Oh dear God - is it any wonder?
This is typical of the way the British mentality - and specifically the British media mentality - works. On the 1st day of the final test between England and India, India geared themselves up to give England a proper trouncing and in so-doing hand them their first series loss on home soil in some record-breaking amount of time. But read the news and watch the coverage of the day and you can’t go anywhere without hearing someone sticking it directly in Matt Prior’s neck.
Matt Prior dropped Sachin Tendulkar on 20, missing a catch away to his right. Tendulkar is now not out on 48, so the drop has so far cost the side 28 (out of 316 scored on Day 1). Yet already, the hair is down and the gloves are off, Matt Prior takes the brunt for a lacklustre English display on a flat, slowish Oval batting track.
Derek Pringle writing for the Telegraph is particularly scathing - England made to rue Matt Prior mistake:
The edge flew to Prior’s right, but instead of taking a step and then the catch, his feet remained rooted to the spot… It was a bad miss… Prior’s footwork is poor on either side and even ignoring the catches he has fluffed, he has conceded more than 100 byes this summer…
Other commentators paint similar pictures that moreorless hand the entire day’s misery to the gloves of Matt Prior.
For starters, I would never classify the dropped catch as a regulation chance. Any catch where you’re diving at full stretch is not regulation. Secondly, he went with both gloves which is the first thing you are told as a young wicket-keeper. It seems likely that had he gone with just his right hand he would have caught it and would have been hailed a hero. (Of course, had he dropped it with one hand, he would have been berated for not going with both hands.) We have seen much easier chances go down, and they rarely raise up such a shitstorm. And finally, the drop in real terms has so far cost just 28 runs. That still leaves some 290 runs scored by the other Indian batsmen as a result of both good batting and uninspired bowling.
To heap such pressure on Prior is symptomatic of the way the English cricket system is working (failing?) at the moment. He has already received criticism for his constant chatter, but funnily enough there were no such criticisms when he was scoring centuries, nor when it seemed the question over the English wicket-keeper which has been a farce for so long had finally been answered.
And to heap criticism on him for the number of byes he has let through is outright ridiculous when you consider how many of them came from a genuine mistake as opposed to those that went pinging down 6 foot outside the leg stump from the consistently wayward bowling.
Sure, plenty of people have leapt to his defence, but in my opinion that should not be necessary, because criticism in this vein should never have been levelled at him in the first place. The perceived importance of the drop has been heightened due to it being Tendulkar which is wrong - Tendulkar is a shadow of his former self and is not scoring the sort of runs that made him so famous. A more important drop would have been Dravid or Ganguly.
In fact, we will only be able to gauge how important the drop was tomorrow, after we find out if Tendulkar goes on to make a big score. But it’s a no-win situation for Prior - he has already dropped the catch - so even if Tendulkar gets out first ball tomorrow morning he’s still had the spotlight for the wrong reasons. Should Tendulkar go on to score a hundred, then Prior will get the blame for England losing the series.
It’s hard enough being an England wicket-keeper without the barrage of garbage that come from these people. Judge first, think second.
Here’s to Prior winning this game for England and giving a big one fingered salute to all the doubters.
Tags: crap, cricket, criticism, England, its-just-not-cricket, matt-prior, oval, test, Test CricketRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Cricket
2 opinions for Oh dear God - is it any wonder?
The Game
Aug 10, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Yeah commentators are too much reading into the player and just criticize even if you do a small mistake.
Matt Prior is more of Batsman and less of an keeper. Still he is not that bad and new to international cricket and will learn from his mistakes.
BTW, today also he dropped one catch which he could had leave for the slips to take it. Luckily it did not cost that much as other wicket :)
Chris
Aug 10, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Really good post, thanks. Not sure I’m completely convinced however — Prior did concede a lot of byes. Perhaps the more important point is that the British mentality often tries to pin the blame on one particular player (e.g. Freddie in the World Cup) rather than sharing it out between the players fairly.
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