Ashes 2006: What's going on on the BBC messageboards?

Here's a new feature for the Website - Every week I'm going to produce a collection of articles from the BBC messageboards, print them on here and hopefully generate some debate on the state of both squads.

"Harmison has does nothing in this series to remotely suggest he can bowl match-turning spells; when England needed fine bowling to save the last Test, Andrew Flintoff turned to Ashley Giles ahead of him. While it is true that he has a tendency to drift in and out of form without warning, can England actually afford to risk selecting him for a Test they cannot lose?" extratime

"I think on the evidence of the two day match agaianst Western Australia, Read, Mahmood and Pensar all deserve a chance to prove themselves in the third test." Akira9b

"Surely now even Duncan Fletcher is left with no choice - Read and Monty in, Jones and Giles out. If he's worried about the tail, fine - play Mahmood instead of Harmison. Sajid seems on much better batting FORM (a word Fletcher hasn't discovered yet) than Giles." TobyMar

"Monty Panesar can bat! He isn't a walking wicket like so many people say. He just hsn't been given a fair chance to showcase his skills yet. He has hit some really nice innings down a t Northants, including a 34 this season, in which the summary of the game (I didn't go) said that he looked like a proper batsmen, playing his shots and driving through the gaps. " no1northantsman

"Flintoff has been deficient so far in his winter reign as captain, and at times he has looked lost. Muddled bowling changes and tactics which represent his archetypal schoolboy image have given creedence to the widely held suspicions." theashesblog

So, what do we think? Opinions please.

Oh my god, what the F*&% was that?

In writing my sensible blog, I was chomping at the bit to call Jimmy Anderson and his England cohorts a bunch of pie-chucking, egocentric, jumped up, pathetic group of piss-artists.

I didn't. Because I actually want people to take me moderately seriously and empathise with the things that I say. So I have decided to write an alternate blog, which expresses my deepest fears and cynicysms about the England team and it's current woeful standing in world cricket.

First of all (cue rant), what the HELL is James Anderson doing playing Test Match Cricket?

I'm a Lancashire supporter born and bred, but that kid has as much chance of forging an excellent career as I do of getting into Britney Spear's pants....

OK that's a bad example, but I'm sure that you can see what I mean. Bowling like a drain not only proves you to be a shit international cricketer, it also saps the morale of the rest of the team.

Just imagine if you were one of the England team (that wasn't Harmison...), waiting for James Anderson to deliver the ball? You know for a fact that it is unlikely to be a dot, rarely a quick single to deep mid-on, and more likely going to be whizzing past your face or any other bodily extremity faster than the poor lad can launch it down the track.

After a hundred runs or so, you'd probably be thinking about your genealogy, and hoping that you had some Bangladeshi blood in you.

James Anderson should not play cricket at all. He looks like an idiot and bowls like a village cricket opener that once had a trial for Nottingham under 3's and has lived off the back of it ever since.

Enough Jimmy bashing for the moment - the chances are that opportunities are going to be plentiful over the course of the winter.

My second concern was the leadership of Andrew 'the man with 1,000 names' Flintoff. Now don't get me wrong, I appreciate that he is a strong and significant character in the England dressing room but is he a man qualified enough to lead this country's cricket team into battle?

Err no.

Michael Vaughan strikes you as the sort of person who lines an 'alien' toilet seat with tissue paper to make sure that his botty doesn't get too cold, and when he goes to bed he reads the Daily Telegraph cover to cover has a final sip of Ovaltine and slips off to sleep - no doubt dreaming of cars with enormous wheels and the Tellytubbies.

Young Andrew on the other hand, seems to be a chap more intent on breaking David Boon's 'Tinnies' record than understanding what actually goes on on a cricket pitch. His cricketing nouse seems to extend to the number of balls in an over, and how long the boundaries are.

In Australia's first innings we saw him mix and match the bowling attack, never finding a duo capable of forming a partnership. His field placings were naive, and the decision to bowl Bell and Pietersen smacked of desperation.

The Brisbane pitch was akin to Cuban virgin's thigh and so the choice to bring in Anderson and Giles, seems in hindsight, suicidal. Mahmood and Panesar, whilst not guaranteed, would have at least provided those moments of inspiration on which cricket hangs. We saw against Pakistan that both bowlers, can at least rattle the best in the world and I, for one am still flumoxxed that at least one of the two didn't play.

I think it's best that we forget that Brisbane ever happened, move on to Adelaide for the 4 match series against the Aussies, and thank Ricky and his men that they didn't enforce the follow-on, because I might now have been writing this had we fallen to our biggest ever loss...

Parallels of '05?

So that was that.

A complete capitulation by the English in Brisbane was eerie in its parallels to the 1st test at Lords, back in 2005.

1) The Aussies totally outplayed us,

2) Kevin Pietersen destroyed the Aussie bowling attack (for a short period of time at least),

3) Everyone, including us Poms, were convinced that Australia would win the Ashes.

The only small problem the English have got currently, is that by-and-large, we were utterly spineless in Brisbane.

At Lords, England showed a true fighting spirit. With the bowlers peppering the top order with venemous short deliveries, and a few batsmen showing that they could deal with the best Australia had to offer, the nation could see that even in defeat there was much to build on.

In Brisbane, there were a multitude of problems ranging from the fact that Freddie Flintoff is a man you secretly would love to be your best man at your wedding and not captain of the country, through to the fact that Australia played like a pub team in England's second innings and we still only managed to score just over 300.

Very few of these problems presented themselves with obvious solutions.

In this instance, the toss was obviously a major player in the game, but considering the profligacy of both England's bowling and batting in the first innings, I have a nagging suspicion that the result would have been fairly similar had Ricky Ponting's little George W. Bush eyes not been the one's to light up with glee after the coin had hit the floor.

The inclusion of Anderson and Giles in the starting XI smacked of inconsistent selection policies. Both Mahmood and Panesar would have been rightly frustrated to find themselves sitting on their behinds for the duration of the Test.

Their achievements over the past summer have been far in excess of those of Anderson and Giles. As bowling threats go, we know in our hearts that they are twice as likely to strike fear into the Aussie batsmen as the buffet bowling of Anderson and the laborious geriatric spin of Giles provided.

Moving on to Adelaide, England must forget about the debacle of Brisbane and start afresh. Andrew Flintoff needs to motivate his troops and prove to them that he is more than just a comic book superman.

The whole team must truly believe that they can go toe-to-toe with the Australian veterans, because at the moment if it came to a dust up between the two, i'd go for experience over age. Wouldn't you?