After England's heavy defeat by India at Trent Bridge, SAM MORSHEAD picks out topics for discussion, including Keaton Jennings' future, India's tinkering obsession and the whereabouts of Ed Smith and James Taylor...
England selectors James Taylor, left, and Ed Smith
Another two failures with the bat here and Keaton Jennings’ Test career feels like it is on the wane for a second time. The Lancashire opener scored early-season runs against the red ball in county cricket but on his return to the international arena, there have been precious few.
This summer, in Tests against India and Pakistan, Jennings averages 20.5 across six innings, with a top score of 42. In fact, since making 112 on debut in India in 2016, he has not registered another half-century for his country.
These are old stats but the fact that we are all aware of them suggests that little is improving.
Throw into the mix his performance in the slip cordon, where two very catchable chances went to ground in India’s second innings, and it all adds up to a fairly miserable state of affairs, both for the player himself and the selectors.
But will it actually trigger a change? Should Jennings, who has had to deal with some pretty difficult conditions throughout the series, be persisted with throughout the remaining two Test matches?
Keaton Jennings, right, and Alastair Cook have been struggling for runs
England have a dilemma ahead of the Ageas Bowl, then. And it’s only exacerbated by reports that Alastair Cook - out of nick himself - could miss the game to be with his wife for the birth of their child.
Should Cook be unavailable, would England really want to change both openers for such a crucial game? Rory Burns, in the runs again for Surrey against the dreadful pink ball and under lights, is averaging nearly 70 in the Championship and must now get his chance in the Test arena.
But who would be the second understudy right now? There’s not a lot of in-form players to choose from and most of those who have had a go at the top of England’s order in recent years are not returning the numbers Ed Smith would want.
Mark Stoneman averages 21.33 in Division One this season and has one score of more than 50 in 12 innings across all formats. Haseeb Hameed has had a horribly poor campaign at Lancashire and has been making his runs at less than 10 per innings. Adam Lyth? Sam Robson?
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Who else is there?
Daryl Mitchell has been making good runs at Worcestershire - another century this week took his season’s average in Division One to more than 46 - and is a safe pair of hands in the slips but at 34 years old he does not feel the type of call-up that Smith is looking to make.
Could Moeen Ali fill the role? Ian Bell? James Vince? All have runs domestically but none really fit the spec.
Maybe the long-accepted formula for a true Test opener needs a little tweaking. After all, neither Shikhar Dhawan nor KL Rahul made 50 in four attempts between them at Trent Bridge, yet their performances were widely and quite rightly lauded.
Should we accept a fleeting, flight-of-fancy 30-odd rather than a curmudgeonly 40-something made in three or four hours?
Questions… far too many questions. And just eight days for Smith and James Taylor to turn them into answers.
England have been found wanting in the top order
Called to the wicket with 490-plus runs still needed and two days to bat, Ollie Pope drove at the first three balls of his second innings. Sure, the first one was a beauty straight down the ground for four and the third ended up nestling beside the third man rope, but was aggression the right remedy for the situation?
That’s not to criticise the batsman too much - Pope has been brought up in an attacking era, juggling the pressures of multiple formats - but it is to say that the nature of batting has very much changed.
Is it feasible for the art of the leave to reintroduced into the psyche of a player who might be asked to bat for three sessions to save a game on a Saturday morning then find himself needing to go at 12 an over to win a match on a Tuesday night?
Do batsmen in the 21st century feel a much stronger compulsion to get bat on ball, early and regularly?
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Certainly, England’s top order might look back at their dismissals at Trent Bridge and wonder whether they really needed to play at the balls that got them out.
Ishant Sharma, at six-foot-and-a-lot, is a fantastic bowler to left-handers but both Cook and Jennings could have left him on length, if not on line, with the vast majority of deliveries destined to leap high over the stumps (less than 10 per cent had a trajectory that would have troubled the timber, according to CricViz).
Joe Root went searching for a trademark back-foot push through the covers and only succeeded in diverting Jasprit Bumrah to Rahul at second slip. Pope slashed wildly and only found Kohli diving to his right at third.
