He can bat, James Vince. That’s half the problem.

James Vince innings come in many sizes, but there are only really two types. There are the ones where he’s dismissed and a much smaller number where he isn’t.

The latter are tauntingly incomplete. Half-written poems, half-painted landscapes, unfinished symphonies.

The former are not dissimilar.

Because a James Vince innings never comes to a natural conclusion. There is, in the eyes of fans, always a sense that he *should* have gone on; that he only exited the stage because of some mad moment that was entirely his own making. Even when it manifestly wasn’t.

This is why it’s considered perfectly acceptable to blame Vince for absolutely everything forever.

It all stems from the Gower Law.

The Gower Law is not to be confused with the Danelaw. To our knowledge, there was no period in history when the people of the Gower peninsula held sway over vast tracts of the British Isles. The Gower Law is, in fact, a very simple thing.

The Gower Law – which, as you’ve no doubt guessed, takes its names from the great David Gower – states the following:

Someone like Paul Collingwood was a far better batsman than Vince, but also widely perceived to be a far more limited one. This meant that people were very rarely angry with him when he got out.

When Collingwood was dismissed, it was seen as being a symptom of his limitations. When Vince is dismissed, people just can’t wrap their heads around it. “But you’re… better than that,” they think, their brains short circuiting at the apparent illogicality of what they’ve seen.

But Vince isn’t better than that. Not reliably. James Vince is a batsman who will at times seem to hit the ball off the middle of the middle of the middle of the bat, and he is also a batsman who will quite often edge one to the keeper for 27.

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If there’s one thing we can all take from the weekend’s sporting events, it’s that England are an unstoppable winning machine.

The various members of England’s one-day squad are currently sitting around their houses doing really not very much at all. And England are still winning. They just can’t stop.

On Saturday, the B-team won the second one-day international against Pakistan and therefore the series. This is in large part thanks to Saqib Mahmood, who presumably won’t be in a second-choice squad again any time soon.

The standout highlight, however, came from James Vince, immediately after he’d been dismissed for 56 off 52 balls.

As we’ve said before, Vince is incredibly fun to have in the team because one way or another people get very emotional about his presence. He also does everything with such panache. This includes, ‘accepting that he’s just been dismissed and immediately leaving the field of play’.

Here is James Vince not hitting a Shadab Khan wrong ‘un.

It was quite an ugly shot, so Vince apparently felt the need to immediately bring balance to The Aesthetic Force with his next movements.

With wicketkeeper Mohammad Rizwan still in his initial celebration roar, Vince embarked on what is conventionally a sad journey back to the pavilion.

Only for some reason, he decided to set off with a rueful-yet-jaunty bat spin.

Here he goes.

And then he just sort of plucked the bat out of the air with his trailing hand as he commenced his skedaddle.

It was a catch that expressed frustration with himself in a really wholesome sort of way.

It was a catch that said, “aw shucks,” or, “oh fiddlesticks,” or something like that.

The catching of the bat then turned into a sort of gentle punch of frustration as he continued on his way.

The momentum of that gentle punch also served to accelerate the pace of his walk.

The thing that we really want to get across to you here is how instant and smooth and lovely all of this was. It was like knocking a guitar over, only for it to play a snatch of a beautiful melody upon landing instead of a discordant crash.

It was almost like Vince had been practising walking off after getting bowled by a wrong ‘un. Who knows? Maybe he has. If so, the obvious suggestion would be for him to practise hitting the thing instead. But do we actually want that? Do we truly, actually want that when the alternative is so silky and unique?

2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 32, Australia v England

You know what it’s like. It’s been a long day, you’ve made a lot of decisions and you don’t really have any left in you. You’re not going to change TV channel. If there’s some leftovers on a plate in the fridge, you’re just going to push them directly into your face and call it tea.

In this sort of a state, you can’t be expected to come up with reasons or explanations or even opinions. You just want the easy option. You want to point at something and say that it was at fault and then let that be the end of things.

In this specific England v Australia instance, you could say it was Aaron Finch’s fault for his plod of a hundred, or you could say it was Mitchell Starc’s fault for Wasim Akramming Ben Stokes.

Maybe you’d blame this bloke.

