Posted by We are absolutely adamant that England cannot possibly withstand public and media appetite for change in the wake of the Ashes drubbing. (Does 4-1 actually qualify as a drubbing given the three previous scorelines Down Under were all worse than that?) One way or another, rightly or wrongly, action must be seen to be taken and if the captain, coach and managing director of men’s cricket are all keeping their jobs then other heads will have to roll instead – players’ heads.
This is the way it has to work. If people want skulls and you explain that, “actually, sorry, no skulls – we’re just going to do things slightly differently instead,” then you absolutely cannot just carry on much as you were doing previously. England have to demonstrate how they’ve changed. They have to put forward clear, visible differences.
In short, there still have to be skulls.
“We’ve overvalued loyalty and overvalued having a settled team”
That’s what Rob Key apparently concluded recently.
“We thought what we wanted to do is make sure we have a team that is settled out there. But what that does is it creates an environment where there’s not enough consequence. We need to be more ruthless with our selection.”
It’s time to unsettle everyone with disloyalty, basically. So who’s in the firing line?
Zak Crawley – OUT
Honestly? We think he’s out. After all these years of Teflon mediocrity, there are visible holes in Crawley’s protective coating now. If the loyalty threshold truly has moved then he surely now finds himself on the wrong side of it as an exemplary victim.
Unless he makes a million runs in the early weeks of the County Championship – which unfortunately for him is a thing he’s never before been able to do – then Crawley will surely become a warning to all of the England players that actually, you know what, we’ve decided there should be consequences.
This would be quite a peculiar development given the batter’s been such a fixture of the side and it could also prove terminal for his Test career. While he is still young for a Test opener – during the Ashes we pointed out that Mike Carberry, Nick Compton, Mark Stoneman, Jason Roy, Rory Burns and Alex Lees were all older than he is now when they made their debuts – it’s quite hard to go back on dropping someone who has already amassed such a sizeable body of so-so work.
Crawley has been given a great many opportunities to prove himself – enough, you could argue, that he has already done precisely that. For years and years, he has generally done just enough to maintain the idea of Zak Crawley, without ever really managing to move things beyond that.
Crawley’s upcoming task is therefore not really to prove himself, but to disprove himself.
Ollie Pope – STILL OUT
Technically, Pope’s been dropped already, which is just one of several reasons why it’s probably a little unfair that he’s so often lumped in with Crawley as a batter who deserves to face sterner judgement.
While the two men have played the same number of Tests and roughly the same number of first-class matches, Pope has hit nine Test hundreds to Crawley’s five and also averages almost 50 per cent more than him in first-class cricket with twice as many three-figure scores.
He is, in short, a far better batter and could probably do okay if someone could prevent him falling victim to some of the more broad brush team messaging that doesn’t really benefit him.
Jamie Smith – NOT OUT
Jamie Smith played the worst shot of the winter, but the brain of many an otherwise excellent cricketer has momentarily melted in the Ashes environment before now and Smith had also been shouldering a sizeable workload in the field.
His first Ashes went wrong, but that alone shouldn’t see him ejected from the side, should it? He might need to find a bit of early season form, but England want to do well in five-Test series and in the one before the Ashes, less than a year ago, Smith made 184 not out against India as well as several other useful scores.
Will Jacks – OUT
If anything Will Jacks’ fantastic T20 World Cup performances served only to better highlight the utter pointlessness of his presence in England’s Test team.
With the red ball, he is not a spin bowler, but a cricketer who sometimes bowls spin. This would be a lot more useful to England if he also happened to be a Test batter, but unfortunately, as things stand, he is not.
In the longest format, Jacks is a buyer of wickets and a scorer of meaningless consolation runs. England need more than that.
Brydon Carse – PROBABLY NOT OUT
Brydon Carse had a terrible Ashes in which he was the second-highest wicket-taker. This combination of facts is still hard to make sense of. We feel we summed up the essence of his experience in the article linked below.
If England can avoid giving him the new ball, we’d guess Carse is probably still in the team? Isn’t he? Maybe not. We have no idea.
