Go and Whack Some Balls for us, Kevin darling, but don’t get Bored



Who's the man? ME!

General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett, in the final scenes of Blackadder Goes Forth, sent his loyal assistant, Kevin Darling to the trenches, for the final push over the top. Darling went, begrudgingly, and honoured his General’s decision.



For this years Cricket World Cup, Kevin Pieterson has been asked by his General’s; Messer’s Flower and Strauss, to go in at the top, of England’s batting order, to give the team some much needed welly in the first 15 over’s of the game.

Pieterson is a superb batsman who likes nothing more than smashing the ball to all parts, and with a hard, quick ball coming onto him from the start of the innings, bowled by the best bowlers the opposition has to offer, he will relish the task of opening, leading the team into battle.

In the 2011 World Cup, it is going to be crucial to get quick runs on the board early and get your run-rate up in first 15 overs, making the most of the hard ball and the power plays. Who better to accelerate things for England then Pieterson?

Strauss will become the more defensive-minded batsman in the partnership, hoping to anchor down and bat long into the innings. He will play his shots, but only when it’s there to be hit. He will surely err on the side of caution and let Pieterson force the issue at the other end, although the only drawback in this strategy comes if Pieterson gets out early. Who can accelerate out of Strauss and Trott?

This change also means Prior can move back down the order, and I think that suites him too. He is a quick scorer, and a big hitter, but he’s sketchy, and flashes hard at wide balls and gets a lot of edges, when the field is in, as it is early on in an ODI innings, he is susceptible to getting caught. Lower down the order when the field is spread and the ball is coming off slower, he will add valuable runs.

He’s no Eoin Morgan, but he’s good enough (and he’s also all we’ve got, as finishers go!)

Bowling wise, Broad has looked good since coming back from a stomach injury, and Anderson is a consistently strong performer at the highest level now. Swann has also returned, so a familiar bowling line-up should field against the Dutch when England’s campaign kicks off on Tuesday 22^nd.

And so the format for the 2011 Cricket World Cup: The competition is broken down into two groups of 7 teams. Each team will play 6 group games with the top 4 in each group going through to the knock-out phases of quarter final, semi final and final.



Cheer up lads, only another 7 weeks and 92 games to go......

Basically, the key change since the last World Cup in 2007 is that the ICC have scrapped the Super-Eights round-robin idea and replaced it, essentially, with 2 round-robin groups that feed the quarter finals instead.

Given the tournament is still 6 weeks long, surely they could have streamlined a little further?

The ICC’s main priority seems to be getting the top 8 teams safely through to the quarter finals, where the real competition starts. So why not scale down the tournament to 12 teams, have three groups of 4 and have the top 2 from each group, plus the two best 3^rd placed teams going through to the quarter finals?

That way you would have 43 games in total, 36 in the group stages, which you could play in 18 days, or 2 and a half weeks. You’d have less “Dead-Rubber” games and get onto the knockout stages more quickly.

It would also mean you could have more “Surprise” teams progressing through to the Quarter finals, as one good (shock) result in the group stages could go a long way to securing a quarter final place. And what’s wrong with that?

If you look at the Football World Cup in 2010, the performances of teams like Ghana are what illuminated an otherwise dull and predictable competition. Surely the same 8 teams going through to the business end of hte competition all the time does little to improve the standard of the emerging teams, which is why they are at the competition after all, isn’t it?

In any case, England will play the Netherlands, India, Ireland, South Africa, Bangladesh and West Indies in their group, with the top 4 teams progressing to the next stages of the competition. England should navigate their way through comfortably but I can’t help feeling some of these games not including the hosts are going to be poorly attended, and will stunt and stall the momentum of the tournament.  

But it’s a World Cup, and so whatever the format, England have got to fancy their chances and give it a ruddy good go.

In Pieterson, England are gambling that their best player delivers at the top of the innings. Irrespective of whether it’s the right move or not, the fact that everyone’s talking about him in itself will get his juices flowing. And mine. Bring on the Dutch!