Here’s to a glorious summer of cricket
Well, real cricket returned this week with a round of the County Championship, though ersatz – that’s to say T20 – cricket continues as an evening jollification. The county championship won’t be back till the 19th of August. By then, England will have played their first two Tests against India and will have started the third one. The last four rounds of county matches will be played in September, by which time one guesses that this gorgeous summer will be over, and a wet and windy autumn will be with us. So it looks as if what one assumes to be the plans of the Vandals at the ECB to downgrade the first-class county game and eventually kill it off are going just dandy.
Still, let’s think about the Test series. There’s a lot that’s pleasing and a lot that doesn’t inspire confidence about the make-up of the English team. We don’t yet have a settled opening partnership. I would assume that Keaton Jennings did just enough against Pakistan to retain his place and that Alastair Cook, though appearing vulnerable these days, isn’t ready to go. In any case, despite the clamour of his critics, there’s little reason to leave him out when there is no obvious replacement waiting in the wings. Admittedly there’s a case for saying that the Surrey captain Rory Burns is on this summer’s form the best opening batsman in the country – as well as being one of the few not yet tried and discarded. Alastair Cook has had more opening partners than Henry VIII had wives, many more indeed, almost as many as Mickey Rooney.
The middle order is full of dashers, somewhat short on stickers, though I suppose Davvid Malan may count as a sticker, or would if he stuck around long enough. Still, one can be confident that we will get some quick runs from at least two out of numbers 5 to 8: Jonny Bairstow, Ben Stokes, Jos Buttler and (I assume and hope) Moeen Ali, even though Stokes has hardly made a run in any form of cricket recently. The question is whether we will get a long innings from any of them. In Test cricket a century made in five hours may be more valuable than one made in half that time; it blunts the opposition attack and gives time for runs to be made at the other end. Finishing the first day at 300 for3 leaves you in a stronger position than if you had made 400 for 9.
I assume Moeen will be in the side not because of the runs he may make (though he is a good enough batsman to bat higher in the order), but because he is the best, and now most experienced, spinner that we have. Like many off-spinners of the past, he’s a better bowler in England than abroad.
There have been mutterings that Adil Rashid, after his ODI and T20 success, might be recalled to the Test side – despite his decision only to play ersatz or white-ball cricket this year. I was glad to see Vic Marks (Somerset and England off-spinner turned admirable cricket correspondent) shoot the suggestion down. Apart from the politics of the matter and the precedent of someone behaving like an old-style amateur choosing when, and when not, to make himself available, Marks drew attention to the differences between red ball and white ball cricket. Bowling in the latter Rashid will regularly have four men on the boundary. He gets a lot of wickets from catches in the deep because batsmen are required to take chances to score quickly. They aren’t, or shouldn’t be, under this pressure in a Test match. If a spinner has four boundary fielders, there are lots of gaps and batsmen can pick up singles and twos while waiting for the bad ball to hit to the boundary.
It’s true that fielding captains often make it difficult for their slow bowlers to build pressure, because they lack confidence in their ability to do so. Consequently, they will have a man on the fence square of the wicket on the offside and another at deep mid-wicket or long-on. So there are gaps and the scoreboard can be kept ticking over. Richie Benaud, who was as good a wrist-spinner as anyone playing today and a lot better than most, liked to bowl with a slip and a ring field of eight, all saving one, when there was nothing much in the pitch. The message to the batsman was: I’m going to tie you down – if you want to score, take a chance. Benaud was of course accurate enough to impose himself on the batsman. Those who assume that muscular modern batsmen with their big heavy bats can’t be tied down by a spinner are fools.
It is now normal for a Test team to have only one front-line slow bowler, though India will almost certainly have two, probably Ashwin and Jadeja. Once you would never have gone into a Test match with only one spin-bowler, but the great West Indies sides with their battery of speedsters changed all that. The need for two slow bowlers won’t return until teams are compelled to bowl more overs in a day. As long as you can get away with cheating the public by bowling only twelve and a half overs an hour you can keep your fast men relatively fresh. Of course, given the incapacity of so many of today’s Test batsmen to stay at the crease, a reversion to the days when eighteen overs an hour was the usual rate, a lot of Tests might be concluded by tea on the second day. “Not so”, says the Wise Old Hack, shaking his head, “Batsmen find it hard to concentrate these days because they get bored waiting so long for the next ball.” Perhaps so. Nobody, one supposes, got bored at Lord’s in 1930 when Australia scored 729 for 6 declared, Bradman 254 – England bowled more than twenty overs an hour – some say twenty-three – throughout that innings
As to England’s bowling, the problem is going to be how to keep James Anderson and Stuart Broad going for another Ashes series next year. It’s a problem because there is no obvious replacement. We may find ourselves soon looking as anxiously for opening bowlers as for opening batsmen. A number of other bowlers have, of course, had some success, notably Chris Woakes and, last year, Toby Roland-Jones. But nobody has come close to giving Anderson or Broad that nudge in the ribs that says, “move over – it’s my time now”; and, to be frank, none of the present candidates looks like doing so.
Recently there has been a demand for bowlers who could score some runs; the Wise Old Hack and I both prefer bowlers who take wickets. Of course, bowlers scoring lower-order runs can be useful, but not half as useful as bowlers who dismiss top-order batsmen. All bowlers are encouraged to work on their batting these days – it’s a very long time since Yorkshire told Bill Bowes to forget about batting, others could do that and his job was to take wickets. I suppose a young player doesn’t have much chance of getting a county contract unless he can bat a bit to supplement his bowling.
Nevertheless, the fact is that many of the greatest Test match bowlers have, like Jimmy Anderson, made only the very occasional contribution with the bat, his greatest Lancashire predecessor Brian Statham for example. Bob Willis was another terrific fast bowler who rarely, as reporters used to say, “troubled the scorers” when he came out to bat. But you’d rather have Statham, Willis or Anderson in your team than a chap who averages in the middle thirties with both bat and ball. What is clear however is that England have to find new ball bowlers in waiting if they are not to have a powder-puff attack in eighteen months or so; and young players don’t learn how to take Test match wickets in T20 when they bowl four overs of “variations” (e.g. slow-medium long-hops) or even ten overs in 50 over cricket, when captains quickly dispense with slips and gullies because the white ball rarely swings or moves off the pitch.
So there it is: when the ECB has succeeded in removing all first-class cricket from high summer and confining it to April, May and September when run-of-the- mill medium to fast-medium bowlers can get extravagant movement thanks to green wickets and overhead conditions, it’s going to be hay-making time for any good Test match batting side facing England. O, my Trueman and my Statham long ago – not to mention Snow, Willis, Botham, Gough, Harmison, Hoggard, Flintoff.
Still, enough grumbling. There are five Tests to look forward to, and one would like to think that two or three of them at least will last into the Fifth Day.