Matt Potts – A BIT FURTHER OUT
Matt Potts is in that age-old position where he shouldn’t really be judged too harshly based on one hospital pass appearance at the arse end of a disastrous Ashes tour, but he also unavoidably will be.
England had worked their way down the pecking order when Potts played in Sydney but you feel they’ll have to get a little bit lower still before he gets to play again.
Jofra Archer and Mark Wood – NOT OUT, BUT ARE THEY EVER TRULY IN ANYWAY?
It seems faintly insane to suggest Jofra Archer or Mark Wood might be members of England’s first XI given the availability disclaimers inherent in such an assertion. In that respect, it’s business as usual really.
Wood is currently recovering from what he was told was “an explosion” in his knee during the Ashes. Archer is in the equally familiar position where he’s fit enough to bowl four overs but no-one seems much inclined to engineer a situation where he might prove himself capable of bowling a greater number.
Likely openings
So what are we looking for then? One opener and one spinner, plus maybe an opening bowler if they conclude that a Gus Atkinson, Brydon Carse and Josh Tongue attack is a bit too first-changey?
Root, Brook and Stokes are all certainties and Bethell hit 150 odd in his last test innings so he is in. Not hard to imagine none of Carse, Wood and Archer being available for the first New Zealand test. Means that the only meaningful skulls to offer the public are the openers and the keeper. Things would get very interesting if Crawley could somehow heavily outscore Duckett in the Championship before the first test.
I’d argue that in some ways getting chopped straight after an away Ashes isn’t the worst outcome anyway, far from inconceivable that Key and Baz end up getting the boot in the next 18 months. If they do end up going then being outside the tent while it all finally imploded could be seen as a positive. I could see Pope in particular benefitting from a bit of distance in a post Bazball world. 2027 Ashes goes badly, Key and Baz booted, Stokes decides to pack it in, candidates for Test captain are going to be thin on the ground and if Brook is seen as not enough of a clean break with the previous regime, a Surrey batter with experience captaining England is going to look pretty tempting.
On any quantitative view, Crawley has to go. We now even “know” that on a Bayesian analysis it is not even correct to pick him because of his supposed high ceiling, because we don’t expect him to perform up there. Smith, on the other hand, performed below the expectations we still have. Similarly Gus Atkinson. They should both be in the XI. Otherwise, bit of a lottery.
I think you’re dreaming about Smith. Enormous talent as a bat, so-so as a keeper, but no cricket nous. Threw away the last Test against India, numerous brainfades in the Ashes, especially when he had a set batsman at the other end. Foakes would have been so much more useful given the lack of upper order runs.
You think he and Pope aren’t their own men; too easily steered by what they think their bosses want from them?
Certainly an element of that. It suggests that Baz is doing more harm than good, if he’s taking away the players ability to mature and think for themselves.
Happy County Championshipmas Eve, all.
There’s a massive named storm set to sweep across the country tomorrow, bringing high winds and heavy rain.
Ah, it’s good to be back.
Thought you were going to do a, “There’s a massive named storm coming… it’s called The County Championship,” type joke there for a moment.
This isn’t the IPL, we don’t do that sort of thing.
Cricket. Dukes balls. Runs. Wickets.
Warwickshire! Lancashire!! Middlesex!!! Fifteen other counties!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s all happening.
With all the talk of increased interest in the championship from the national selectors, it’ll be interesting to see if the promising early form shown by Chris Woakes and James Anderson leads to a test call up…. So far not really helping with the choices outlined in this article.
You can add Toby Roland-Jones to that list of good performers with the ball who are probably not on the selectors watch list, Tim.
I couldn’t help but notice that the first centurion of the season, Emilio Gray, plays for Italy.
Mind you, the first double-centurion of the season, Martin Andersson, is England qualified and a former Middlesex boy. But he’s not exactly on the ECB selectors list of probable or even possible call-ups either.
Admirable that he took both his names from Lancashire/England seamers, even if he got one of the spellings wrong.
Meanwhile, in the cricket itself, Lancashire, Middlesex, and even Derbyshire come to that, are in a decent position to push for wins on Day Four.