Can left-field lineups bring home a win for England’s cricket and rugby squads?

There are few things that we armchair critics, watching our sport from the stands or the sofa, enjoy more than bickering about selection. This week’s announcement of the England Test side squad for the tour of the West Indies and discussion of Eddie Jones’ selections for the Six Nations and what part his decisions played in the defeat at Murrayfield have made for a happily talkative few days.

Take the cricket first. The new group of short-terms selectors convened by Andrew Strauss made headlines by omitting James Anderson and Stuart Broad, who between them have taken more Test wickets than England managed to score runs in the last two matches of their miserable Ashes series. Now, of course, both are in the evening of their career, but both still bowled well in Australia, better, one may say, than anyone batted. 

Australia didn’t make huge scores, and most of the innings of their best batsmen would have been a good deal shorter if England had held catches at wicket-keeper and in the slips. Meanwhile, the two England bowlers who really had a bad time in Australia, Jack Leach and Chris Woakes, whose modest haul came at 55 runs per innings, are both in the party heading for the Caribbean — lucky chaps in more ways than one.

There is, to some extent, a good reason for giving Anderson and Broad time off. England has a demanding home Test match summer: three against New Zealand, three against South Africa and one against India, held over from the postponed Fifth Test last summer. It’s hard to think Anderson and Broad will not be needed, even if Jofra Archer is at last fit again. Of course — Anno Domini and all that — even the greatest bowlers eventually lose some of their zip and nip. As Alan Jones, coach of the 1984-5 Grand Slam-winning Wallabies, liked to say, “one day a rooster, the next a feather duster.” It’s hard to believe that Anderson and Broad will be reduced to feather duster status by midsummer, but you never know.

Some see another reason for their omission, though it has been dismissed by Andrew Strauss. Still, the suspicion remains that their occasional expressions of disappointment (to put it mildly) at the failure of England’s batsmen may have made the mood in the dressing-room and Joe Root’s time as captain less than that of a happy family. Perhaps, perhaps. If this is indeed the case, it’s hard to blame the grizzled pair for feeling more than a little disgruntled.

Some of the failing batsmen have been culled. Ollie Pope — scorer of only 67 runs in the series — is lucky to survive. Immensely talented and a joy to watch when he is going well, some of his recent dismissals in Tests have been bizarre and quite remarkably inept. The search for openers continues with Rory Burns and Haseem Habeeb no longer wanted on the voyage.

Durham’s Alex Lees is the latest to be called to enter the revolving door, and I hope he slips out into the foyer before its revolution dumps him back on the street. His first-class average is only 34, but he has character. After a good start with his native Yorkshire, he lost his way, as so many starlets have done there, and has rebuilt his career at Durham, where there is only rarely a wicket on which batsmen flourish. So good luck to him, I say, hoping he returns from the West Indies as a proud rooster.

Meanwhile, back at Twickenham, Eddie Jones continues on his merry teasing way. Only seven of the XV that started at Murrayfield will start in Rome. Admittedly Test match rugby is now a 23-man game, and the bench or, as Jones prefers, the “finishers”, is as important as the XV that lines up for the kick-off. He has yielded to popular opinion by picking Bristol’s Harry Randall, now twenty-three but still looking like an eager schoolboy, at scrum-half, but his long-time favourite Ben Youngs, with his hundred-odd caps, is on the bench and will probably come on to finish the game. And Jones still stirs up or teases his critics by picking players out of position, this time by moving Maro Itoje from lock to flanker; none but Jones knows why. Considering that Itoje, though richly talented and intelligent, rarely seems to have any notion of where the offside line is, Italy may be quite happy to be granted a few penalties.

England has never lost to Italy or indeed come close to doing so, and though this young Italian team is improving and played well for the first half in Paris, one can’t see them winning on Sunday. So, from any English fan’s point of view, the interesting question is whether Eddie Jones’s latest “shuffle the cards and deal” selection takes them any nearer to achieving some stability. 

Does it, they ask, prepare them for the visits of Ireland and France to Twickenham, or is Jones, a rooster who once strode the yard to proudly, beginning to look more like a feather duster in-waiting?