Marcus Trescothick to miss Ashes

Marcus Trescothick's 'stress-related condition' has flared up again and he's missing the Ashes. This is mighty bad. (We're not questioning the legitimacy of his condition with those inverted commas, incidentally - it's merely a reference to the predictability of the mainstream media who have settled on that phrase to explain his malaise.)

Marcus Trescothick is like a big, solid lump of familiarity at the top of the order. No, we'll go further than that: Marcus Trescothick IS a big, solid lump of familiarity at the top of the order. The reason why he's attained this status is because he's played heaps of games for England because he's so good at batting. To lose a player of his calibre is a bitter blow.

We wish Marcus the absolute best with his continuing struggle. If there were some way of indicating the absence of sarcasm, we'd have used it there. We're quite capable of genuine emotion, despite the vast majority of this site.

Most likely Alastair Cook will move up to open the batting with Andrew Strauss, thus removing England's selectorial headache surrounding the middle order. However, there is an alternative.

We should probably add that Mahinda beat us to that in the comments on our previous post. We were already thinking it though. Since about March.

Zaheer Khan could learn from Marcus Trescothick

Zaheer Khan said he found the presence of jelly beans on the wicket while he was batting "insulting".

He should follow Marcus Trescothick's example.



TRAMPLE THEM WITHOUT MERCY

Marcus Trescothick - an aggressive, left-handed one-day opener

All the best teams in this World Cup have got at least one aggressive, left-handed opener - a bullying one, even.

The West Indies have got Chris Gayle; South Africa have got Graeme Smith; Sri Lanka have got Sanath Jayasuriya; New Zealand have got Stephen Fleming; and Australia have got Adam Gilchrist and Adam Gilchrist alone - no other aggressive, left-handed opener of note at all. Not one. Just Adam Gilchrist.

Sri Lanka have even got a spare. Upul Tharanga's remarkably aggressive. You just don't notice sometimes because Benevolent Uncle Sanath's batting has gone up to 11.

England have got a left-hander, Ed Joyce, but he's not really aggressive. We believe that the correct term for him is 'an accumulator'. The other two batsmen in England's top three, Ian Bell and Michael Vaughan, are also accumulators, although all they've really accumulated so far is a length list of poor scores.

The problem is that these three are each piling the pressure on each other with their 'steady' scoring rates. Replace one of those three with a left-handed aggressor - we don't know why they have to be left-handed, but they really do - and the pressure is lifted from the two survivors, who can then play their dull, natural games with the spotlight elsewhere.

What England really need is a Marcus Trescothick-esque batsman, such as Marcus Trescothick. Ideally, this batsman will also have Marcus Trescothick-esque levels of experience. He'll have hit a Marcus Trescothick-esque number of one-day international hundreds - about 12. He'll have a Marcus Trescothick-esque strike-rate too - about 85.21 or thereabouts.

Unfortunately, the only name that comes to mind is that of Andrew Strauss and we're not really feeling Andrew Strauss of late.

Gosh darn it, Marcus. We want you back, you big red-cheeked, cider-swilling beeftain. 'Beeftain' is a word we've invented specifically for this occasion. It means a burly, authoritative player. It's a blend of 'beefy' and 'chieftain' as you've probably guessed.

Words we've invented:
Beeftain
Innocuoso

An 'innocuoso' is one who excels at the art of harmlessness.