That would be wrong – but you’d certainly be well within your rights to strongly not like this bloke.

These are one-match things though. You can’t blame them for England’s whole non-firing tournament so far.

Maybe you could say that England are a side built for flat pitches with weaknesses that stem from that, but that kind of feels like you’d have to think about it a little bit and maybe someone would confront you with some stats and argue against you and that is really not what you want right now.

What you want is a particular player to focus on; a player to moan about without being challenged. What you want is James Vince.

What happened today was that Jason Behrendorff, a man whose shrug-inducing bowling is exactly as sensible as his sensible haircut and sensible face, bowled a ball to James Vince that James Vince did not hit. The ball then carried on past James Vince and hit James Vince’s stumps and you do not need to know a whole lot about cricket to know that that is not a great way to start to an innings.

James Vince often seems to be a man hell-bent on making the absolute least of his talent.

In Test cricket, this has mostly involved batting like a prince and then entirely unnecessarily edging one to slip on 27. In one-day internationals, it is more about batting like Jason Roy or Jonny Bairstow but for nowhere near as long.

Those two things sound not entirely dissimilar now that we write them down.

James Vince is too good for county cricket but has been a real averages-in-the-20s sort of batsman in international cricket so far. He is incredibly fun to have in the team because one way or another people get very emotional about his presence.

Let us tell you about the other members of England’s World Cup squad

4 minute read

We were originally going to present this article as being the views of Captain Hindsight, but when we started to write it we realised that half of England’s problems were actually fairly easy to see in advance.

So while some of what follows comes with the benefit of knowing how things panned out, that’s not true of all of it. Whether or not the sum of all these things would have made any difference to the end result is of course another matter.

Shoulda dropped Moeen Ali

Moeen Ali is a player of top innings rather than being a top batsman. Even before this series, his Test average was only 34.66. That’s pretty good for someone who bowls, but not really enough to warrant a place in the top six, which is where he found himself come the first Test.

Based on what followed, Moeen would have been batting a place too high had he come in at number nine. Craig Overton and Tom Curran averaged more than him, Stuart Broad managed a higher score, and you can’t imagine Gary Ballance would have bowled any less effectively.

We love Moeen, but things wouldn’t have turned out much differently for England had they instead picked a specialist fielder.

Coulda done more to discourage Ben Stokes’ boozy late nights out

Michael Vaughan said Ben Stokes had been given ‘strong warnings’ about his lifestyle even before that night in the cells. It wasn’t like England should have locked him in his room each night, but could they not at least have persuaded him to refrain from going out on the lash in the middle of a series?

Who knows whether some other incident might have happened subsequently, but even a slight change in behaviour might have been enough to avoid the Bristol incident.

Shoulda tried out some quicker bowlers in the preceding years

Our article about Toby Roland-Jones’ Test debut was essentially a veiled question: ‘Why have you picked a right-arm 80mph bowler when we’re touring Australia this winter?’

Plenty of similarly pedestrian right-armers followed. We’d sort of assumed that there was a minimum pace requirement for young seam bowlers, as this seems to have been an unstated part of the job description for as long as we can remember. When did this cease to apply?

People watch Jimmy Anderson bowling at 80-85mph and hope that younger bowlers operating at a similar clip might gradually develop his skills. But that isn’t the way it worked for Jimmy. He could bowl at 90mph in his first few seasons. The increased skill has compensated for the decrease in speed. He never entered a Test match with neither.

Craig Overton, Tom Curran and Jake Ball are about a tenth as skilful as Jimmy Anderson and don’t really have much to make up the shortfall. Overton and Ball have height, Curran has a slower ball, but England’s attack is so monochrome, this really isn’t enough.

Faster English bowlers do still exist. Either they’re not sufficiently valued or not especially well-managed.

Coulda picked Adil Rashid

England were never going to play Mason Crane until the series was already lost. When they did, he performed about as effectively as you’d imagine a 20-year-old debutant leg-spinner would.

It’s great that England seem to have identified him as one for the future and that they’re keen to invest in him, but they also identified Adil Rashid as one for the future a long time ago and despite his being top wicket-taker last winter, they ceased investing in him immediately before this Ashes series.

