Former England batter Mark Butcher has labelled the standard of England’s Test and first-class batting the worst he’s ever seen following their Ashes-surrendering collapse to 68 all out at the MCG.
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Australia’s 267 was the lowest team total to secure an innings win this century, with England’s latest debacle their 13th all-out score below 200 in 2021, equal to the number of times they have surpassed that total. Dawid Malan and captain Joe Root are the only two batters to finish the year with an average above 30.
Speaking on the Wisden Cricket Weekly Podcast, Butcher stated that England were “more ill-equipped than any other other team before it” to cope with the demands of Test cricket in Australia.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen batting as bad, but then watching first-class cricket over the course of last summer, I’d say exactly the same thing,” he said. “People talk a lot about the gap or the difference between county cricket and Test match cricket, and from personal experience that gap has always been a very big one. It’s always been pretty large. But I do wonder if the guys currently playing for England at the moment are not only coming up against a gap that is large and always has been, but have gone into this series more ill-equipped than any other team before it to cope with the demands of high-quality quick bowling on Australian pitches.
“I think that’s the saddest part of it for me. You can talk about selection, you can pluck a few names out of the air, you can talk about the type of bowlers that are successful in county cricket as against what you come up against in Test matches, but fundamentally, the basic techniques of all but Joe Root and to a lesser extent Ben Stokes – quite a lot lesser extent actually – are just so poor that it’s not surprising that this team or this current selection of England Test match players have collapse. Every third innings there’s a massive implosion and they get knocked over for next to nothing. There was an inevitability about it which tempers any anger or sadness in what’s gone on over the last couple of days.”
In a lengthy discussion of the causes of England’s woes, Butcher identified the County Championship schedule, which sees little first-class cricket played in the heart of the summer, as one of the key reasons for their frailties.
“The game as far as red-ball cricket at home is concerned is in an absolute disgraceful mess,” said Butcher. “It’s a disgrace. I finished my last commentary stint of the summer on the second of October at Lord’s when the leaves were falling off the trees and it was freezing cold. That’s the importance of county cricket, it’s been pushed to the point where you’re playing it in the snow in spring time and with brown leaves sloshing around your feet at the end of summer, it’s absolute nonsense.
“5-0 is not looking like something you can have a little nervous chuckle about, it’s looking like an absolute certainty.”
