Success of English cricket shows sport is no longer a game for specialists

In his later years on Test Match Special Fred Trueman was sometimes given to muttering “I don’t know what’s going on out there”, perhaps because of an odd field setting. He might have expressed the same puzzlement about England’s line-up for the First Test in Galle – though one should add that, at the moment of writing, they look to be doing all right and indeed heading for victory.

Nevertheless, a bemused Fred would have had a point. Can England ever have gone into a Test with only three players selected as batsmen – Joe Root, Keaton Jennings and Rory Burns, with three all-rounders – Moeen Ali, Ben Stokes and Sam Curran, and with two wicket-keeper batsmen, Josh Buttler and Ben Foakes? Moreover, in the injured Jonny Bairstow, they have another wicket-keeper batsman, or batsman wicket-keeper, waiting in the wings.

Equally to the point, have England at any time since, say, 1900, fielded an XI in which only one batsman- Joe Root – had a Test average over 40?

There have been times when there was a shortage of openers or batsmen in the 3,4,5 positions, but never to this extent. When I was a boy, the top order seemed to be set in stone: Hutton, Washbrook, Edrich, Compton. After Hutton’s retirement in 1955, there was rarely an established opening pair till the middle sixties when Boycott and John Edrich came together. But in those years, you had players like Peter May, Colin Cowdrey, Tom Graveney, Ted Dexter and Ken Barrington to choose from at 3,4,5.

Even in the 80s and 90s, years of first West Indian, then Australian, domination, the batting cupboard wasn’t anything like as bare as it is today. There was David Gower and Graham Gooch, Alan Lamb and Alex Stewart, Graham Thorpe and Mike Atherton. Then in this century we’ve had Andrew Strauss and Marcus Trescothick, Michael Vaughan and Kevin Pieterson, Alastair Cook, Ian Bell and Jonathan Trott, all scoring hundreds home and abroad.

Of course, we all recognize one reason for the shortage of good specialist batsmen: the ECB’s ludicrous programming of the county championship season, with most matches played in the first and last weeks of the season when wickets favour seam-bowling and the ball moves about as unpredictably as a trout.

Yet I wonder if we are witnessing a new stage in the development or evolution of the game. This thought came to me watching the fine partnership between Ben Foakes and Sam Curran at Galle. Neither would have been selected as a batsman, but these two young players, members of the Nescafe cricket generation, were playing classic Test match innings, distinguished by good sense, application, serenity and imagination.

Maybe they represent the future and perhaps not only in cricket terms.

Adam Smith remarked on a feature of the new Age of Industrial Capitalism – the division of labour – and Karl Marx elaborated on it. Whereas a wainwright would have built a whole cart, a factory worker made only a small part of an engine or car, sport went the same way with the demarcation of roles. In the 1930s Bill Bowes, Yorkshire’s star pace bowler, was roundly told batting wasn’t his business, nor indeed was fielding. If the ball came to him, sure, he was expected to stop it (though not of course to throw himself about in order to do so), but if it went past him, it was somebody else’s job to give chase. Considering that he took more than 1500 wickets for Yorkshire at an average of around 16, and Yorkshire won the championship most years, this seemed to work pretty well.

Indeed few other Test match bowlers made much of a contribution with the bat, while nobody expected Jack Hobbs or Herbert Sutcliffe or Don Bradman to take wickets. Demarcation of roles was likewise evident in the West Indies sides captained by Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards. One of two of their fearsome fast bowlers could bat a bit, but they were picked as specialists.

It was the same in other sports. I doubt if Stanley Matthews was ever expected or required to track back to defend in the penalty area, while there were many full-backs who never crossed the half-way line. Rugby props and hookers rarely carried the ball while Fifties fly-halves like Jack Kyle and Cliff Morgan did little tackling except in cover defence. The star of the Lions tour of New Zealand in 1971, Barry John, simply told his forwards, “I don’t tackle. That’s your job.”

Now everything is different. Though football pundits argue about formations, attackers are required to defend and defenders to attack. In Rugby backs – even tender plants at fly-half – are expected to get over the ball and compete at the tackle point and centre three-quarters like Ireland’s Robbie Henshaw and Scotland’s Alex Dunbar are as adept at this as any flanker. Meanwhile, all forwards are expected to handle, to give and take a pass at speed, and even to make delicate back-of-the hand offloads. There is still specialist work to be done of course, but the specialists are expected to be generalists too.

So perhaps this England Test XI in Sri Lanka – an XI that some of us old-timers might describe as cobbled together – may actually set a pattern for the future. It may soon be quite normal to see a Test side with only one or two batsmen averaging over 40, or only one, like Joe Root now, with a Test average of about 50, but with seven or eight players who average in the 30s; an XI even with only a couple of bowlers who are pure specialists and not expected to make many runs.

Of course, at any time there is likely to be a Test place for a bowler like James Anderson or a batsman like the just retired Alastair Cook. But these single skill cricketers may become the exception rather than, as for most of the history of the game, the norm. In Joe Root’s team, young Sam Curran has never in his half-dozen Tests batted higher than number 8 but averages 37. Maybe England don’t need another specialist batsman even though they have one in waiting – the other Surrey pup, Ollie Pope. As for the number of bowlers, Root has six at his disposal – and has taken a few Test match wickets himself too. More than a hundred years ago, Archie MacLaren, captain of England and Lancashire, declared that if you can’t win with four bowlers, you can’t win at all. But I guess this view is out of date – just as specialisation seems to be.