Ashes: Brittle batting and pace could make this a series to remember
“Luck, be a Lady tonight”, sang Sky Masterton in “Guys and Dolls”. The Lady has certainly been favouring England these last weeks. She was on their side in the World Cup final and in the Test against Ireland when on the Friday morning she provided Stuart Broad and Chris Woakes with the sort of weather they might like to take with them everywhere. After England had been thoroughly outplayed for two days, Lady Luck said “enough of that”.
Ireland have reason to be aggrieved. For two days they had shown themselves more than worthy of their elevation to Test Match status, only to be made to look like clueless novices on the third morning. Still they shouldn’t be disheartened. Other countries before them have found their first years of Test cricket to be hard-going, partly because they were given few opportunities for players to acquire experience. Looking at the history of New Zealand cricket should encourage the Irish.
In 1958 New Zealand played a four Test series in England. In their eight innings they were dismissed five times for under a hundred, the lowest total being 47 in their first innings at Lord’s. In extenuation one should remark that the England attack that summer was as good as any England have ever had: Trueman, Statham, Loader, Laker and Lock. Yet, less than four years later, New Zealand went to South Africa and halved a five Test series, two wins a-piece, with one Test drawn, against a pretty good Springboks team. Now of course New Zealand have been tough opponents for a long time.
Now for The Ashes. The general assumption is that this will be a low-scoring series. On both sides the bowling looks stronger than the batting. Australia have a formidable battery of fast bowlers. England’s batting is brittle. In an article in The Daily Telegraph my old friend Simon Heffer described them as “sloggers” who have forgotten – if they ever knew – how to play Test match cricket. Well, he has a point. How often in recent years have England managed to bat for 120 overs? Take out Joe Root and the probable other five of England’s top six have scored seven Test centuries between them – and Ben Stokes has six of them. It looks only a little better if you include Jonny Bairstow who is expected to bat at seven. He, like Stokes, has six Test centuries to his name, but his recent Test form has been poor. Nobody except Root averages 40 in Test matches.
Actually it’s not the so-called slogging that worries me. It is the apparent inability of all the batsmen, except again Root, to keep the score moving by pushing the ball into gaps for singles. Singles are the bread-and butter of a Test innings. There was a Test once in which Neville Cardus found himself writing that even Bradman could be kept quiet. Then a burst of clapping told him that The Don had just reached his 50 – in 75 minutes – with only a child’s handful of boundaries. Taking singles, rotating the strike, disrupts bowlers and unsettles the fielding captain. Against Ireland Rory Burns, a very gifted batsman, was becalmed because he kept hitting the ball straight to fielders instead of pushing it into gaps.
Not surprisingly there is agitation in some quarters for Root to bat at 3 rather than 4. More surprisingly the coach Trevor Bayliss has let it be known that he is of the same mind, while adding that it’s up to Root as captain to decide where he bats. The question wouldn’t arise if England had a reliable opening pair. My own view is that it’s in the team’s best interest that Root should bat where he feels most comfortable.
England have, unusually for a home Test, named a squad of fourteen. This is because of doubts concerning the fitness of Jimmy Anderson and Jofra Archer. It’s more than sixteen years since Anderson played his first Test, and for a long time now he has been happily injury-free. But he’ll be thirty-seven when this Test starts. He is so important to England that they will be very eager to have him play. On the other hand he is so important to England that, with four Tests to follow, it would be foolish to play him if he hasn’t fully recovered from his recent calf injury. No doubt he will be the one to decide.
Archer may well become as important to England as Anderson has been, but he has been suffering from a side strain. Again it would be foolish to go into this Test with two bowlers whose fitness may be doubtful. Modern fast bowlers seem to break down frequently. I don’t recall Fred Trueman, Brian Statham or Ian Botham being often on the injured list. Perhaps fast bowlers today are only gym-fit, whereas they used to get fit by bowling and would usually have developed muscle-strength by walking in their childhood and adolescence. Certainly one doesn’t remember them suffering “stress fractures” and the like.
There are few worries about England’s attack whoever plays, and it was especially good to see Stuart Broad bowling so well at Lord’s. The series however may turn on how effectively England bowl at Steve Smith and what tactics they employ against him. He is a great batsman with a method all of his own. He moves so early and so far across his stumps that one school of thought favours bowling wide of the off-stump to restrict his ability to play his favourite strokes through the on-side. So you test his patience, frustrate him, and hope he will do something rash. The argument makes sense, of a sort anyway. Contain Smith and you weaken Australia. On the other hand, this line of attack more or less means that the only way you can get him out is “caught”.
A couple of Ashes series back, Ted Dexter made this point in his always interesting blog. It does make things easier for a batsman if he is in no danger of being bowled or lbw. “Surely,” he wrote, “it is worth a try bowling at the stumps and putting fielders where Smith hits the ball. Freddie Trueman told me that he was only looking at the batsman’s feet as he ran up to bowl. You can bet your bottom dollar that he would have had two more leg-side fielders with at least a couple of attempted Yorkers every over. When I buttonholed Captain Cook on the subject at the end of last season, I got a shrug of the shoulders, little more.”
Dexter’s blog, appearing too seldom, is always worth reading. Some of England’s battings woes might be eased if they attended to Dexter’s words. What, for instance, about this? “The latest fashion for standing with the feet far apart may have merit, but, if so, I am unable to identify what it is. The first problem is that you are unable to move easily laterally. The second is that it destroys the natural rhythm of playing forward and back.”
Quite so. Some – Nasser Hussein among them – might say it’s the modern game and things are done differently now, with the implication that different is better. An England top-order with only one man averaging over 40 suggests otherwise.
Still, enough grumbling. The coming series promises to be gripping, even though happy expectation may end in tears. It looks, I’m sorry to say, as if England will leave Sam Curran out of the XI. Sad, if so, and also, I think, a mistake. Young Sam may still be what is sometimes called a bits-and-pieces cricketer, but the bits and pieces are very good indeed, and evidently he has a great temperament. Nothing seems to faze him.
A footnote. Idly flicking through Ted Dexter’s blog pages, I came upon his memory of the Second Test at Melbourne in 1962-3. England needed 240 to win and as he went out to bat, the Rev David Sheppard said, “remember this is a fifth day pitch – not a big shot day.” “So,” he wrote, “we started pinching singles. Soon the bowlers were cursing the fielders and the Captain was moving them around like a puppet show. For a couple of hours we ran them ragged: by the time I was run out we had inflicted mortal damage and the match was nearly won.” Actually they still needed another hundred or so, but Colin Cowdrey made a half-century and the future Bishop of Liverpool finished 113 not out.