THE TOP SPIN: Consistency has become the Holy Grail of this England team

Quiz question. What links these England Test wins? Lord’s 2000 (v West Indies), Kandy 2000-01, The Oval and Trent Bridge 2003, Johannesburg 2004-05, Edgbaston 2005, Mumbai 2005-06, Wellington 2007-08, The Oval 2009?

Answer: they all followed demoralising defeats.


So when England’s bowlers were given a lesson in ingenuity and chutzpah by AB de Villiers at Cape Town on Friday, you could almost guess what was coming next: South Africa all out for 119 – their lowest total in home one-day internationals – and England on the brink of winning a series that most observers, this one included, felt was another limited-overs accident waiting to happen.

You couldn’t make it up. And if you did, you’d be sacked for over-embellishment.

Consistency is a strange thing. It’s got so many syllables you imagine sportsmen nodding off when the captain uses it in his team-talk. Neither is it the sexiest concept in the sporting dictionary.
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It’s also wonderfully understated. Why not just say: ‘We want to win every game’? But it has become the Holy Grail of this England cricket team – a reasonable, modest, unflashy goal for those embodiments of reason, modesty and non-flash, Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower.

The good news is England are aware of the problem. In the 1990s, their stirring victories were undoubtedly too seldom and almost always too late: at The Oval in 1993 and 1997, at Bridgetown in 1993-94, at Adelaide in 1994-95, and at Melbourne in 1998-99, the series could not be won.

Worse, all those games took place in series England went on to lose. The games mentioned in the first paragraph, by contrast, were all part of series England either drew after being behind or won. Progress comes in all shapes and sizes.

The journey, though, may only be beginning. After England’s win on Sunday, Strauss was keeping his size 11s on the ground. ‘The see-saw nature of this series so far suggests that if we expect to [win at Durban on Friday], we will probably come unstuck,’ he said. ‘So we have to keep building.’






For common sense, he sure takes some beating.

But then this is a captain who, in less than 12 months back in the job, has presided over a Test-series defeat by West Indies, a red-faced Twenty20 night against the orangemen of the Netherlands, Ashes glory, a 6-1 NatWest Series walloping, a Champions Trophy campaign that lurched from the sublime to the less so, and now a one-day series in South Africa that resembles a tight finish in a boat race: it all depends who gets the shove on when the line approaches.