Strauss:Too many mistakes again

By Sam Hathaway
July 1 2006

Andrew Strauss was yesterday livid with his teams poor performance yet again and blamed their downfall on basic mistakes. This loss means England have lost their fourth ODI by 33 runs at Old Trafford and Strauss knows they need to improve quickly.

"We keep making the same mistakes. We talked about batsmen getting a hundred and no-one got that," he lamented. "We talked about bowling straight with the ball but no-one did that either - it's pretty disappointing again." Our Bowling has let us down again and they struggled to bowl the basics like line and length and conceded 21 wides and many fours. But it wasn't just the bowlers who struggled, not one batsman looked convincing had didn't really make a 'big score.' "We did some very good things with the bat but we need one guy to get a century and no-one in the top four was able to do that," Strauss continued. "It's a big ask for the guys at the back end to score 10-15 an over so the guys in the top four have to take responsibility. "The bowlers are trying to concentrate on getting their lines and lengths right. It's not rocket science and it's a lot easier to do it in practice than in the middle. "It's more a mental thing than technical but the guys have to keep working on it and get it right - we can't keep bowling 20 wides a game. You're not going to win any game if you do that." All England can hope for now is a very quick recovery in performances and hopefully stop the series from being a whitewash.