Flower puts a brave face on interrupted summer
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Your support makes all the difference.All roads now lead to the Ashes. The trouble for England is the number of byways they must negotiate on the route, the first of which takes them to Leeds tomorrow.
There they will play West Indies in the opening one-day match of three. Soon after that, they will compete (or that is the hope) in the World Twenty20, being held in this country for the first time. Then and only then can they concentrate on what they and everybody else knows is the real business of the summer.
"It's not ideal but we have to deal with whatever situation is put in front of us," coach Andy Flower said. "That's what we face so we must make the best of it."
An interpretation of those sentiments might be that if the Test victory against West Indies, completed with embarrassing ease on Monday, was to have any bearing on the Ashes, it would only have been if there were not seven weeks between the series.
Only now that it is upon England does the ridiculous nature of this summer's schedule becoming clear. A Test series followed by a one-day series, a Twenty20 tournament and then another Test series boggles the mind, so what it will do to cricketing psyches is anybody's guess.
"I think the Test series against the West Indies is relevant to the Ashes, definitely," said Flower gamely. "We had a little bit of winning momentum after the one-day series in the West Indies and the hard work we did there. It's now picked up a little more."
Flower used the plethora of limited-overs cricket to avoid the issue of the probable team to face Australia. Part of this was no doubt because he has no wish to let the old enemy know his plans, but part of it, the conspiracy theorists aver, is because he is perfectly prepared to change a winning team and bring in new faces, or as some suspect, old ones.
When he suggested that Ravi Bopara could bat anywhere and they had not decided on the side to play Australia yet, some folk immediately concluded that must mean Michael Vaughan was already being pencilled in for a return. Thus it will continue for seven weeks.
"There is a hell of a lot of cricket before that, we have really got to put or minds and our focus on to this one-day series against West Indies," Flower said. He'll be lucky.
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