The England cricket team’s search for an opening pair

England hasn’t had a settled opening pair since Andrew Strauss retired in August 2012 and left Alastair Cook searching for a partner. He never found a consistently successful one, though many of those who walked out to the wicket with him did score at least one Test hundred. Some of those tried and discarded are still playing; Haseem Habeeb may open in the Third Test at Headingley this coming week. By my count, there are a dozen still active county players who have opened for England. The list includes Cook himself, who retired from Test cricket but continues to play for Essex.

Actually, the search for openers isn’t unusual. Though settled partnerships come easily to mind – Hobbs & Sutcliffe, Hutton & Washbrook, Boycott & Edrich, Strauss & Trescothick, as well as Strauss & Cook; it has often been the case that many have been tried and found wanting. Hutton himself played 79 Tests, all but two as an opener, and in a Test career that lasted from 1937 to 1955 had seventeen opening partners. Only Cyril Washbrook accompanied him to the wicket more than twenty times.

Selectors have cast the net wide over the last few years, but it has been a wide-meshed net, and many have slipped through. Some of those tried and rejected have had the occasional good day, even series, yet failed to establish themselves. England has tried dashers like Jason Roy and stickers like Dom Sibley, the latter being sent back to his county to develop or recover his game.

Meanwhile, Rory Burns – 31 Tests, 1596 runs at an average just under 32, with three centuries and nine 50s in fifty innings – is just holding on. He has made two ducks against India this month, but a hundred against New Zealand in June with 81 in the other Test, giving him some remaining credit in the bank. He also has a century against Australia in the last Ashes series. Far from being a classical, or even orthodox, batsman, Burns has an awkward-looking stance, and a strange head movement as the bowler approaches the crease, but he has grit and a good temperament. Whatever his technical deficiencies, he is the best we have at present.

Like many, I was delighted to see young Hameed picked for the last Test. He made a fine beginning in his Test career in India when he was only nineteen, then lost form calamitously for a couple of years, moved from Lancashire to Nottinghamshire and started scoring hundreds again this strange summer. But his match at Lord’s was unhappy; out first ball in the first innings, then out for a scratchy 9 in England’s disastrous second innings, having already been dropped in the slips. One hopes he will come good at Headingley.

Opening the innings is the most challenging role in cricket. Observation, common sense and experience, all go to prove this. The bowlers are fresh, and the ball is new, and, especially in England, moves dangerously late. Most opening batsmen fail more often than they succeed – by failure, I mean they are out for less than 20.

Statistics back up this common-sense view. Of eighteen Test match batsmen who have played 20 innings and average 55, only three regularly opened the innings: Jack Hobbs, Herbert Sutcliffe and Len Hutton, all of whom played a very long time ago. In Wisden’s list of forty-five batsmen who have scored twenty or more Test hundreds, only eight or nine were regular openers.

Opening batsmen lay not only the foundation of a team’s innings but often the ground floor too. England’s opening cricketers haven’t been doing this for years now. Joe Root, batting second-wicket down, has been coming in with a paltry score on the board. Fortunately for England, he has been – and one hopes still is – in a rich vein of form. He has been scoring about a third of England’s runs, even more than a third of runs from the bat. 

This is tremendous, but it can’t and indeed shouldn’t last. Over his Test career, Don Bradman’s percentage of Australia’s runs was 24.28. The highest percentage from an English batsman was 18.13, Len Hutton again, just above Hobbs and Sutcliffe. Of course, these averages reflect not only the ability and achievement of these players but also, to some extent anyway, the failure of their teammates.

And Root’s teammates have been letting him – and of course themselves – down badly in these first two Tests against India. Twenty or thirty years ago, before the days of central contracts, selectors were more impatient, less tolerant of failure. Now England’s head coach and selector, Chris Silverwood, says he would instead give a player one chance too many than one too few. This is reasonable. Few surely would call for a return to the days when a single failure often meant consignment to outer darkness or oblivion.

All the same, the readiness of selectors to make changes then was more understandable than it would be today. They at least had current form in the county championship to go by. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, county attacks often featured West Indian or Pakistani fast bowlers. Anyone who made runs in a county match against, say, Malcolm Marshall, Richard Hadlee, Joel Garner or Wasim Akram could certainly bat a bit. 

Now, of course, with the championship confined to the first and last weeks of the season, no such comparison or evidence of form is available.

It’s easy for old fogeys like me to moan about this and to complain that playing white-ball cricket is inadequate preparation for Test matches. Perhaps it is, but in this respect, England is in more or less the same position as their opponents. Very few Tests players from other countries play more than a couple of other red ball matches a year- if indeed that.

Anyway, grumbling about this is futile. We will never return to the days when a batsman who had failed in a Test match had the opportunity to score runs and regain form and confidence in the Championship for his county a couple of days later. So there is no current form on which to base a player’s selection outside the present Test squad.

India is a very good team. Remember, they won a series in Australia early this year, even with some of their stars missing. They have a very good pace attack, too good on current evidence, for England’s top three. It’s hard and demanding work facing them. Even so, things might be better than they have been. One doesn’t criticize batsmen for getting out to good balls, but it is, I think, fair to remark that they have been too passive. 

By this, I don’t mean that they should be looking for boundaries. Rather, they should be on the alert for opportunities to push the ball into spaces for singles. Rotating the strike not only keeps the scoreboard moving. It disturbs, even irritates bowlers, especially when one batsman is right-handed, his partner left-handed. Bowlers are then required to shift their line. Alastair Cook was usually looking for singles. Almost all successful openers are.

In this context, I recall Neville Cardus’ report of Don Bradman’s innings. He came in at number 3 after an opener had gone quickly. The bowling was tight. There were few boundaries on offer. Cardus was, by his account, just about to write that even Bradman could be kept quiet. Then came a ripple of applause. It was for The Don’s fifty, made in seventy-five or eighty minutes.

“Look for the singles” should be the last words to England’s openers as they come down the pavilion steps.