Andy Pakes looks at the emergence of Australia's James Pattinson and compares him to his England-capped brother Darren.
Sam Holloway looks at why test match cricket is not going to become extinct just yet
Manraj Bahra looks at the subtle differences between the forms of cricket and how teams shouldn't look to pick the same players in all forms.
Sports Editor James Tompkinson looks at the continuing problem of corruption within cricket as the cases of three Pakistani cricketers accused of spot fixing comes to an end
Were the great Australian and West Indies teams of the past judged as being great on the back of statistics, points and world rankings? Of course not. They were judged as being greats because they beat any team that they came up against with consummate ease and with almost an air of arrogance. They knew that they were the best and they played like it. It would seem like a bold statement to make, but this England team will carry on winning matches and before long, people will be talking about them in the same way that we talk about the Australian team of the 1990’s and the West Indian team of the 1980’s.
There has been a lot of talk in the media this week about whether the current England team is better than the team that beat Australia in 2005, but for me there is no real comparison. The current team may not have individual personalities like Andrew Flintoff amongst their ranks, but they are a much better all round team. I personally think that there is only Flintoff that would be good enough to hold down a place in the current England team when you compare the class of 2011 with their 2005 counterparts, and even then it would be difficult to know who to drop.
In Alastair Cook, England have probably the best batsman in the world. His score of 294 in this test match was one of the best innings that you will ever see from an opening batsman. Cook’s powers of concentration and his temperament are second to none and at just 26 years of age, he is only three test match centuries short of the all time England record for number of hundreds scored. Cook will not only break that record, he will smash it, probably along with many others as he continues his career. He has given the Indian batsmen a master class in how to build a huge innings in this test match, batting for 184 overs and over 13 hours.
Cook’s innings provided the platform for England to set a total of 710. Did they really need that many? No. But with two days left in the game, England wanted to run the Indians into the ground and show them that they are a force to be reckoned with. It smacked of confidence from Strauss, some would say arrogance, but England have every reason to be confident at the moment. It will not have entered Strauss’ mind that there is a chance that England will come away from Edgbaston with anything other than a win, otherwise he would have declared much earlier.
It is this supreme confidence that shows that England believe that they are the best, and when a team back up this belief with performances such as the ones that England have produced in the last year then it becomes very hard argue against that. England are playing a brand of cricket that will be remembered by those who currently have the privilege of watching them play, and that is why they will eventually go down as one of the best England teams ever to have played the game.
They've definitely proved themselves unforgiving against a frankly dire Indian team that gave up the fight after Lord's. England certainly have the passion, all round skill and team spirit to go far, but the side they really need to prove themselves against is South Africa, in my opinion. Australia and the West Indies aren't exactly forces to be reckoned with at the moment.
It has been discussed at length on TMS, but a world no.1 side needs to be just that: consistently good around the world. England have to prove that they can play just as well on flatter southern hemisphere pitches, so the autumn tours in Pakistan and Sri Lanka should be pretty interesting.
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