England has changed their mindset in test cricket, Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum started the baseball pattern somehow it worked in their initial phase but as soon as they came to play in India they couldn’t play with the same pattern and so they lost the series by 4-1 and even the Ashes were shared and they failed to win it.
England Cricket didn’t change their mindset despite their failure they didn’t want to change it and wanted to make it aggressive rather than play like old school.
Naseer Hussain slams England Cricket
Test Cricket is an old format and everyone respects this format and follows the rules and regulations of how it is decorated. Many teams have kept the old-school theories and no one wants any changes but England thought test cricket should add some thrill and entertainment so they changed their mindset and the baseball pattern started by them. Their pattern didn’t succeed in India and so they were trolled a lot for their mindset and said test cricket is dying. Former England skipper Naseer Hussain also slammed England Cricket for their pattern. Naseer Hussain said:
“Those two days summed up for me where we are with Test cricket. You talk about all the batting they could have but they’re off in a white-ball sunset, you’ve got bowlers who haven’t bowled, you’ve got undercooked cricketers, and then you lose the toss and have the worst of conditions, and everyone goes ‘Test cricket is dying’,” said Hussain on the Sky Sports Cricket Podcast.
“But if you prepare for a Test match like that, you’ll get exactly what England get when they go away. It frustrates me because you’ve got to give Test matches the preparation that they deserve, which is a very easy thing to say but a very difficult thing to do in modern times,” he added.
“The other story is ‘the West Indies are in terminal decline’ — England haven’t won in the Caribbean for two decades and (the West Indies) hold the Richard-Botham Trophy,” Hussain said.
“England travel to India or Australia and don’t particularly do well, so it shouldn’t just be a West Indies story. All it does is add to the fact that Test-match cricket is in a difficult place, and it is sort of self-perpetuating.”
“If you don’t look after it, then sides turn up and put in a performance like that, and everyone goes, ‘Told you, Test-match cricket is dying’. Listening to you speaking to Jimmy Anderson after 188 Test matches on the podium, I would like to think we would try to look after Test-match cricket,” he added.
England won the first match of the series against West Indies where legendary James Anderson bade adieu to international cricket and even said that he loves test cricket more than ODIS and T20IS. James Anderson said:
“Test cricket has made me the person I am. So, all the lessons he’s drawn from Test cricket — the ups, the downs, the highs, the lows, the coming back for that third spell at six o’clock in the evening and having to dig deep within yourself.”
“All of the things which have made him the mature person he is, Test cricket has helped him along the way. I wanted to ask him about it because it’s at a fragile time, he’s going to move onto a mentoring role and you’d hope, because young players are coming through now who will have career choices to make.”
“You’d like to feel Jimmy would say to them ‘sometimes the easiest choices are not always the most rewarding or most fulfilling’…although everybody needs to pay the bills, one understands that.”