Posted by It looks like Essex’s Sam Cook is finally going to get a Test cap. “About time!” you might be thinking. Or maybe you’re thinking, “Okay, that makes sense now – although which other bowlers is he going to be playing alongside?”
With 318 first-class wickets at 19.77, Sam Cook’s statistical case is beyond compelling and for many that’s enough. These people are utterly perplexed that he’s so frequently been passed over in favour of other seam bowlers up until now.
This is the common sense approach to picking a pace attack – ‘just pick your best bowlers’. But like almost all ‘common sense’ solutions, it doesn’t work. (Never trust a person who actively talks up their own common sense while ridiculing that of others. It’s essentially an ‘attack is the best form of defence’ mechanism for simpletons.)
‘Just pick your best bowlers’ is only a few steps removed from ‘just pick your best players’. If you took that approach, you might end up with eight bowlers in your XI or four wicketkeepers. Different players perform different roles.
For example, while there’s clearly overlap, opening batters are different from middle-order batters. Similarly, left-arm seamers are different from right-arm seamers; and reverse swing fast bowlers are different from accurate, fast-medium opening bowlers.
That’s a simplification, of course. In reality, each bowler ticks their own idiosyncratic array of boxes. ‘It’s about components,’ in the words of Steve Harmison. Nevertheless, some qualities are more significant than others, so you can subcategorise at least a little bit.
England have, historically, been quite bad at explaining this – quite possibly because some captains and coaches have been quite bad at understanding it. The situation seems a bit clearer now though.
Speaking to the Sky Sports Cricket Podcast the other week, England selector Luke Wright said: “We explained to Cooky that he’s competing with the likes of Woakes, Potts – those guys – because we want a varied attack; those guys bowling with high skill, who are not necessarily 85mph, but they still have a definite part to play in our bowling attack.”
So up until recently, Cook had been waiting in a queue that was headed by James Anderson – and Jimmy wasn’t for shifting. It’s hard to get a game in that situation, no matter how well you perform for your county.
The truth is there are lots of different queues to get into the England Test team and some feature a far greater number of players jockeying for position. (You’re going to have to set queuing etiquette aside in this analogy.)
In the very tall left-arm seam bowler category, Josh Hull has the best average – even if that average is terrible. The right-arm fast-medium opening bowler queue, meanwhile, is consistently the most congested of them all. But you know what? With Chris Woakes injured, Sam Cook probably is at the front of it now. A hat trick and 10 wickets in the match with the Kookaburra ball last year certainly didn’t harm his case.
With all this in mind, what’s interesting to us is who Cook will be teaming up with and this distinction of Wright’s between sub-85mph bowlers and those who are a bit quicker. After assessing the available componentry, will England pick one sub-85mph bowler or two? And is Matt Potts honestly in that bracket, because we’d have him down as operating in no-man’s land; not really one thing or the other?
Perhaps this gives Potts the option of switching queues.
Imagine you’re at the supermarket, in a gigantic queue, and they open another checkout. Do you take a punt and go for it?
If you’re already near the front of the original queue, you probably don’t. There’s too much to lose. Probably by the time you get there, you’ll be further back than you were before committing to the switch. But if you’re way, way back, eyeing full trolleys ahead of you, then yeah, you may as well.
But here’s another thing. Isn’t there something fundamentally undignified about changing queues? Whether at a supermarket or an airport check-in, isn’t there something just a little bit desperate about making the switch and racing everyone in the vague hope of slightly shortening your wait?
These are the tricksy questions Matt Potts will have to grapple with if he finds that Sam Cook’s ahead of him in the sub-85mph queue and subsequently concludes that gaining half a yard of pace might get him closer to the Test team.
Or maybe they’ll both play. All the proper fast bowlers are injured anyway. It’s a fluid and unpredictable queue, that one.
If you’re in a long supermarket queue and they open another checkout, they want people to change queues. There’s a whole new queue.
I think the analogy is more switching lanes in a tailback on a major road. Generally switching lanes feels like the thing to do as when other lanes are moving faster and you’re sat in a stationary lane you are acutely aware of the cars going past you, but it’s not necessarily faster – when you’re in the lane that’s moving, you’re focused on the road ahead and so don’t notice how many cars you’re going past.
Basically what I’m saying is they should try and clone Mark Wood as soon as possible.
Well, the italics haven’t quite worked as intended there, have they?
I think the england selectors want more bowlers to change queues
I like your ‘changing lanes’ analogy, but then again with a queue there is something about having someone at the end of it – like a selector. Maybe the analogy is going through passport control. Different queues for different nationalities, or types of players. (I almost wrote ‘skillsets’ there – phew, a near miss.)
So there is Matt Potts, in the queue at the Tijuana/California border, wondering whether he can pass himself off as American or whether he’ll have to wait with all the other highly skilled Mexican [s]farm workers[/s] seam bowlers. Or something.
I wonder whether the strikeout marks will work. shouldn’t think so.
didn’t think so. suppose I should have looked up how to do it.