The look of our batting lineup and their approach on sunday was wrong, to me.
you've got Webster and Hain coming in at 3/4 which means by law of averages the two of them are going to end up spending a lot of time playing spin in the middle overs. But Webster looks to be a poor player of spin in white ball cricket, too big and immobile just doesn't seem to have the footwork, doesn't use the sweep and on current evidence won't look to just smash through the line and bully spin/medium pace in the middle overs.
And as good as Hain is, the absolutely worst part of his batting is his inability/unwillingness to attack spinners, he's basically never really taken spinners to the cleaners, ever. I remember him hammering Matt Carter once at home, like. His career SR is 150, I bet its something like 125 vs spin and 165 vs seam.
If I think about truly great/destructive players against spin, they generally do at least one of, either use their feet to change the length of the delivery or access either side of the wicket (and short boundaries) better, or use the sweep/reverse sweep, or if all else fails just find a way to smash/muscle to ball somewhere over the leg side boundary, and the really good ones will do all 3 at some point. Hain basically does none of them and never has.
Hain has, and we have for years, spent far too long just allowing the spinners to bowl at us in the middle overs, just accept 6-8 an over and basically hope that Hain is left at the end to take the seamers down for 10-15 an over at the death. Goldsworthy is tidy but not a world beater and it wasn't till Ed came on and used his feet at him that anyone really tried to put him off his game, we just passively let him bowl at us. we almost always do this, and on what was clearly not a 190 par surface it was as responsible as anything for us losing the game
Hain's passivity against spin means he really needs someone like Mousley or Bethell (Or ed) with him to take those risks, both of whom were excellent foils for him as they'd do his attacking for him in the middle overs. But hain partnered with Webster I foresee a lot of excruciating passages of play during overs 6-14 tbh.
back to hobby horse if hain was opening he'd face mostly seam for the first 6 overs and have power play restrictions to get cheap boundaries and take some lower-risk attacking shots. and if Davies was batting at 4 he's much more pro-active against the spin and we'd be getting bogged down less. thank goodness Somerset only had 4 overs of spin to throw at us, it could have been really ugly if they'd had another spinner
Hain's tactic of playing pretty much risk-free for the majority of his innings and hoping to be around at the end, and then making up by scoring very quickly, places a huge onus on him taking advantage of nearly every single ball in the last 4. what if he doesn't manage to get the strike much? what if the bowlers simply bowl well? a lot of them have had success bowling the short/slow stuff at him at the death and daring him to try and muscle a six off a 65mph bouncer, which he can't/won't do- I mean its not like teams haven't had a while to work out tactics for his strengths and weaknesses over the last decade.
as with Trotty in white ball cricket, I have to wonder with Hain at what point his aversion to taking risks before the last 4 overs amounts to tactical error or even selfishness. that was a 200+ par wicket all day, you're going to struggle ever getting 200 if you just resign yourself to going at 6-8 in the middle overs, and judging by the number of attacking shots hain and Webster played, that seemed to be the tactic.
Ed got out because he was playing the situation unselfishly (and with more tactical awareness IMO) to play a shot a ball because at that point someone needed to , and he was kind of forced into that by Webster/hain's slow scoring.
To me that was an obvious 200+par pitch where we almost settled for 190, with middle order batsmen not taking enough risk when they have proven late order hitters behind them all the way to number 8. I know, fells like sacrilege to criticise Hain, but at least as many times as he has ambled to over number 16 with SR of 125 and then hammered the last 4 overs to get us to or near 200, he has also had loads of innings where he did just what he did on Sunday- marked time for a late over burst that never came, whilst putting pressure on his partners to take risks he wasn't taking. He has also had games where his late innings blitz did come off but the 200 he just about got us to, proved insufficient and the opposition showed he was batting on a 220 par pitch all along. betting on the last 4 overs giving you enough runs to make up for taking very few risks in over 7-15 is very risky against good batting teams on good pitches. 200 is not the totem it used to be.
I feel like there are different ways of taking on responsibility in cricket and in T20 sometimes taking risks is taking on the responsibility. It feels weird criticising our best and my favourite player but that innings had some real deja vu to it and not in a good way.
It could be that Hain is playing to orders, and Westwood's conservative style. when i think back to that season when Hain got a century against Notts away I think 2024, when his SR that season was i think 165, way better than his usual, he was conspicuously more attacking early in his innings, and we kept on getting 200 that year with him and Hose both attacking much more in the middle overs.
so i don't think it's inability on Hain's part and apparently when the team approach is more attacking he absolutely can do it, so can only assume he is playing a too-conservative role management have forced onto him.