the Willis era was dire - a fast bowler & no.11 batsman should never be skipper of a Test side IMO !

at least with Beefy & Lamby the menu was varied ? it's a pity Onions wasn't around at the time......

Carberry, Hales & Mitchell are all having pretty mediocre seasons in the Championship. None has anything like the weight of runs needed to make a convincing case, although Mitchell has just carried his bat for a ton this morning. I'd put Joe Denly & Chris Nash ahead of those three.

Compton is the only man with 1,000 Championship runs before the current round of matches. Chopra has been fairly consistent for a couple of years now and at 26 has 7 or 8 seasons of fairly regular first class cricket behind him.

A tour of India would be a big challenge for someone of Root's inexperience but he looks like the most convincing long-term bet by a distance, and is in decent enough form to boot. Alternatively Compton could bat at 3 with Trott moving up to open. Otherwise I'd rate Chopra as the best bet.


Kerrigan still has a long way to go for me, having seen him mercilessly battered by Pietersen at Guildford last month. KP took over 100 runs off him at almost two runs per ball in a situation where Lancs were looking to enforce the follow on. India might not have anyone as aggressively dominant as that, but I wouldn't fancy him to trouble them in their own back yard on that evidence.

The selectors generally seem to favour an old pro for back-up spin options on the Subcontinent, e.g. Pat Pocock in 1984/5, when we came from behind to beat India, or Shaun Udal a few years back when we levelled the series with Flintoff captaining the side. I would imagine Swann, Panesar, Patel and Tredwell will remain at the forefront of the selectors' thoughts in the spin department.

Mustard keeping wicket too

to be fair, i'm only 27, and only watched cricket ssince '93, not bad when one of your first cricket memories is the Ball Of The Century! Only real circus I can recall is the hoo-hah over Nasser (and i don't even recall what the issue was). Sky just go a long way to blowing the issues up, especially since they've had full test series coverage.

I hate Sky, is it obvious?

Well I've only got two extra years on you, so that's no excuse.

Sky are a shower of c***s, I'll grant you that. I can't stand what they've done to football and, whisper it, I can't stand some of the baggage that's come into RL with their coverage. The latter's not usually a popular opinion, but there you go.

There is a heck of a lot of "blowing up" that Sky do surrounding their coverage, but that's always been around in cricket. Controversy in the English game, particularly surrounding the captaincy, has often been more widely reported, inspected and dissected more than other sports in the past. I can only guess at the reasons for that, possibly due to the image of cricket being a clean, pearly white sport and a symbol of old school virtues that some yearn to. Or I could be talking b*llocks.

You b*stard. I'd just about pushed that out of my mind until you posted that! Wasn't too pleasurable to watch from my point of view...

I always thought C4's coverage of the cricket was outstanding. I wish they never lost the TV contract.

Aye. I should say I was thinking more of the "news" coverage - papers and the like.

Kent beat Leicestershire by 147 runs

Whatever your thoughts on sky, and you certainly are not alone in what you say, in my opinion sports coverage in general through sky is far, far superior to anything that has ever been broadcast previously. The number of camera angles, the depth of coverage and the analysis is all far better than yesteryear.

Think back to the days when there was next to no live rugby league on at all, midweek sport special and/or sportsnight for midweek football and no televised overseas cricket tours whatsoever!!!! The sports fan is spoilt these days