England v West Indies Test/ODI/Twenty20 Series ** Spoilers **

Test Match Special is the best program ever. Absolutely love all the stories and the history. Talking now about WG Grace leaving a cricket match to go off to a race, got his gold medal and then straight back to the cricket. Love the nostalgia!
 
bit late to this, but bit of a mixed bag for England this test. In summary:
Anderson - Unlucky
Broad - Lucky Anderson was unlucky
Strauss - well played, I'll forgive the second innings
KP - Typical performance, I'm expecting a big score at some point in the series, he's hitting the ball very well
Cook - well played in the second innings
Bell - Consistent
Bresnan - Oddly disappointing

Trent Bridge should be interesting but as expected West Indies are really struggling with their back up bowlers.

Stats Time

After hearing Nasser question "who's England's most dependable batsman? Cook? Trott? Best batsman has to be Pietersen.." I thought I'd check out some basic facts

Taking Trott's introduction to the team as a starting point, it's no surprise to learn that both he and Cook are the highest runscorers. But when it comes to average, even with his disasterous winter tour, Bell is still ahead:
Bell - 41 Innings, 2217 runs, 63.34 @ 56.4, 8 100s 11 50s
Cook - 52 Innings, 2799 runs, 57.12 @ 49.74, 10 100s 9 50s
Trott - 50 Innings, 2390 runs, 51.95 @ 47.51, 7 100s 10 50s
Pietersen - 48 innings, 2052 runs, 46.63 @ 62.65, 4 100s 10 50s

Haven't included Strauss because you don't need to see his figures to know he's not been in form.

Of course you might think "well Bell had that awful series but Cook and Trott always score" - But that's not true of course. Cook had a horrible run of form through 2010 and Trott had a poor series in SA. Neither were as bad as Bell's failure over the winter, but then again, Bell has still come out with better statistics - he's scored almost as many runs as Trott in the same time period with 9 fewer innings.

I think this is an interesting example of how missleading stats can be - when you're not comparing like for like, things can look very different. Another example would be James Anderson's bowling average - his career average is a shade over 30, which is roughly the same as Darren Sammy's - but like Bell he came into the England side young and learnt on the job. Stuart Broad's stats are already looking far superior to Andrew Flintoff's, but that doesn't tell you about the team he played in and the teams he had to play against.

Erm, anyway, hope some of you find that interesting
 
I saw on the coverage today that Bell had 16 Test Hundreds - didn't know he had that many! He seems to have improved in the last few years. Before that he had an awful run.
 
Mad old tory said:
Bell was on a stunning run before this winter. Be interesting to see if he can keep it up. A lot of people seem to constantly challenge his place in the side which is madness!
Click to expand...

Yeah it's because he was very up and down before his recall into the side towards the end of 2009. He was often used as a scapegoat and criticised for scoring easy runs on the back of others, people still quote the "he's never scored a hundred when no-one else in his team has" line even though it's well out of date.
 
England: A Strauss (capt), A Cook, J Trott, K Pietersen, I Bell, J Bairstow, M Prior (wk), T Bresnan, S Broad, G Swann, J Anderson.

West Indies: A Barath, K Powell, K Edwards, D Bravo, S Chanderpaul, M Samuels, D Ramdin (wk), D Sammy (capt), K Roach, R Rampaul, S Shillingford.
 
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