You have to try and recoup investments. Test experience is a finite resource. This whole thing just seemed so wasteful.

Shoulda picked someone other than James Vince

A flirtation with run-scoring in the first Test might have encouraged some to think otherwise, but this really isn’t hindsight, is it?

It was so obvious we actually titled September’s Ashes squad post England to win the Ashes via airy off-side drives.

James Vince’s first stint in the Test team ended because he didn’t score any runs and kept edging behind. Having underscored the fact that his record in the first division of the County Championsship is really rather mediocre through his efforts during the 2017 season, the selectors brought him back at number three for the Ashes.

He didn’t score any runs and kept edging behind.

Conclusion

If you’re England in Australia, chances are you’re going to lose anyway. You are not going to improve your odds by spending the years leading up to the series doing a load of things that everyone in the world can see are manifestly wrong.

Also, you should have added Paul Collingwood to the squad.

< 1 minute read

It had to happen eventually. Today was the day James Vince finally managed to avoid edging one to slip.

And it was so easy to avoid. All he had to do was persuade an opposition bowler to aim a 90mph delivery about a foot wide of leg stump only for it to hit some sort of chasm which would persuade it to chart a new course for off stump.

He did his best though, did Jimmy the Nick. Presented with this heinous crime against physics, our boy presented the full outside edge of the bat. Alas, for once he couldn’t make contact.

We all have our limits.

ICYMI: The ball of the century

Mitchell Starc’s ridiculous delivery from EVERY angle ????

Just. Wow.#ItsTheAshes pic.twitter.com/H165bQXTJy

— The Ashes on BT Sport (@btsportcricket) December 17, 2017

2 minute read

The most significant question ahead of the Waca’s final appearance as an Ashes venue was not whether or not it would recover the pace of old – because it clearly wouldn’t – it was whether or not the ball would turn.

The Waca is Australia’s most over-hyped pitch and the pace of the home attack is its most over-hyped quality. Nathan Lyon is the man. Spin is what’s shaping this series.

England have left-handers at one, two, five and seven and Lyon has been hoovering up their wickets with ease. The tourists’ best hope has been that the dust of their demises might eventually clog his filters.

The bad news for England

Lyon might have struggled to make much impact, but so did everyone else. With the old ball, in particular, nothing happened. The Kookaburra’s behaviour became as unremarkable and predictable as the Nullarbor Plain that keeps Perth safely detached from the rest of Australia.

Wickets don’t look easy to come by and there was no obvious theme to the dismissals. Cook was near-yorked, Joe Root suffered legside strangulation (it’s not unlucky – either middle it or leave it) while Mark Stoneman gloved a lifter.

You can guess what happened to James Vince.

Causing dismissal by careless driving

According to Cricinfo, James Vince’s unbreakable addiction to nicking the ball behind has to be weighed against the fact that he scores 37 per cent of his runs through the covers. We disagree. All this statistic says to us is that Vince is a compulsive driver who will keep on lashing out at deliveries outside off stump until he’s invited to leave the field of play by the umpire’s raised finger.

Responsible driving

Dawid Malan is the man no-one particularly wanted to see picked in the first place but he’s also the man no-one has since wanted to drop.

Like Vince, he hit a few nice drives. But then, just as crucially, sometimes he didn’t.

2 minute read

On the first day of the first Ashes Test, James Vince made what Reese described to us as ‘a daddy 30’.

No-one expected Vince to make 83 and what’s so marvellous about that is that it undermines a number of pre-series certainties to leave us all watching a nice, unpredictable sporting event.

Well, maybe not watching. Not unless you have BT Sport or whatever.

The gist of it is this: if Vince can score runs against this attack then either he’s better than everyone thought or Australia’s fearsome pace attack is slightly less fearsome than we’d been led to believe.

Let’s go for a little from Column A and a little from Column B.

Vince was solid. We know this because having got up just in time to see Mark Stoneman dismissed (literally the first ball we saw) we then got to hear the commentators talking about what we’d missed at great length. England’s subsequent mediocrity then inspired us to spend a great deal of time dwelling on what had preceded it. (Ashes Tests can be very personally vindictive in what they present to part-time viewers on the opposite side of the world – we’re not inclined to calculate our own personal ‘cricket viewed’ mini scorecard.)

