Posted by England confirmed the dropping of Kent’s Zak Crawley today when James Rew walked out to open the batting for Somerset. There are definitely more straightforward ways of announcing these things.
English cricket’s rune-readers have been broadly in agreement for a while now that Zak Crawley is no longer an England Test cricketer. No-one in a position to influence things has actually come out and said so. It’s just been impossible to envisage circumstances where the managing director of England men’s team, Rob Key, can concede that they’ve, “overvalued loyalty and overvalued having a settled team,” without then dropping him.
Sure, they could drop someone else instead, but that would rather rely on Crawley making an inarguable case for retention. With 12 hundreds in 143 first-class matches and an average of 31.67, that is not a thing he was ever going to do.
The only thing Crawley really had in his favour was that the guy England most want to pick right now – James Rew – is a middle-order batter.
We get the impression Rew likes being a middle-order batter. Why wouldn’t he? He’s scored thousands of runs there. But the vacancy is elsewhere. England love players showing ambition. They’ll have had a word. Words like ‘opportunity’ and ‘adaptability’ will have been bandied about.
‘No pressure, James, it’s entirely up to you, but from our perspective we think you’re made of the right stuff and we like players who are willing to get out of their comfort zones. We’ve got a problem and we feel like you could solve it.’
The flipside of that is of course that staying put and churning out middle-order runs would perhaps be viewed as being inflexible and cowardly.
So today James Rew walked out to open the batting for Somerset of his own volition and got bowled for 4 in the third over. Which doesn’t mean much. He made 7 and 0 batting in the middle order last week, after all.
But it does mean something for Zak Crawley because it tells us that England are so committed to finding a new opener, they’re willing to suggest to middle-order batters that they turn themselves into top order batters to plug the gap.
Our view is that this can work, but usually doesn’t – particularly in England where the new ball is so often a capricious bitch. It didn’t work for Dan Lawrence, for example.
Joe Root performed creditably enough when he was pushed into an opening role for similar reasons – but then Joe Root’s a genius. The fact he still only lasted six Tests there underlines that one way or another it was only ever an interim measure.
Further England squad news?
So that’s one bit of implicit England Test squad news. Is the fact that Ben Stokes opened the bowling today another?
Was this a Durham decision or an England decision? And given that two of the key decision-makers would have been the England Test captain and Marcus North, the new England chief selector, how would you even tell the difference?
We suspect and hope it was just a Durham thing. Given his clanking physiology, ‘Ben Stokes, opening bowler,’ would surely be even more of a stopgap move than Rew as opener.
