Posted by Chubs on 11/8/2009, 11:44 am, in reply to "Re: Langer's dossier"
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You had to hand it to Andrew Strauss. His side had just suffered the definitive pummelling, but when it was put to him that Justin Langer had to Jimmy Anderson in his top-secret, extra classified, supra-nuclear dossier as "a bit of a pussy", the England captain was unable to stifle a grin - as if his biology teacher had just explained the true meaning of mammary glands. Yet didn't he realise Langer's memo to Tim Nielsen, penned at the start of the tour and intended for private use only, contained some withering indictments?
Forget, for a moment, the contention that blaming others is a "classic English trait" (although personally the Spin blames Steve Harmison), that being "friendly" and "matey" is the "key to the whole English psyche", and that English players' body language becomes "flat and lazy" the moment it "gets a bit hard". And consider that this is the same man who only last year was proclaiming the standard of first-division cricket in the county championship to be the best domestic set-up in the world!
Perhaps Langer was damning county cricket with faint praise - y'know, Monty Panesar's the best finger-spinner in the world, that kind of thing. Or perhaps, just perhaps, he was doing that thing all overseas pros do: condone the English set-up in public, slag it off in private. One former county coach the Spin spoke to yesterday could hardly contain his rage at what he believes is an all-too-common phenomenon: take the money, then return to sunnier climes and tell your mates over a beer - bought, perhaps, with those hard-earned pounds - what a joke English cricket is. As this coach said: more fool the county administrators.
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