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No supermen; no magic: Cook rues England’s errors
- Updated: November 29, 2016
It was hard to avoid a sense of deja-vu as Alastair Cook accepted that England’s batting had let them down in Mohali.
He was quite right, of course. By failing to take advantage of winning the toss here, England surrendered their best opportunity to control the game. On a surface that Cook described as “400 par” – and it was at least that – England instead succumbed to 283 all out and surrendered the pitch at its best to an India side who were determined to utilise it.
Whereas four England batsmen had scored centuries (three in the first innings, one in the second) on what Cook described as a similar surface in Rajkot, here Jonny Bairstow was the only man to make 50 in the first innings.
“You need a big score on a wicket like that,” Cook said, “and we weren’t good enough to make one. Jonny Bairstow made a good 80, but we need hundreds. The pitch wasn’t too different to Rajkot, maybe slightly harder to score on, but it was 400 par and we were below it. We just weren’t good enough.”
While Cook’s candour is welcome, England have now lost four of their most recent six Tests with batting failures a recurring theme. If the collapses in Dhaka (where they lost 10 wickets for 63 runs) and Visakhapatnam (where they lost 10 for 63) were especially eye-catching, the batting at The Oval (England were 110 for 5 on the first day having won the toss) and here (where they were 87 for 4 before lunch on the first day) was equally culpable.
And while they seem to have found the answer to their problem at the top of the order in Haseeb Hameed, Moeen Ali was not convincing at No. 4 (or No. 3 in the second innings) and Hameed is now unavailable for the rest of the series. Moeen and Jos Buttler both picked out the fielder after trying to hit over the top in the second innings – victims of good bowling, for sure, but also a lack of patience – underlining the suspicion that England were still trying to find a way to blend their naturally positive approach …
