Flower refuses to panic after England’s Dubai debacle

England may still be top of the world in Test cricket – but after their ten-wicket hammering against Pakistan in Dubai, Andy Flower believes the only way is up for his team.

On their ascent to the No 1 spot in the International Cricket Council’s Test rankings, England have recovered impressively several times from what captain Andrew Strauss termed “aberrations”. Flower yesterday echoed Strauss’ straight talking, agreeing that there should not be any panic from England after one – albeit unexpected and landslide – defeat. Like the captain too, England’s coach will not be getting in the batsmen’s ears about their obvious failings against Saeed Ajmal’s off-spin in particular. He is well aware they know as well as him that they did not do themselves, or their ICC seeding, justice in the first Test. Flower will stick, therefore, not to lectures about technique but the broader base of man-management, which has served England’s generation of world-beating talent so well over the past three years.

“One of our principles is to improve continually – and we can certainly improve on this performance,” he said. “We all know that it was the batting that let us down in this Test. But our batsmen have a pretty good record against spin, so I don’t think it’s a matter of reinventing the wheel. They all have their individual strengths and they have to focus on those.”

There were some embarrassing examples of poor shot selection from England’s batsmen at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium, among them Strauss’ first-innings dismissal to Ajmal and Kevin Pietersen’s in the second to seamer Umar Gul. There have been mutterings about Strauss’ form in the longer term, too. He is without a century since Brisbane more than a year ago, but has made four 50s in a relatively light Test match schedule since then.

“He’s a pretty calm bloke, and I wouldn’t say he’s in poor form at all,” Flower said of the captain. “He looks very composed and compact at the crease. He got out in the first innings to a shot he wouldn’t want to repeat, and he was unlucky in the second innings. He will come back. As Strauss said yesterday, there’s no point in panicking.”

As for Pietersen, Flower believes he, too, does not need to be told what he already knows – that it was not a great idea to try to get off the mark with an attempted pick-up pull for six over the head of deep square-leg.

England began this series after four months away from Test cricket, and Flower concedes a break of that length is inevitably a mixed blessing. “It might be fair to say that the lay-off we’ve had means people aren’t quite up to speed. But we needed that break. You can’t have it all ways. Our challenge now is to get up to speed for the second Test.”