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The three-year itch

08 Friday Jan 2016

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Unsurprisingly, there’s chat about Alex Hales and whether he should get another chance opening the batting. This debate is as premature as it is predictable. The man has played two tests, averages 25, scored a good 60 in one of his four innings, and with a strike rate of 37 he is clearly reigning in his attacking instincts in order to make a good fist of the test opening job. He averaged 50 in the Championship last year. It’s worth noting, too, that in each of his four partnerships with Cook, it has been the skipper’s dismissal that has come first.

With all the talk of Cook’s run of unsuccessful opening partners, my mind turned to Graham Gooch’s rather slow start to his test career. He managed 0 and 0 in his first test and soon disappeared back to county cricket, only to return with considerably more success three years later.

Saeed Anwar had the same experience, coming back from a pair on debut to score 169 three years later. And as any cricket aficionado of a certain age will tell you, Marvan Atapattu is the poster boy for ropey beginnings followed by sturdy careers. He made 0 and 0, 0 and 1, 0 and 0 in his first three tests (admittedly rather unhelpfully each about two years apart). This is a less than solid performance for a test match opening batsman. Hales’ average of 25 looks pretty good compared to Atapattu’s 0.16 (and even his one run was rumoured to have come off his pads not his bat). Atapattu was then dropped for three years before coming back to have a distinguished 90 test career that included 16 tons of which six were doubles.

It was only as I began to research this article, which was ostensibly to be about Alex Hales (with a side helping of self-congratulation on my previous post calling for Mo to be kept at 8, Compton to be recalled and Bell to be dropped), that it dawned on me that all the players mentioned above were dropped for around three years before they made their successful comebacks. I wonder what the significance of those three years is? Is this the amount of time it takes to refine your game or work out whether you’ve got the hunger to play for your country?

It worked for James Taylor too. Much as I believe he deserved his recall sooner, the fact is that he had a three-year hiatus from the team and has returned a transformed player. He says himself that not being picked drove him on. Are the selectors on to something here? Do they possess a psychological insight that we hadn’t credited them with?

Nick Compton’s absence was approaching three years too. Undoubtedly a better player now.

There must be something in this three years thing (I think I’ll call it the Campion Rejuvenation Formula©) because Boycott even dropped himself for precisely that length of time before his glorious return with a ton against the Aussies in 1977.

Then there’s Adil Rashid, who spent six years in the international wilderness and judging by his form in the Big Bash, he’s now twice as good as he used to be.

(If I’ve missed anyone you can think of in the three-year club, do shout up.)

It’s impossible to know whether being dropped was the right decision, of course, because we can never know how players’ test careers might have turned out had they been retained. Other teams, with scarcer resources, might be forced to find out whether a player could learn on the job. Certainly when England’s own options have been limited, they’ve had to be patient. Look at Gatt – it took him seven years and 54 test innings to make his first hundred. Hales has had four knocks in his test career. I reckon he should be allowed a few more.

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Don’t mess with Mo

13 Tuesday Oct 2015

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I’ve had misgivings about the way England have gone about dealing with the troublesome opening spot for some time. Today they picked Mo to do the job. It would appear that he got the job not because the coach and selectors thought he was the best man for the job but because they couldn’t come up with anyone else. ‘It’s not ideal’ is the ringing endorsement from the coach, who in one short sentence manages to undermine Mo and annihilate Hales’ confidence completely.

It would seem that Mo is expected to fail. If he does not fail here, he is still expected to fail against South Africa. So we haven’t solved a problem by picking him to open, we’ve postponed it – and created a new one.

Coming in at no.8 last summer was an odd spot for Mo but he rather made the most of this niche position during The Ashes. He played with delicious freedom and treated us to strokes of such grace that the ball didn’t so much hit the bat, as genuflect before it prior to racing away in reverential haste to the extra cover boundary.

Now, however, we’re in danger of doing a Joe Root on him. Taking him from a position where he’s comfortable and performing well and asking him to perform another role in the team that he’s not ready for simply because the powers-that-be are a bit stuck. It would be a crying shame if Mo’s confidence, currently clearly growing, was shattered by a difficult test series. And I do fear for him. From seeing the way he batted in the summer, he didn’t look like a candidate to open in a test match, and to see him wafting outside off stump in the warm-up matches like a cross between David Gower and d’Artagnan confirmed my fears.

What’s sad about the situation is that not only is this decision potentially messing with Mo (and Hales) but it’s also monumentally unfair on other opening batsmen who could be fulfilling the role. If they wanted someone to wave at balls as they passed outside off stump, they could have stuck with Adam Lyth. At least he opens for a living.

