Posted by Zak Crawley. Every England fan’s favourite topic of conversation. You’ll miss him when he’s gone. And that might actually happen, you know. This Ashes series has become so pivotal for Crawley’s career that failure will most likely see him ejected for good; a long Test career definitively done and dusted, despite the fact he’s only the same age Andrew Strauss was when he made his Test debut.
It’s an odd fact, that. England invested in Crawley so early that there’s a decent chance they’ll conclude they’ve seen enough when he’s still only 27.
That’s young for a Test opener. In recent times, Mike Carberry, Nick Compton, Mark Stoneman, Jason Roy, Rory Burns and Alex Lees have all been older when they made their debuts. Dropping down another spot, so was Jonathan Trott.
But let’s quickly recap where we are with Crawley right now.
Crawling along
“I like it when great players miss out. It means statistically they’ll probably get some pretty soon.”
Justin Langer wasn’t talking about Crawley when he said that (the ‘great players’ part is probably the giveaway). He was talking about David Warner, four innings into the 2019 Ashes.
Warner’s next innings was his biggest and also worst of that series (seriously, an absolute horror show – you can read about it in our book). Despite Langer’s statistical certainty, he never did come good. Not even close. If Josh Hazlewood had made just one more run that summer, Warner would have finished with the lowest average of all the Australians.
The point is, you’re not due. No one is due. Certainly not someone with Zak Crawley’s track record.
Pacing himself
In large part, Crawley owes his presence in this Ashes series to a notion that he’s good against pace.
Relatively speaking, this is true. But at the same time, he’s not that good against pace. You don’t need CricViz to tell you that an opening batter who averages 30 isn’t consistently seeing off the quick bowlers only to later founder on the rocks of spin bowling. Crawley’s pretty prone to foundering on pace rocks too.
If we think back to, ooh, let’s say the first Test, we can see that Crawley didn’t even see out the opening over, let alone the opening bowlers. The sunlit uplands of strong back foot play against a tiring attack seem meaninglessly distant in that context.
It’s like fancying you’d be great at bando or harpastum, if only you could get over that trifling first hurdle. If you could just find a way to travel through time then nothing could stop you!
Not unrelated to this somewhat stymying dynamic is Mitchell Starc, a man who hits the ground running towards the slip cordon celebrating yet another early wicket. cricket.com.au has a page documenting Starc’s opening over successes – and it’s quite a long page.
If duck-hungry incompetentron Crawley can get through the first over from the sport’s most devastatingly reliable opening bowler, he could earn himself a shot at trying to also survive Australia’s other opening bowler and all of Starc’s other overs.
It’s possible – insofar as things that aren’t impossible must by definition be so – but you wouldn’t say it feels colossally likely. And how big a deal is it anyway? If he gets through that period, Crawley is a bit better against pace and bounce, but ‘a bit better’ than a Test average of 30 doesn’t exactly put him into world-beating territory. If we’re thinking positively and envisioning success, then we’re possibly still only looking at a player who’s barely worth a place in the side.
You could go further and imagine things going extremely well, but a lot of people are going the opposite way. (Who knows, maybe the man himself is among them.) It’s always possible to argue a path to hope, but assessing Crawley’s Ashes prospects right now, further failure undeniably feels the safest of the bets on offer.
Unfortunately, for England… that’s not really an option.
Who else?
From the tourists’ perspective, Crawley has to succeed because at this point there is nothing that can realistically be done; no change that can be made that doesn’t say, “Oh Christ, we’ve made a bit of a balls of this.”
Jacob Bethell would be a bold pick at number three, but an empty, desperate one as an opener. Shipping someone in from the Lions – Ben McKinney we’d guess – would be a bit more palatable, but how often do England Test debutants have a lovely time in Australia?
Realistically, England are betting that Crawley might at some point get himself in and make the absolute most of it and basically win a match. That’s the investment they’ve been making these last few years, continuing to add to their position as his stock price has slumped and the dividends have dried up.
That level of investment is what’s so fascinating about this. There’s so much at stake. Crawley isn’t just a weird marginal pick who may or may not work out – we’ve had plenty of those. He’s a weird marginal pick England have retained for years and years based on an argument that has gradually narrowed down to, “Actually, we’ve good reason to believe he could do well in this specific series.”
It’s surely not enormously helpful to his prospects that Crawley himself must be acutely aware of this.
How would people react to a terrible Ashes performance?
Large numbers of England supporters have been fiercely annoyed about Crawley’s selection for literally years already. As long ago as May 2023, we noted that his presence had already become a sufficiently big bone of contention that his name was consistently cropping up in a debate about England dropping their wicketkeeper.
He subsequently proved himself the greatest inside-edger in world cricket before delivering that oh-so-crucial and magnificent reputational salvage job at Old Trafford, the ripples of which still feel like his Test career’s chief mode of propulsion.
Perhaps most relevantly to this article, he also struck an incredibly rich vein of consistency against New Zealand’s Matt Henry, this time last year. No England opener has ever batted so many times in a single series and finished with a lower average. Strikingly – and in a way quite impressively – that average of 8.66 was almost a full run less than Warner in the 2019 Ashes.
Channelling Justin Langer after the series had finished, England’s assistant coach, Paul Collingwood, said that Crawley was, “ready to hurt someone.”
As we said at the time: it would be helpful if that someone were the opposition.
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