None demanded a shot.
Easier said than done, of course. But worth considering.
It has been 45 matches since India last named an unchanged side in Test matches and Virat Kohli has chopped and changed in every single game during his tenure. However, it now seems unfathomable that the run can extend to the Ageas Bowl.
After three attempts, they have found an opening combination that appears to understand how to play in difficult batting conditions, who negated the swinging and seaming ball and gave their team the foundation to make a competitive score.
History should have told the selectors that the Dhawan-Rahul combination was the right option but now there can be no doubt. And that in itself may well signal the end of Murali Vijay’s international career.
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In the middle order, the folly of leaving an accumulator like Che Pujara out of the side initially was exposed by a second-innings 72 of tremendous substance, while below the classy middle order of Virat Kohli and Ajinkya Rahane, Hardik Pandya showed he really can cut it as a Test allrounder (even if comparisons with Kapil Dev are a tad over-the-top).
Swapping Dinesh Karthik for Rishabh Pant is the cricketing equivalent of trading Enron stock for Apple shares at the turn of the millennium, and the bowling attack looks balanced, varied and dangerous, particularly with the return of Jasprit Bumrah. It speaks volumes that Bhuvneshwar Kumar will be fit for Southampton yet struggling to make the line-up.
This has always been a strong Indian squad. It’s taken three matches but now, in English conditions, the tourists’ selectors have assembled a strong Indian team.
Will India stick with the same team at the Ageas Bowl?
It has been a familiar sight throughout the summer; Ed Smith and James Taylor, smartly dressed, sat together in one executive box or another. It makes sense, of course, that the men in charge of picking the national team are there to represent the ECB at marquee events.
However, this week their presence - while the team has been in a losing position - has sparked some criticism. One former England international, Steve Harmison, went as far as to suggest that Smith and Taylor being at Trent Bridge instead of out on the county circuit during a full round of Championship fixtures showed that the pair do not care about county cricket.
Naturally, their visibility at Lord’s and Edgbaston did not seem to be that much of an issue, while England were busy winning but that is besides the point.
There are many ways to keep an eye on all the potential options for the national team, and in an age where pictures and data from every match nationwide is accessible instantaneously online, it seems a little melodramatic to bark about where and when Smith and Taylor are doing their job correctly.
Frankly, the two could be sat in their three-piece suits and shades in Burger King at Watford Gap services and still have all the tools they need at their disposal to run the rule over players in action from Southampton to Scarborough.
There is also, let’s not forget, a team of scouts whose job it is to scour the county network and report back to Smith and Taylor.
Yes, most of them would have had their minds on playing (Marcus Trescothick and Jonathan Trott) or coaching (Glen Chapple and Richard Dawson) but they are still out there, in the trenches, experiencing form and lack thereof first hand.
Let’s cut them all some slack.
Posted by Richard Evans on 25/08/2018 at 09:57
Re Daryll Mitchell, wasn't Cyril Washbrook recalled to the colours at the age of 42, in 1956, and promptly scored 98 ?.
Posted by Ricky Gunn on 24/08/2018 at 18:06
After our debacle in Australia 2013/14, one of the many Aussie jibes was "Q. What is the difference between Cinderella and the Pommies? A. Cinderella knew when to leave the ball." Plus ça change?
Posted by Richard Edwards on 24/08/2018 at 15:37
Selectors don’t need to be at test matches, they can see every single ball from tv coverage if they need to see something or somebody Easy life I think just watch cricket all day and be feed and drink All the players at test level have already been watched and selected for the match in which they are playing, you can’t change that by watching them. They should not need coaching at this stage that should have been done during their time in championship cricket getting to test level You don’t need a batting coach just somebody to throw balls How do players like Jennings, Malan, Westley get to this level with so many obvious issues While the best player by a country mile out side Root, Stokes and Bairstow is James Vince and he gets dropped and treated badly after as well as anybody in Aus Ran out 85 Ball of the series 50 odd And batting at 3 against a virtually new ball where Root should have been told to bat there, and Vince at 4 He is the best player to watch out of all of them