But really, I still have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about Compton and Carberry. Two proper openers who did a decent job and should have had a chance to do more. Both had steady, if unspectacular, county seasons and both would have been raring to go. Before you ask, no I don’t think they’re too old. Apart from Younis, Misbah and Shoaib Malik proving the old guard have a bit to offer today, I think Compton (32) and Carberry (just turned 35) are in that stage of their careers where the proximity of retirement is such that it really concentrates the mind. Perhaps you’d call it the Chris Rogers effect™.

When Chris Rogers retired from international cricket this year, I was so glad he didn’t rescind his decision after a successful series. I think he was so successful largely because it was his last series. Essentially he gave it his absolute all for two glorious years and by the end of those two years, he was spent. The fact that his light blazed brightly was inextricably linked to the fact that it blazed so briefly.

It would be the same with Compton or Carberry. Indeed, I think we got a glimpse of it when they first played. Remember how Carberry stood there in Australia and took on Johnson and co, where others were in full retreat? He tried his heart out in that series and his stats stacked up with the best of a bad bunch. One of these two (and realistically it probably would have been Compton) should have been inked in for the whole winter – Pakistan and SA. One of these two would have got their head down and fought with every last bone in their body. It might have been the start of a Rogersesque couple of years. And Mo would still have been down the order, persuading the ball to the fence and changing the shape of games.

Bell’s clangers

And a word on Ian Bell and his selection. My previous post explains my reservations about Bell. He shouldn’t have been picked for this tour, and shouldn’t have been picked for this game. I just don’t know what James Taylor has to do to get the nod. And now Bell has spilled two sitters at slip. When he was pondering retiring at the end of the summer, I think a part of him did. The rest of him should follow.

Alistair Cook: slump in form or end of career?

21 Tuesday Apr 2015

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I don’t know what it is about the Aussies but they always seem to back the right horse. A new player who looks like they’re never going to make it? Back them, back them, back them until they do – à la Steve Smith and Glenn Maxwell. Old player who could be finished but might just be in a form slump? Back them, back them, back them until they come good. Steve Waugh, Hayden, Langer, Mark Taylor. Other greats tend to have the happy knack of quitting while they are still ahead. Even Ponting, who I remember as a distinctly fading force towards the end, managed to average 43 in his last year of test cricket, with a top score of 221.

So, Alistair Cook then. Do we stick with him and hope for the phoenix from the Ashes? Or is his goose…ahem…cooked?

In the last two years of test cricket he has averaged 31.66 with just one ton in 20 matches. That’s 37 innings opening the batting with one century. Just to prove this is no fluke, it’s 27.70 in 28 ODIs over the same period, top score 64.

That’s a long bad trot. I’m all for loyalty but how long can he live on past glories? It can only be his highly distinguished career that saves him at the moment. The likes of Carberry (average 28.10 in the most recent five dismal Ashes tests against the best attack in the world), Robson (average 30.54 in seven tests) and Compton (average 31.93 with two tons in nine tests) must be biting their tongues so hard they’re drawing blood. All have a comparable average and all were just starting out.

Then there’s Adam Lyth, selected for England as an opener after spending the whole of 2014 as an opener for the Division 1 County Championship winners and scoring 1,489 first-class runs at 67.68 with six tons. Now he’s carrying the drinks for Cook and Trott.

With Cook, it’s not just the stats that are troubling though. It’s the fact that he looks like a walking wicket. Where before he was natural and fluid, now he looks as if his body is made of entirely of sharp angles and limbs that don’t quite move together as they should. He pokes at the ball from a distance, hands thrust out in front of him. It’s mechanical, awkward, unnatural and painful to watch.

Then there’s Trott. To be fair to him, he’s stacked up a pile of runs since his return but rushing him back in when his position wasn’t available was unfair on him, on us and on Lyth. Clearly Trott still has challenges to overcome with his technique – you just can’t be ambling across the stumps so spectacularly as an opener, hitting on the move and still expect to score consistently.

If you were an opening bowler lining up these two, you’d fancy your chances. It’s not like they’re going to get off to a flier either…

England just seem to be so uncertain in their selection – and their default is safety first; for example choosing Tredwell over Rashid for the first Windies test. It’s a similar selection to Trott’s – he seemed to have been selected solely because he’s familiar.

Somehow England need to find this sixth sense that other countries have when it comes to identifying someone who’s going to come good (fingers crossed for Stokes…) – and also being bold enough to call time on a career when all evidence points to terminal decline.