Andrew Strauss

[Leicester Fox]

He's quality, but in the last test I saw him grinning at slip after we had just scored 100 all out. All I could think was complete and utter ████.

 

[Owzat]

I think he just needs to shake the "I'm England captain, this is what England captains do in this situation, that situation............................." mentality. I can see patterns with declarations and field settings, a least he had the guts to not enforce the follow-on and quite rightly too. Had he enforced the follow-on he would have been caught between two stools on taking wickets and not conceding runs, runs were taken out of the equation by batting the opposition out of (realistic) contention.

I think a few need to lay off him a bit, he gets a lot of stick for "negativity" when it's more likely something he simply takes as normal as Vaughan and other captains before him passed down the bad habits. I wish he'd lose the nightwatchman mindset too, it was bordering on pathetic to employ a nightwatchman on the brink of defeat in the last Test like that piddly ploy would avoid defeat.

His only two defeats have come via embarrasing collapses in the batting - 51 vs West Indies and 102 vs Australia - so hardly down to his captaincy. More worrying is that we've collapsed one further time in less than two years and several of the same names featured in two and all three, losing two and surprisingly saving one as a draw (still lost the series) I hope there isn't a trend as both those series where we collapsed we lost the series, albeit 0-1 in both cases but we can still lose this one 1-2

 

[Hooper]

He is an ugly boy, thats for sure.

 

[Mercules]

I've been impressed. Him & Flower look like they might make a good partnership.