told the England management just exactly where they can stick their not-very-central contract.

During and subsequent to the recent Women’s Ashes Test at Canterbury several people, including the respected BBC commentator Lizzy Ammon, suggested that perhaps women’s cricket should be played on shorter pitches:

Sky Sports News then followed this up with a (ahem…) scientific poll, which suggested quite a lot of people (44%) thought this was a good idea:

It should be noted that the key effect of such a change would be to make the bowling appear faster.

A ball from Katherine Brunt would reach the batsman in [back-of-an-envelope calculations] 0.7 seconds rather than the 0.8 seconds it currently does. And given that it takes the human eye 0.2 seconds to see the ball, that’s actually in reality an almost 20% increase in apparent speed.

A spinner’s ball would obviously be less effected in apparent pace, but the shorter pitch would nevertheless allow them to bowl a more accurate delivery more often.

TLDR: It massively rebalances the game in favour of the bowlers, particularly the quicker ones.

So the key question you have to ask is: Were those who voted to shorten the pitch actually watching the same match as us at Canterbury? Because the game we saw didn’t appear to need rebalancing in favour of the bowlers – if anything it was the other way around! Just one batsman posted a score of more than fifty in the match, and the average run-rates for both teams hovered around 2 for much of the 4 days.

On a more practical level, the idea is a non-starter anyway.

Firstly, it would wreck the game for the current generation of elite batsmen and bowlers, who would never truly adjust after years of playing on the longer pitch.

Secondly, it would destroy the art of swing bowling – a key weapon in the armoury of the women’s game – because those two yards are the critical ones where swing really comes into play.

Lastly, it would require the game to change at all levels of the pyramid – you can’t have girls playing for years on a 22 yard pitch, and then suddenly having to adjust to 20 yards at the elite level. And this is a non-starter – clubs won’t (and to be fair, probably can’t) maintain dedicated women’s pitches, remembering that the pitches couldn’t be shared because the women’s foot and crease marks would be located at a point in the men’s pitch that would be downright dangerous.

So, no – there are a lot of things that you might consider changing about the women’s game… but the size of the pitch ain’t one of them!