On the plus side, we did get to see Australia’s four-man attack at the end of the day, allowing us to gauge the impact of one whole day of Test cricket on them.

As relentlessly aggressive pace attacks go, they seemed to spend an awful lot of time pressuring England by cutting off the runs. As we all know, ‘good cricket’ and ‘attacking cricket’ are one and the same thing, so this defensive cricket was therefore impressively attacking.

Pace-wise, they were all utterly unspectacular. Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins hovered just below the 90mph threshold above which we’re finally willing to deem a bowler ‘fast’. Josh Hazlewood opted for Jimmy Anderson pace and everyone pretended it was quicker because he’s younger and Australian.

An alternative take on the day is that the pitch is shunting the play runwards, in which case James Vince is the same and Australia’s bowlers are amazing because they’ve dismissed Alastair Cook and Joe Root for almost nothing.

Watch the highlights

2 minute read 

We’ve been trying to provide some sort of pithy and insightful summary of the Test series for 24 hours now, but it’s not really happening. We’ll instead content ourself with a vague collage of observations. If these are our workings-out, maybe you can provide the conclusion yourself.

Specialists and all-rounders

If you need someone to bat at seven or bowl right-arm fast-medium, England are spoilt for choice. However, if you want a specialist batsman, a fast bowler or a spinner, you’d be better off looking to the tourists.

England had more batsmen, but fewer effective specialist run-scorers. Despite greater numbers, they also had less diversity in their bowling attack.

If Moeen Ali could avoid being clattered for six…

Moeen emerged from the series with a better strike-rate than almost all the specialist bowlers. Blind yourself to the rate at which he concedes runs and he’s a very effective spinner. His stellar batting is an excellent distraction, but not quite blinding.

James Anderson has lost a quarter of a yard of pace

We don’t normally take claims that bowlers have ‘lost their nip’ too seriously because pace often varies from one match to the next. The difference with Anderson is that he said himself that he was down on pace in the second Test and then didn’t really seem to recover it. If he can retain a viable bouncer, he’ll probably be okay. Pace isn’t everything – but it is something.

Beware the out-of-form old pro

Younus Khan’s had it. Look at him. Look at the state of him.

Oh.

Beware the conquered leg-spinner

Yasir Shah hasn’t posed a threat since Lord’s. He doesn’t spin it. England have worked him out.

Oh.

Looking good and being effective are different things

Shivnarine Chanderpaul could have told you that, but James Vince has been trying to prove it from the opposite direction. We feared for Vince’s chances before he played and we haven’t seen a huge amount to reassure us since then. Nor has anyone else. County cricket’s who-saw-a-future-England-player-first-and-championed-his-cause-the-most competition will have to forget about this and move on. Do yourselves a favour though – don’t claim that a player ‘looks good’.

Misbah-ul-Haq

The last time Pakistan toured, cricket fans were left feeling sick and unenthusiastic about the game. Pakistan themselves were left a fractured mess. This time they leave with fans more enthused about the game and with a level of solidity to their cricket that it is hard to remember their ever having had before.

Misbah-ul-Haq is an alchemist who can turn middle-age into youth and chaos into order.

< 1 minute readJames Vince wasn’t going to be caught in the slips driving today. Oh, no, no. Today he had other ideas.

He announced his intentions early on by edging a sort of half-defensive shot, half-leave. Vince was going to make damn certain that when he was caught in the slips, it was while playing with a complete lack of intent.

The only question was how many runs he would make before that happened. Would it be 37? Would it be 39?

It was 39.

The shot, when it came, was the indeterminate prod. Younus Khan took the catch and gave everyone a few more opportunities to assess Vince’s interminate prod techique when he floated the possibility that the ball maybe didn’t carry. It did carry though. Of course it carried. It was an edge off Vince’s bat while he was in the thirties. If it hadn’t carried he’d have had to have repeated the shot before he reached 40.

The ‘James Vince edging to slip’ montage extends still further. How many more chances will he get? We’d give him at least another innings what with his already having been selected for this Test and all.