Melbourne: Alastair Cook blamed the bowlers for inconsistency, admitted that England have to stop ‘gifting’ chances through dropped catches and conceded that he urgently needs to start leading with the bat if the one-day series is not going to go the same way as the Ashes.
Cook stopped short of repeating the famous ‘can’t bat, can’t bowl, can’t field’ verdict uttered about an England team of old, but there will be no escape for his side unless they improve quickly.
Cook’s Ashes tormentors — Mitchell Johnson, Peter Siddle and Ryan Harris — were not playing, but he fell in the first over to Clint McKay, a bowler dropped recently by his Big Bash franchise for conceding runs at 9.7 an over in four matches.
“I know it is only practice and it counts for [nothing], but I felt better this morning before the game,” he said. “I need to start scoring runs to help us turn games around. You can’t keep asking the lads to do it if you are not doing it. It has got to come. I need a little bit of luck to get me going.”
He also needs his team to start taking chances. Just as they let off the Australian lower order throughout the Test series, they failed to capitalise here when wickets were needed as the white ball swung early on.
“We dropped a couple of chances and we misfielded a few balls,” Cook said. “We have not fielded to the standards we are capable of on this tour. We have always been a pretty good fielding side but it comes down to two things: wanting the ball to come to you and a lot of hard work.
“We are not bad fielders. It is just for some reason the last three or four months, actually longer than that, we have been dropping too many chances. We are aware of it and a lot of the practice is specific to that. Like a lot of these things they do turn around but we can’t keep gifting simple chances because you get punished at international level.”
Boyd Rankin again endured cramp, a condition he put down to nerves on his Test debut in Sydney and if it was the same again here then it raises questions about his mettle for top-level cricket. He was costly as he often dropped short and England could never contain for long enough to defend a total Cook admitted was below-par.
“We wanted another 20 runs, but with 270 you are in with a chance,” he said. “You need to bowl well and take your chances. Those are the two things we did not do. If you look at our pitch maps with the ball, when we hit the top of off-stump on a good length they struggled to score, but we did not hit that consistently enough and we got punished for it.”
Problems are building already for England in batting and bowling. Rankin is out of sorts but Steven Finn appears unpickable at the moment, while Stuart Broad is rested due to a niggle in his knee until the third one-dayer in Sydney next Sunday.
England’s tactic of picking a top three of technically correct batsmen able to cope with the new ball at both ends works on English pitches in June but looks staid on truer Australian surfaces, particularly when compared to their opponents’ top-order bashers.
Australia’s probing of Joe Root’s technical weaknesses continued and Cook has empathy for a young player enduring his first low in international cricket. “I don’t think he is feeling tired,” the captain said. “He is just going through what happens to a lot of young players when they have just come on the scene, been successful but people have started to work them out a little bit. The beauty of Joe is that he has the character and talent to come through that.
“There is not one player who has not had one challenge thrown at them through their career. I know the way he goes about his business that he has the talent and technique to come through it. I have no doubt he will score a lot of runs for England. He probably does not feel like that at the moment, but he has to trust me on that because a lot of players have been through what he’s going through now. I have seen a lot in him I like.”
Low scores for Cook, Root and Ian Bell mean they will probably play against a Prime Minister’s XI in Canberra on Tuesday to gain time in the middle, and if Finn does not feature, then it is hard to see him playing a game on the entire tour.
