The lack of proper preparation is very weird, isn't it? Other performance-based professions use simulation in the way you suggest to the nth degree. Tells me that the upper echelons of management are either incompetent or have no interest in the future of test cricket. Either way it's an insult to the players on both sides, Australian hosts, and the fans. As for poor Ollie Pope, he's got what golfers call the Yips...uncontrollable twitching of the right hand. Not a pretty sight. Time to concentrate on the football I feel!
The ECB are all about maximising money from the customers and success on the field is secondary.
Obviously they care, but the money is the most important. In my opinion it's been the main problem in English cricket since the Sky money came in.....which is a poisoned chalice because it denies promoting the game properly to the masses.
Football can do that.....I'm not sure a sport like Cricket can.....Cricket requires numbers....and it's relying far too much on people like me, Gen Xs and boomers raised on past glories.....Well, relative glories at least.
It's all about maximising money and squeezing the paying customer.
It shows from the number of twenty twenty cricket they have to the size of wages for players who.....in relation to their foreign counterparts.....just don't justify them.
Well, watching England at both home and away has been my obsession for 40 years and even though I'm fortunate enough to afford to watch them on Sky this has been the first time I've refused to do it......I don't like doing it.....I can take the losing, but I'm sick of the management of our system that recreates this humiliation everytime.
If the schedule means you can't acclimatise the team over there with enough time and matches then have the means to simulate over here and take it ultra seriously.
In the old days competing mattered more than the money.
If we don't have enough youngsters playing the game then ditch Sky and go with the BBC......Put the game before the size of your wage packet.
If you don't it's a slow death anyway.....but just one that you made more money out of while pulling up the ladder for those that come after......A story we see so much today.
England
