Stokes doesn;t strike me as a captain to be honest. Yes he's capable of heroics and

seems very driven but I think he's probably a bit loo likely to p**s people off rather than take people with him. He had a go at Archer at one point in this test at which point i'm surprised Archer didn't tell him to do one given he dropped a sitter when their double centurian was on 38.

In that sense I think Root is captain material I just don't think he has the instincts/nous with his fields and bowling changes and perhaps most importantly it also seems to have ruined his batting as well. He's more important to us as a batsman than he is as a captain in my view.

This game was a bit of a microcosm of all our issues. Let a promising position slip with a careless batting collapse. Fielded poorly. Bowling plans completely wrong/ineffective (bowl at the stumps/to make them play - did they learn nothing from watching the Aussie bowlers in the summer?) and then another rear guard effort to save the game that saw us not score quickly enough to out their bowlers under any pressure and then chuck wickets away with stupid shots.

As to other captaincy candidates that's the issue really isn't it. I quite like the look of Burns but he's obviously very new to the side. Butler a possible although not 100% convinced he deserves his place in the team at the moment on batting merit. Other than that maybe Broad but that would be a relatively short term thing.

It may be knee-jerk but I also worry a little bit about the appointments of Giles and Silverwood. Giles has not been that successful in his previous roles with England and yet somehow was the overwhelming favourite to take over from Strauss. Silverwood was the bowling coach/consultant in the summer where our bowling tactics were consistently rubbish and were it not for Broad having left handers on toast (which didn't really require any kind of plan) we would have struggled more.

Ironic to hear Ramprakash bemoaning the batting approach in commentary. Either he's changed his tune since he was part of the camp or the players were just completely ignoring him when he was the batting coach and doing their own thing!

Having said all that, Stokes holds that catch and we could well have won this test. It was that crucial.

Posted By: Jim on November 25th 2019 at 09:11:39

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