Quote: The Angry Pirate "Fair assessment of those players, Sally......Though you didn't mention the debut of a certain FEC amongst your emerging future stars!!
What was startling back then, was how fickle and how amateur the whole selection process was....Players were picked and discarded at a whim. Many a promising career was ruined by poor selection policy.
I often think how successful somebody like Neil Fairbrother could have been at Test level if they had only been around today when, at last, we seem to pick the side in a well thought out manner??.....Fairbrother was similar to somebody like Bell or Collingwood, in that he undoubtedly had talent but needed nurturing correctly and not just expected to produce from day one. Instead, I seem to remember him being selected for his debut against a formidable Pakistan attack, being sent in to bat in gloomy conditions, with about 2 overs left of the day, getting an almost predictable duck and then being dropped on the back of it!!
I'm not saying he would have been a world beater, but for any player, what sort of message are they getting when something like that happens??.....Its quite funny that some people today complain of players getting too long of a stay in the side, but its no coincidence that since we have more consistancy in our selection, so our results have dramatically improved since the days of 20 odd players being used in a series!!'"
I agree with you on this and it didn't change till Duncan Fletcher came in. Back in the 1980s and 1990s loads of players were continually cycled through the team because they'd have a bad couple of games for England, get dropped, go back to their counties and dominate county cricket again, then when someone in the England team got dropped they were back in. The newspapers used to have a lot of influence over selectors because they would demand players who were doing well in the county game, got picked, and then as soon as they were in the team, they would start criticising them and move onto demanding someone else.
Fletcher had a different approach, he came in, looked around the county game and decided on a group players who he thought had potential, even if they weren't ripping up trees in the county game, and he stuck with them - Vaughan, Trescothick, Flintoff, Collingwood, Harmison, Simon Jones. None of them were ever near the top of the county averages, and Fletcher got criticism early on for having his 'favourites' who he stuck with whether in/out of form when the press were launching bandwagons for Ian Salisbury and Ramprakash etc to be recalled. Ben Hollioake was also in Fletcher's 'in group' and I wonder if he could have come through like Flintoff did had it not been for his early death.
I wonder what would have happened if Fletcher had taken over in 1989 rather than 1999, England had a lot of young talent coming through at that time, some made it (Atherton, Stewart, Hussain, and later Gough), some had good spells but were not helped by being picked and dropped at strange times (Smith, Hick, Fraser, Malcolm, Tufnell), then there was Ramprakash who was the most obvious example of a player who needed a vote of confidence behind him and could have been an awesome player. In Fletcher's book he talks a bit about this, he said he reckoned the most technically perfect batsmen of the era were Tendulkar, Kallis and Ramprakash, and he had needed a long run and selectors confidence behind him to let him relax. He could have been our best player of the era. I reckon if Fletcher had been in ten years earlier, we would have played Malcolm every game because Fletcher liked the idea of strike power - IMO Malcolm was a much better bowler than Harmison was. Instead we had him taking 9-57 against South Africa then Ray lllingworth trying to change his technique saying "we've got to get Devon to swing the ball". Even Fraser, who was probably our best bowler abroad, always seemed to be the guy we brought back when the bowling attack had been getting hammered, he would do well, then disappear at the start of the next series.
With good management I reckon we could have had a very good team in the 1990s although it has to be said the overall standard of Test cricket back then was very high, when you think how tough Australia, Pakistan and West Indies were.