Batting

Bob Willis England have made the same mistakes as previous World Cups by jigging round with the order at the 23rd hour. It’s one thing making the decision to leave Alastair Cook out but why Gary Ballance at No3 when James Taylor had made his case for it in Sri Lanka? That defies belief and it hasn’t worked at all. It’s left Eoin Morgan and Jos Buttler too low down the order. They haven’t adapted to the regulations but only Morgan has been playing regular Twenty20 cricket around the world and so many innovations have come from that form of the game. AB de Villiers and Brendon McCullum have taken the game to the next level and we sadly don’t have a player like that. You have to have the talent, of course, but those two are among the best in all three formats. You would beg the question, why hasn’t Ian Bell, say, managed to develop into a player like that? Owais Shah There is no question we have the talent but we’re playing scared cricket. We are not dominating the middle phase of an innings. The key batsmen in ODI cricket are numbers three and four. We have had Gary Ballance out of form and Joe Root there. Root is a class act, as he showed against Sri Lanka, but is he really dominating this middle period? It’s not so much personnel as the mindset – we’re not playing the attacking cricket that Australia and New Zealand are. England are always playing catch-up in one-day cricket, reacting to how others play the game. We have always been like that. Every World Cup it’s the same: We see how others are playing, then spend four years trying to get there ourselves, by which time the game has moved on again. We never seem to want to be leaders in the format, we’re just followers. Test cricket gets top billing.

Derek Pringle We keep hearing Eoin Morgan is world-class but he’s not delivering. He has the weight of the captaincy, of course. England got 309 against Sri Lanka but with the bowling not firing it had to be more. Their gameplan of one man, like Ian Bell, batting deep into the innings with a late surge is fine but whether you will win a World Cup against teams who are playing much more aggressively is another thing – you’re banking on their failure to beat them. The team analyst probably worked out 280 at the World Cup would win you more games than you lose. But the stats are flawed with that fielder having come inside the circle. Jos Buttler played one of the great hundreds at Lord’s last summer but he now isn’t getting the time to bat.

Bowling

OS The busy international calender and the rise of Twenty20 leagues makes batsmen more used to conditions around the world and so it comes back to bowlers’ skills. Sometimes your attack doesn’t execute them, as against Sri Lanka, and the game goes. That’s life. But they need to revisit the plans. This Bangladesh game in Adelaide is tricky as it’s more of an even playing field on that surface. And gone are the days when you can bully sub-continent teams in Australian conditions with the short ball.

DP They needed to get the ball moving sideways to trouble good batsmen and they have failed to do that. It’s been disappointing to see Jimmy Anderson not swing it in particular, maybe the tension has transferred into his action, I don’t know. Him and Chris Woakes swung it in the Tri-series but haven’t in the tournament, so it becomes hittable and the attack very samey. Their plans in the last 15 overs have been a bit stubborn too, they don’t seem to have a good, robust plan B. That has been the same with a lot of England teams over the years, including those I played in.

Preparation

BW They dithered over Alastair Cook’s place and it set back much of the time set aside for preparation. But I don’t think the schedule was wrong, it was more a case of not knowing their best team. I would criticise the management and selection rather than the preparation they had in front of them. They haven’t given one-day cricket the priority it deserves and one has to have sympathy with Ashley Giles when he was in charge of the limited overs teams – he rarely got his first-choice side. They needed to formulate their best squad a year in advance of the World Cup, not a few weeks.

OS They were never favourites, so there is no excuse not to play with freedom. And yet we are so stodgy. I don’t buy the argument they are obsessed with stats and they are too head-down in the computer, though – that is just nit-picking. No one mentioned it in a negative way when they were winning the Ashes series three times on the bounce. The Tri-Series was the best preparation they could have hoped for. It could only have been brilliant for batsmen and bowlers – perfect even. The ECB got everything right in terms of clearing the winter for the World Cup and playing a Tri-Series on the same grounds a month before. What more do you want? There is no excuse in terms of lack of preparation, it was spot on. But we haven’t fired. It’s a mystery but that’s our one-day cricket for you. And now we’ll build again …

DP The same thing happened before the last World Cup. They said they were planning for it and found themselves panicked into making late changes. I know they were worried Alastair Cook looked at a low ebb but I didn’t expect them to win in Sri Lanka and they picked up two. One game before the end Cook was being backed, then one more defeat and it was all change. In terms of moving the Ashes forward, I was always sceptical of the excuse it had weakened their World Cup campaigns in the past. Two years ago we were top of the ODI rankings but other teams have since become more aggressive with bat and ball. They have plenty of meetings to discuss these things – is it a case of too much talking and not enough doing?

Coverage of England v Bangladesh in Adelaide begins at 3am on Sky Sports World Cup, Monday 9 March.