Ian Bell

At the risk of playing devil's advocate to the opinions of certain other Cricket Burblers, this post is in full praise of Ian Bell and his role in the current England team! (An opinion easily expressed in hindsight after today's match, I'll freely admit.)

I'm just watching the highlights of the England ODI this evening, and was delighted to see a good win set up by a pair of fine debut hundreds by Alistair Cook and Ian Bell. Whilst I appreciate how one day cricket has evolved to a breakneck pace in recent years after its conception, necessitating powerful hitting as well as orthodoxy, isn't it great to see a solid platform being laid by proper batting before being developed by free strokeplay rather than mindless slogging? Though every international team would love a Gilchrist, Jayasuriya, or Pietersen, all too often we have seen the search for players in the same mould ending in county biffers that have no place in international cricket (Ian Blackwell, anyone?).

I'm convinced that good test players can adapt far more readily to one-day cricket but not vice-versa, and both Cook and Bell made that point emphatically today whilst playing proper cricket shots (and fielding marvellously too). Sure, the Aussies might have turned that start into 320+, but some of the bits-and-pieces England one day sides of the last ten years would have turned it into 220 all out.

I'm also in disagreement with critics of Ian Bell's role in the test team (reminiscent of the constant debate hanging over Paul Collingwood even when he was scoring consistently). The guy already has a test average comfortably in excess of forty, with six hundreds. He has already suffered failure (Ashes 2005) and has shown the maturity to learn from his failings and tour Australia in 2006 as a much improved player. All this at the age of 25 and with many potential test match years ahead of him.

In the nineties, England's search for batting resulted in many failed experiments, whimsical selection and several high-profile failures. Two of the rightly acknowledged stars of that less successful era - Mike Atherton and Alec Stewart - both averaged under forty. In this context, Bell is most certainly a proven test match player. Furthermore, I don't buy the argument that Bell scores 'cheap' runs - i.e. against poor opposition or when the scoreline is already heavily in England's favour - surely our dominance of certain nations and the higher frequency of our wins is a measure of the improvement our test team has made since the nineties rather than a devaluation of the efforts of the players who secured that success?