Could the necessity of rotation have been handled more resourcefully so that Root had his best players available for the India series?
There will be traces aplenty to kick over now that England’s Test tour of India is over. How much it could be regarded to a significant degree as a successful Test winter is in the eye of the beholder.
The Sri Lankan side beaten so comfortably were no more than a middling county side in standard, so think Somerset winning games on a Taunton turner. In India, they got lucky once when all the stars aligned in their favour and were then thrashed for the rest of the series.
In simple terms, and no disgrace in it for England, India were a superior side across the board, in their own conditions, and it would be wrong to think that even had England been able to pick what they might regard as their best side, it would have come close to challenging them.
Nonetheless, the national selector Ed Smith, Chris Silverwood the head coach, Joe Root as captain, and even Ashley Giles who is their boss and signed it all off, will have some explaining to do on whether the rotation policy, while clearly necessitated by Covid circumstances and the result of considerable consultation with, among others, health care and mental health professionals, was instigated to best effect.
Were the priorities the right ones in terms of the importance of the India tour relative to Sri Lanka, for example, or should Sri Lanka have been in effect a Lions tour, which at times it looked and felt like the India series was? And were the original selections as good as they might have been, however they might still have fared overall.
Examples? It remains absurd to me that for these specific conditions, the most difficult Ben Foakes had encountered, and which involved the most specialised keeping skills, he had not been pencilled in for all six Tests. And why, when they have struggled to find opening batsmen, was Keaton Jennings, whose modest record elsewhere is offset with Test hundreds both in India and Sri Lanka, not in the party?
'Smith, Silverwood, Root and even Giles should be asked if the rotation policy, while clearly necessitated by Covid circumstances, was instigated to best effect?'
Why did Jos Buttler need to play in Sri Lanka? Or Jimmy Anderson? In other words, could the necessity of rotation have been handled more resourcefully so that Root had his best players available for the India series? The intrusion of IPL onto England’s plans only muddies that water further.
The problems experienced by Moeen Ali were not helpful. A month in total spent in self-isolation following a positive Covid test, in addition to the usual ‘bubble’ life would be enough for anyone. But the belief that Dom Bess was a better option as an off-spinner than someone with 189 Test match wickets, a Test hat-trick, and 56 wickets at 25.69 in his last 11 Tests – which, as George Dobell has written elsewhere, don’t look so bad now – was a collective misjudgement.
But Moeen had lost his red-ball contract on the back of this record. This is not Bess’ fault. He didn’t ask to be picked (although saying he was surprised to be dropped after the first Test shows a lack of understanding of the standards required at the top level), and it is easy to argue that he is thin gruel in a time of spinning famine in English cricket. But when as generous a person as Sir Andrew Strauss uses words such as “unacceptable” and “painful to watch” you know things are bad.
Moeen may well have played all four Tests up until the time of his scheduled rest. But he has not been managed well, even the manner of his departure back to England, another who, not just with hindsight, would have benefitted from missing the Sri Lanka tour in the first place.
Now there is a clamour to encourage spin bowlers in spite of the season being bookended by four-day cricket. You either need pitches that render mundane seam bowling ineffective, or some that take spin. Somerset get docked points for providing the latter, though, while greentops go unchallenged.
My solution, for what it is worth, is for the ECB to instruct groundsmen to follow the guidelines of Raymond Illingworth at Leicester or Clive Rice at Nottingham, and shave the ends to a distance of three metres from the crease, and use the heavy roller only on the middle section. Pace and bounce for quick bowlers and turn for spinners: what’s not to like?
This article was published in the April edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game