Good Article by Matthew Hoggard (The Times)

Matt comes across as a genuinely likeable bloke and this article is really quite good too...

Tour hits another flat note after Pakistan's variety performance
By Matthew Hoggard

SOME time around lunchtime today I will be landing back at Heathrow airport after a long flight from Lahore via Dubai. Coming back down to earth with a bump is a feeling that we have become increasingly familiar with over the past few weeks. We’re trying not to feel too down about it: we were some way from our best and were well beaten by a Pakistan team who, on that sort of form, would beat most sides in their own conditions. But there’s no doubt that it has been a massive comedown from the high that we were on at the end of the Ashes series.
It has been a long time since the England dressing-room has been as disappointed as we were on Saturday. We were fairly low after we had been stuffed by Australia at Lord’s last summer, but winning series is what we’re all about, so to lose two matches out of three has hit some of our players really hard. The important thing is that we learn our lessons from these defeats before the Test series against India begins in March.

Some of the Pakistan players told us that, when they played in India in March this year, the weather was unbelievably hot and that they wouldn’t want to tour there again at the same time of year. So we’d better be ready for some more hard work in the new year.

Our batting performance in Lahore on Saturday afternoon may have been woeful, but worse was still to come. After the game, we had a karaoke evening at the team hotel and, if you thought our batting was poor in the third Test, you should have heard some of the singing. By far the worst of a very bad bunch was Kevin Pietersen, whose rendition of YMCA had to be seen and heard to be believed.

Just about the only player to emerge with credit was James Anderson, who sang Don’t You Want Me quite acceptably. It wouldn’t be right for me to comment on my own version of the Green Green Grass of Home, but I’m sure I wasn’t as bad as Pietersen.

So we’ve had a bad series, but that is not going to undo the spirit that we have built up over the past two years. No matter how much we were struggling — and we bowled at Pakistan for almost 12 hours in Lahore — the spirit was still there in the field.

Some people have suggested that we may have struggled to motivate ourselves after the Ashes series, but that’s rubbish. We were playing Test cricket for England and if you can’t motivate yourself for that, you shouldn’t be a professional cricketer. There have also been suggestions that we didn’t have enough warm-up matches before the first Test, but we outplayed Pakistan for the first four days in the first Test before coming unstuck on the last day.

Where Pakistan had the edge on us was their variation in bowling and application in batting. With the bat, we will look back with regret at the failure to chase 198 for victory in Multan and then, after finally winning a toss in Lahore, only posting 288 in our first innings, which simply wasn’t good enough.

With the ball, the value of a leg spinner was shown by Danish Kaneria. This is not being disrespectful to our own slow bowlers, but the ball simply doesn’t turn for finger spinners out there as it does for a wrist spinner.

Also, Shoaib Akhtar had a point to prove in this series and he did so brilliantly by running in and bowling at 90mph-plus at the start of the day and still doing so at the end of the day. His slower ball fooled a lot of our batsmen, helped a little bit in Lahore by a dark spot just above the sightscreen that it seemed to keep coming out of. When he released the slower ball, it felt as though it was coming straight for your head, only for it to dip and hit the pitch just in front of you. It is as good a slower ball as most of us have seen, bearing comparison to the ones that Courtney Walsh bowled to Graham Thorpe and Chris Cairns bowled to Chris Read.

As expected, it has been a hard tour for most of our seam bowlers. I set myself a target of 12 wickets for the series and finished with 11; I may have reached my target if we had made Pakistan bat again in Lahore. It was difficult to exploit some of the technical deficiencies we had identified in the Pakistan batsmen when the ball was refusing to bounce above knee height.

They are due to tour England in the second half of next summer and we are looking forward to the chance to get our own back on surfaces that suit us a bit better.

Nice balanced point of view from Matty

Yep - very balanced analysis and less of the "hotel fever" and homesick crap.

Excellent read there..

Always liked Hoggard. Seems like a genuine, down to earth kind of guy...gets a lot of flak (esp on PP)...but is usually doing the donkey work for Eng...but I think he was underbowled in this series.

Nice to hear from an Eng players perspective-seems a lot more realistic than the cr&p we have heard from the journalists/media and coaching staff

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/ma...05/ixcrick.html

which japenese restaurant is trescothick on about?

He was laughing away when Shoaib bolwed that beamer - I think any other player would have made a much greater deal of it - hats off to him for that as well!

A far cry then from the early tour Pot Noodle complaints!!!

There are tons of restraunts in Lahore could be any of them.

have always been a fan of dis guy.. can't forget his 7 wicket haul agnst the Kiwis in 2002.

possibly fu je yama (sps) since it's inside the hotel they are staying in

Look at him complaining about the standard of karaoke in the hotel. First Pot Noodles and now he is implying that we can't make decent speaker systems and microphones in Pakistan. Someone tell the mindless idiot we're not a third world country omg I'm going to ring up my friends in Lahore and tell them to go beat him up I'm unbelievably disgusted and infuriated at his typically English bigoted, prejudiced and ignorant comments

lol what article are you reading he was talkin about the standard of singing!

pak for life - 1 word: irony.

on a side note, MIGGY lal - loving the avator

Good one Mac Daddy!

Good article by Hoggard always has come across as a good bloke.

nice article