Former England captains Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Vaughan have made a scathing attack on Zak Crawley and Chris Woakes after Ben Stokes and co. suffered a humiliating 337-run loss at Edgbaston in the second Test of the ongoing Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy.Boycott said opener Zak Crawley has not learnt a thing and has resorted to his old bad ways.“At Headingley, he played straight with the full face of the bat, left wide balls, and let the ball come to him so he could keep his bat close to his pad,” Boycott wrote in his column for The Telegraph.“The two shots he got out to at Edgbaston were awful. In the first innings, his feet got stuck in cement, neither forward nor back, and then he wafted at the ball to be caught at slip.“In the second innings, he batted on off stump and drove at a well-pitched-up ball two feet wide. He did not need to play it. He was on nought, had been fielding for five sessions, and his legs were tired, so he should have been thinking about surviving that evening.“I don’t think he can change or get better.”
The 27-year-old opener has played 56 Tests and still averages 31 in Test cricket, which Michael Vaughan said is just not good enough.“There have been many players who have frustrated fans – including me – over the years, but he is right up there as the most frustrating I can remember. And in my time watching, playing for, and covering England, he is the player luckiest to have won as many caps as he has,” Vaughan wrote in his column for The Telegraph.“He has to count himself fortunate to have played 56 games, while scoring just five hundreds and averaging 31. Among all the openers in history with more than 2,500 runs, he has the lowest average: 30.3. He’s batted 102 times in Test cricket and been out in single digits 42 times.”Boycott used even sterner words for Chris Woakes, who he thinks is past his sell-by date.“His pace is dropping, as you would expect as a seamer gets older. He has never been a wicket-taker abroad, where his record is poor. He is good – or has been good – on English pitches, and his batting has been handy at times as a safety valve when others have failed. His job should not be to shore up bad batting. Batsmen are there to score runs, and bowlers need to take wickets,” said Boycott.“Woakes has been a good cricketer, but not a master craftsman like James Anderson, who took buckets full of wickets home and away consistently.”
