In five County Championship matches this season Zak Crawley has made 322 runs at an average of 32.20. In eight Vitality Blast T20 games he has made only 82 runs at 10.25. What’s more, if you take out his 238 in the championship for Kent against Somerset (which I do not like doing but, honestly, there is a point to this) Crawley averages only 9.33.
Those are quite shocking figures and they raise the question of why Crawley missed Kent’s two most recent championship matches. But should we be overly concerned about him as he walks out to open the batting for England at Lord’s this week in the first Test of the summer?
No, not really. We’ve been there and done that so many times before. Surely the penny has dropped by now that, put quite simply, Crawley’s game is not suited to county cricket. He is best suited to true and bouncy pitches and high-pace bowling, both of which are in short supply in the championship, with it being little surprise that his 238 came at Taunton, which he describes as “the best non-Test-playing ground in the country”.
His first-class average for Kent (32.88) is remarkably similar to his Test record for England (32.63), but the figures that matter most are that he has averaged 46.68 in Test cricket since the start of last year’s Ashes, when he strode out to bat at Edgbaston and launched the first ball of the series from Pat Cummins through the covers with all the insouciance of a sunbather swatting a fly from their face. He now looks completely at home in the Test arena.
Dibbly-dobblers and a seaming ball are not Crawley’s best friends, and I do think he might have fared much better in previous eras of county cricket, when there were more pace bowlers who tested your ticker as much as your technique, because he does pull the fast stuff superbly well.
Advertisement
And West Indies will have some pace. I happened to chance upon a small passage of play when Sussex played Glamorgan at Sophia Gardens earlier in the season and one ball, even on a slowish pitch, that Jayden Seales bowled at the nightwatchman Mason Crane, whistling through to a leaping wicketkeeper, swiftly brought to mind West Indies quicks of bygone eras.
Whatever you make of Crawley’s numbers and nature, he will have played a lot more recently than his opening partner, Ben Duckett, whose last championship match was on April 26, before he spent a lot of time on England’s bench during the T20 World Cup. He played for Nottinghamshire on Friday in the Blast and made 39 off 21 balls.
All this does invite the question of what exactly form is, and what is the ideal state of mind, body and weight of runs with which to approach a Test series. My colleague Mike Atherton wrote a fascinating column on this during the T20 World Cup, asking how players, especially finishers in the shorter formats, can cope with what looks like no form at all, simply because they have spent so little time in the middle.
Besides his 238 at Taunton Crawley has had a poor championship season for Kent — but he should be more comfortable against Test bowlers.
A couple of players I coach did long sessions with the bowling machine during the recent Blast block just to find the rhythm through volume of balls that is so easily lost when hitting in T20. One of them had acquired some glaring technical differences during the T20 window, which was then a problem when attempting to revert back to four-day cricket.
Advertisement
To me form was always a rather nebulous word that others used when you had put a string of scores together and therefore appeared more confident. But every innings still began with the same doubts and struggles.
This was probably best emphasised by the words of Alastair Cook when I interviewed him in Perth during his record-breaking Ashes series (766 runs at an average of 127.66) in 2010-11. “You’ve always got this nagging doubt as a batter,” he said. “What if I don’t score any more runs? You’re always thinking, ‘What about the next innings?’”
I always thought it was more about luck than form. Players go through periods when the good lady is always by their side and therefore scores pile up. Witness how much luck Marnus Labuschagne profited from when he was at his best in Test cricket.
That is not to say there are not periods when technical faults creep in, as they can when switching formats, and when the bat just does not feel right in your hands or, as the former Australia opener Matthew Hayden once said rather hilariously as well as crudely, “Like holding another man’s old fella in your hands.”
But it is easy to forget sometimes how much failure befalls a batter. As another Australian, Greg Chappell, once said: “You should look back at your career stats. More often than not you’d find that you scored runs in every fourth or fifth innings, and hence every innings of low score is actually taking you closer to the innings in which you’d score runs.”
Advertisement
The player most worried going into this Test may be the No3 Ollie Pope. His seven championship games this year have yielded just one fifty and an average of 22.88. His Blast form has been better, averaging 34.16 in eight matches, but his Test form fell off a cliff last winter in India after a sublime 196 in the first Test.
The captain, Ben Stokes, might have preferred a few more runs for Durham in his three championship matches (he averaged only 20.40), but his primary aim was to rediscover his bowling zip and he has certainly done that.
The ones, inevitably, not to fret about are the Yorkshiremen, Joe Root and Harry Brook. Root has averaged 55.25 in his five championship matches, with two centuries, while Brook averaged 77.60, also with two hundreds, in his five outings, as well as enjoying a fine T20 World Cup.
And the debutant Jamie Smith has had a wonderful season for Surrey in both the championship (averaging 56.41 with two centuries) and the Blast (averaging 40.71) but even then, as many of our readers pointed out when the Test selection was made, his championship statistics are not as impressive as those of another contender, Durham’s Ollie Robinson (averaging 71.63), who is also, unlike Smith, a regular wicketkeeper with his county.
There are many in the game — and Australia’s Ricky Ponting was a huge advocate of this — who argue that, as a batsman, going into a Test series slightly undercooked (which is the route Crawley, Root and Pope took in missing the last round of championship matches), and therefore hungry for the hard work required to build an innings, is the best course of action. But are England risking salmonella here?
Advertisement
We should remember that Bazball has long looked to mock the more traditional truisms. The Test head coach, Brendon McCullum, said after the winter tour to India that Bazball would need to be refined, but the only changes to the batting order are replacing Jonny Bairstow with the equally hard-hitting Brook and ditching Ben Foakes for the much more belligerent Smith.
I’m not sure we should expect anything much different from the previous in terms of approach. As for the form those players are in, who knows? Perhaps let’s just see who gets lucky with the good lady.
England v West Indies
First Test, Lord’s
Starts Wednesday, 11am
TV Sky Sports
