England Cricket Team

The England cricket team is a cricket team that represents the Wales and England. This is operated under the auspices of the England and Wales Cricket Board called as ECB. This is considered as one of the strongest teams in the world.

The sport of cricket evolved in England. This is the nation which found Test Cricket, One-Day Internationals and latest Twenty20 cricket play. Despite of all these discoveries, unfortunately and stunningly, England has never won the Cricket World Cup in its whole history.

England played its first test match in the year of 1877 against Australia in Melbourne and also the first One-Day International game in the year of 1971 with same team in same city. It was a Peter Moores who took responsibility as Head Coach on May 1 2007 following the resignation of Duncan Fletcher because of poor performance of the team in the latest World Cup (2007). He subsequently employed Andy Flower as an assistant coach and Allan Donald (South Africa) was appointed as bowling coach.

Though the team has never won a World Cup, England has traditionally been one of the strong teams in international cricket. The record says (up to an end of 2006) that England has 857 Test Matches in its account out of which, 298 (about 34.77%) are won by them and 250 (29.17%) were lost rest of 309 (36.06%) being no-result i.e. draw. For One Day Internationals, up to the Super Eight World Cup match against Australia on April 8th, 2007, England had played 464 ODIs out of which, 224 were won and 221 were lost with tie in 4 and 15 with no results. England team has 203 players up-to-the-date.

It was a great shock when Australia won The Ashes for the first time in 1881-82, England had to fight with them for primacy and that was most fierce rivalries in the sort event for the seventy years. In the year of 1963, this duopoly of cricket dominance began down-falling with the great emergence of the strong team West Indies. In the year 2006/7 tour of Australia The Ashes were lost in 0-5 ‘whitewash’ but the team of England got succeed in clinching victory in the series against Australia and New Zealand in Commonwealth bank ODI Tri-series.

The Recent Scenario

Since the historic Ashes win, England’s team has suffered from many injuries to its key players. Simon Jones, Andrew Flintoff, Michael Vaughan and Ashley Giles all suffered form non-ignorable injuries. There are several new players have emerged especially with yesteryear’s series victory against Pakistan in July-August 2006. Its latest player Monty Panersar, the only Sikh to play Test cricket to play for England, impressed all with stunning match figures of 8-93 in the innings victory over Pakistan in the month of July, 2006 at Old Trafford. He has also become proud of crowd! He was one of the favorites to win BBC Sports Personality of the Year. However, he did not receive the award.

Several new players include left-handed batsman Alastair Cook and Fast bowler Sajid Mahmood. The injury crisis has also allowed past marginal players Paul Collingwood and Ian bell to unite their places.

In the 2007 Cricket World Cup, England lost to many Test playing nations and was able to beat only Bangladesh and West Indies. There was a heavy defeat of England to stronger teams like South Africa, New Zealand and evergreen Kangaroos (Australia).