5 minute read
We are absolutely adamant that England cannot possibly withstand public and media appetite for change in the wake of the Ashes drubbing. (Does 4-1 actually qualify as a drubbing given the three previous scorelines Down Under were all worse than that?) One way or another, rightly or wrongly, action must be seen to be taken and if the captain, coach and managing director of men’s cricket are all keeping their jobs then other heads will have to roll instead – players’ heads.
This is the way it has to work. If people want skulls and you explain that, “actually, sorry, no skulls – we’re just going to do things slightly differently instead,” then you absolutely cannot just carry on much as you were doing previously. England have to demonstrate how they’ve changed. They have to put forward clear, visible differences.
In short, there still have to be skulls.
“We’ve overvalued loyalty and overvalued having a settled team”
That’s what Rob Key apparently concluded recently.
“We thought what we wanted to do is make sure we have a team that is settled out there. But what that does is it creates an environment where there’s not enough consequence. We need to be more ruthless with our selection.”
It’s time to unsettle everyone with disloyalty, basically. So who’s in the firing line?
Zak Crawley – OUT
Honestly? We think he’s out. After all these years of Teflon mediocrity, there are visible holes in Crawley’s protective coating now. If the loyalty threshold truly has moved then he surely now finds himself on the wrong side of it as an exemplary victim.
Unless he makes a million runs in the early weeks of the County Championship – which unfortunately for him is a thing he’s never before been able to do – then Crawley will surely become a warning to all of the England players that actually, you know what, we’ve decided there should be consequences.
This would be quite a peculiar development given the batter’s been such a fixture of the side and it could also prove terminal for his Test career. While he is still young for a Test opener – during the Ashes we pointed out that Mike Carberry, