Former England Test and ODI captain Alastair Cook is disappointed with ECB’s latest rotation policy and said its the main reason for the men’s team series loss against India and New Zealand recently.
Cook played 161 Test matches for England, the second-highest in English history after James Anderson surpassed him recently, along with this he also played 92 One Day Internationals for the national side.
“Clearly it was disappointing. England has got themselves in a tough situation. It was going so well, winning in Sri Lanka, and then they’re 1-0 up against India. To then rest and rotate players, ever since that moment they’ve ended up chasing their tail — ending up with a fifth-choice wicketkeeper (James Bracey), an unbalanced side even though people were playing the (T20) Blast,” said Cook.
While all-rounder Ben Stokes and pace bowler Jofra Archer suffered injuries and were unavailable for the Test series against New Zealand, several key players were not in the England squad because of the ECB’s rest and rotation policy.
“You’ve got a Test captain (Joe Root) who hasn’t been able to play his best side, yet we seem to be playing a full-strength side in the T20s against Sri Lanka (June 23-26, 2021). The decisions don’t look like they’ve been made correctly. Of course, they’re trying their best to make the right decisions for the right reasons, but when you’re playing for England, you get judged on end results most of the time, so you’d have to say it hasn’t worked,” Cook told ESPNcricinfo.
England’s top cricketer like Sam Curran, Moeen Ali, Jonny Bairstow were not the part of recently concluded Test series against New Zealand.
“I genuinely feel sorry for Joe Root because he hasn’t had his best players available. You can’t buy that experience of guys like Ben Stokes, Jos Buttler, Jonny Bairstow, Moeen Ali. Those kinds of players make a big difference.
“When you look at it in isolation, it doesn’t make that much sense what happened, but how they got there you can kind of half understand. It’s been a tough one, and they just got found out against a better team in that New Zealand series.”
England has to prepare a complete Test team for the Ashes series later this year down under. They got the Indian Test series to try all their permutations and combinations.
