Alastair Cook: Keep a watch on him
One line in Alastair Cook's column in the Daily Telegraph is enough to tell me that we ought to be seriously keeping an eye on the kid.
I'll take an ugly hundred over a pretty 10 any day.Well said, Alastair. Given we more or less predicted a century on test debut for him, it's not tough to see why his is a career to be followed.
Compare Alastair's attitude to England's diamond merchant, who mainly deals in thrilling run-a-ball 40s, 50s and 60s in both forms of the game.
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| Kevin Pietersen does have a perfectly respectable conversion rate in both forms of the game, at international and domestic level. In fact, his first-class conversion rate is notably better than Cook's.
geoff: Statistically true. But instead of looking at it purely as a 50s to 100s conversion efficiency, consider the number of times Pietersen's got out for a 30 or a 40 (or indeed a 21 as was the case yesterday) when he's pretty much had the bowling by the b#lls. Which invariably results in a crisis situation for England (like yesterday, like in India). As I've pointed out earlier, that is a _serious_ shortcoming. You could argue that others who bat similarly are also "guilty" along similar lines, say people like Flintoff, Gayle, Gilchrist & Sehwag. But they don't have the same hype factor KP has.
By 
Jagadish (15 Jul 2006, 12:08:00 am)
But the way those players bat is always likely to give the bowlers a chance. It's not risk-free, and that's why they're so exciting. I don't really think that hype can be considered, although Pietersen is a one-man publicity campaign.
I'm also not sure how Pietersen's dismissal left England in a 'crisis situation' yesterday. It wasn't a comfortable position, but I'm not sure you'd be saying it was a crisis situation if the catch off Cook on 0 had been taken and Pietersen had stayed in.
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