3 minute read
In the wake of England’s most successful Ashes tour for 15 years, it was widely agreed that some England players needed to play smarter and so that is what Brendon McCullum has promised to deliver henceforth. Some players didn’t need to play smarter though. One in particular has built an enviable record through his absolute wholehearted commitment to playing the daftest cricket he can imagine.
No-one’s saying Harry Brook had a great Ashes, even though he was England’s second-highest run-scorer and pretty much averaged 40. However, the fact those returns were seen as a colossal failure is because of what preceded them.
Brook’s witless self-destruction and addiction to circus flourishes has so far furnished him with a Test batting average of 54.79. Plaintive cries that his approach means he’s not making the most of his talent rather overlook that simple fact. No-one has averaged that much for England since the 1960s. We’d therefore argue that, if anything, Brook has hit upon a way of transcending his talent.
The last time England played New Zealand saw Brook at his daft best. In the first Test, he frittered away several lives while taking England from 45-3 to 381-6 via a personal score of 171. In the second Test, he walked out at 26-3 and when England fell to 50-4, he responded with an onslaught of fours and sixes, adding 22 to the total in his next seven balls.
He finished with 123 off 115 balls with 11 fours and five sixes.
It was Peak Harry Brook.
He was going pretty well at this point. The month before, he’d hit 317 off 322 balls against Pakistan – England’s first triple hundred since Graham Gooch’s 333 against India in 1990.
Shackleslessness
Last time New Zealand toured, the whole England team needed pulling in a more carefree direction. Some did better out of this group recalibration than others, but almost everyone benefited to some degree. McCullum’s was a broad message that initially brought a massive net positive.
It was a neat trick and very well executed, but having already secured those gains, McCullum’s coaching method of continuing to say much the same things in the hope that things would continue getting better and better clearly didn’t work. England didn’t really get any further. If anything, they went backwards because several of the newer, younger players would in fact have benefited more from being steered in the opposite direction.
Ollie Pope, for example. “I was probably just too eager to put the bowlers under pressure without necessarily realising it at the time,” he conceded of his own Ashes failures.
In short, the wider team messaging was doing him few favours.
This is a bit of a side point, but there’s actually a case here that the players who would benefit most from McCullum’s new post-Ashes goal of becoming “slightly smarter in some of those key moments” are the likes of Pope and Zak Crawley, who aren’t around any more.
And while those players were clearly pulled too far from their own, personal optimal approach, responding to that by turning the whole ship around now risks blunting the effectiveness of the players who did respond well.
For example, as mad as it sounds, floating the notion that there are times when you shouldn’t bat like a complete dingbat could stymie England’s most dynamic batter. Batting like a complete dingbat is never the answer, but you also don’t want to steer Harry Brook too far away from that, because evidence suggests his peak performance level – a level that is really quite fantastically accomplished – sits quite a long way towards the dingbat end of the spectrum.
Team philosophies are hazardous matter in a game that is to a great extent won and lost by individuals. What might land as a sensible bit of advice for one team member can destructively undermine another.
You don’t want Harry Brook trying to bat like Jacques Kallis. You want to get the best out of him, and to do that, you want to keep him just about within touching distance of dingbat.