Odds-on accumulators crash as shoddy England slip up

I am a betting man and, like so many other betting men I know, I’m particularly adroit at retrospectively foreseeing foreseeable results which I haven’t actually backed. This week the two most obvious sure fire winners were that British defence secretary Liam Foxwould be gone by the weekend and that England would lose the first ODI against India in Hyderabad. Obviously I hadn’t got money on either.

England do not have quite as an embarrassing a record in ODIs on the subcontinent as you might expect, but it’s still shoddy enough in India to have quite safely predicted their capitulation on Friday. In the last thirty years before today’s implosion they had won 13, lost 21 and tied one of the games played there and despite the shellacking administered to their hosts in all forms during the summer, there was a sodden, throbbing inevitability that Cook’s men would succumb in the first match of what has been termed, rather graspingly in my opinion, the ‘payback’ series.

At 111 for two and with Cook and Trott at the crease, however, this trend seemed to be well on the way to being bucked senseless, but in a nine over spell of irrationality that saw them lose six wickets for 37 runs, England flailed themselves towards a defeat that was greeted with a vociferously vengeful yet perfectly understandable lust by the home fans who, since the World Cup win in April, had been rather starved of meaningful success, if indeed one can ever be peckish in a short few months after winning cricket’s ultimate prize.

As an England fan, it would have been rather easy to dismiss the Indian victory as an irrelevant teaspoon of sugar to sweeten the rather sour grapes that whined about the sides’ recent encounters, but the fact is that any English loss on the subcontinent in an ODI should rasp like a spurned lemon and to me it did. Particularly so because I had naively allowed thoughts of smugness to set in when the two aforementioned pillars of accumulation were milking away at the crease. “Different ball game now, Ravi, isn’t it?”, I thought to myself as Cook and Trott poodled along mechanically, but ultimately it really wasn’t.

I don’t know why Cook played that shot. I don’t know why Trott played that shot. Perhaps after two years of steamrollering oppositions yet still getting steamrollered themselves for victorious dourness they both finally cracked in some massive, at least the latter’s case, see-how-you-like-the-taste-of-my-middle-finger-of-reckless-defeat-Bob moments of madness. The pitch then subsequently did an equally impressive job of buckling, but still not enough to justify what followed from the rest of the team.

From Lendl Simmons’ ton to Patrick Cummins’ bowling to England’s defeat, it’s been a productive week for cricket, with a number of highly exciting future possibilities and potentials brought to the fore. It’s absurd to suggest Andy Flower would have welcomed today’s performance, but there must surely be a small part of his resolute character that is relishing the chance to turn round an England ODI side and finally nail their away Indian ODI hoodoo against the now even more improbable odds. Would you bet against him? I would. So on that basis you can look forward to a thrilling and competitive next four games.