Haseeb Hameed and Ollie Robinson show the importance of looking in the mirror

PAUL EDWARDS: The arc of Robinson's career is simpler than Hameed's but the experiences of both players seem to me to highlight the point that while talent is necessary it is never sufficient

Some years ago there was a county batsman of whom much was expected. More or less all his coaches and those who watched closely from press boxes agreed this was so.

The player had ability, application and absolutely no shortage of style. An international career appeared possible. And so we waited for him to achieve his potential. Sure enough, there were fifties and there were hundreds but never in the quantities we expected. Eventually we noticed that the player was finding ways to get out, even at times in his innings when everything seemed to be in his favour.

Before long we expected him to commit such errors and all our talk of promise and potential became couched in the past tense. The cricketer of whom I’m thinking doesn’t play first-class cricket any more but on quiet winter evenings I still think of those Aprils when the game seemed laid out before him.

The memories remind me of the barriers lying in the path of any young sportsman; they remind me of talent’s limitations; and they reminded me of it again last week when I watched Haseeb Hameed and Ollie Robinson play Test cricket at Headingley.

Both Hameed and Robinson enjoyed fine matches and played full roles in England’s victory. Should the Ashes tour take place it will now be surprising if they are not on the plane. Yet not so long ago it appeared possible that both cricketers might be lost to the first-class game. Robinson’s career might have ended before it had properly begun whereas Hameed’s decline was startling for a player who had looked utterly at home in the first-class game and had taken to Test cricket with unnerving comfort.

The simple facts of the matter are well-known and there is no reason to repeat them in anything but their briefest form here. Having scored over 1,000 runs for Lancashire in 2016 and after making his Test debut in India the following winter, Hameed’s form declined so sharply that two years later he averaged 9.44 from 18 first-class innings.

^{Haseeb Hameed is back in the England Test team}

There were certainly technical reasons for the slump: critics as sharp as Mike Selvey noticed that his hands were too low, a problem that resulted in three finger fractures. It was also possible that Hameed was listening to too many coaches and that he was neglecting the simplicity that had informed his batting in 2014 when I first saw him playing for Lancashire’s second team and was moved very deeply by his utterly natural talent.

It was bleakly astounding to see him become so uncertain about the location of his off stump that he was frequently bowled or leg before wicket playing no shot. In the summer of 2018 and much of 2019 Hameed’s brain seemed scrambled and his technique shot to fragments.

Perhaps he was also seduced a little by the illusory certainty of fame. After all, no one was in any doubt that Hameed was the most real of deals; not his England colleagues, not his opponents, not former players with over 100 caps. No one. Eventually it became clear that he needed to change counties, something that had appeared unthinkable when he was capped by Lancashire. At which point the revival in Hameed’s fortunes began, albeit at a meeting he didn’t attend.

"No one was in any doubt that Hameed was the most real of deals; not his England colleagues, not his opponents, not former players with over 100 caps. No one"

“What about Hameed?” said Steven Mullaney to Peter Moores on the dressing-room balcony at Trent Bridge where the pair were discussing possible signings for the 2020 season. Hameed had just been released by Lancashire and was considering his options. (One doubts there were many.) Nottinghamshire took a punt on the player and he scored good runs in last season’s Bob Willis Trophy.

Then this season there were two hundreds against Worcestershire and fifties in other games. It was not long before the England coaches were taking an interest once again. Encouraged by Moores, whose insight, patience and work-ethic are legendary in county cricket, Hameed made technical changes and they were analysed with characteristic clarity by Mike Atherton in The Times.

“Like so many top-order players in county cricket right now, worried as they are about the movement of the Dukes balls and soft, seamer-friendly wickets, Hameed had moved his guard towards off stump, with the counterproductive consequence that he was forced to play around his front pad and hip, thus coming across the line of the ball. Having moved his guard slightly back towards middle stump again — to a more orthodox stance, in other words — he has found he can play beside the line of the ball again and his bat has a clear path to it.”

^{Ollie Robinson has made a fine start to his international career}

But Atherton also said that Hameed was too good a player not to come again and here I respectfully differ from my colleague. There was nothing inevitable about the matter. Sure, Hameed had buckets of talent but without determination, a willingness to learn new lessons, a degree of self-awareness and a capacity for self-criticism and change it seems to me unlikely that Hameed would have played five-day cricket again.

“He’s been on a journey,” said Joe Root when the Boltonian was recalled to the Test side at Lord’s. True enough, of course, but there was no certainty that the destination would be Headingley, where Hameed made 68 and I thought again of the unnamed young batsman mentioned at the opening of this piece.

And so to Ollie Robinson, who could be England’s cricketer of the year if only his captain would stop scoring centuries. As Robinson received a standing ovation for his match-winning five-wicket return against India on Saturday morning, it might have occurred to him, though I suspect briefly, that Yorkshire was the county that had sacked him in 2014 because it seemed to them that his conduct was not consonant with that of a professional cricketer.

"When a player consistently displays behaviour that isn’t professional, there has to be a point in time when you say: 'Look, this isn’t really working, you’re obviously not that bothered about playing for the club.' That point came, and it was tough," said the then Yorkshire coach, Jason Gillespie, when Robinson’s contract was terminated. "He’s got to learn about his game and about being a professional sportsman. I I think he needs to learn a lot, and I think he can do it."

Gillespie was right on all counts, although it was fortunate for Robinson that a club like Sussex was prepared to give him a short-term deal in 2015. In that season his cricket really began to flourish again, a development that was maintained, ironically, under the guidance of Gillespie, whose time as coach at Hove coincided with some of the most important seasons in the young seamer’s career.

The arc of Robinson’s career is simpler than Hameed’s but the experiences of both players seem to me to highlight the point that while talent is necessary it is never sufficient. At some point in their careers I suspect these two England cricketers will have looked in their mirrors and asked themselves exactly what they wanted from the game and what they were prepared to do in order to achieve it.

Many of us have similar moments in our lives but the publicity surrounding professional sport and the demands placed upon the very best players can make such interrogations very brutal. The journey to Headingley is never chauffeur-driven.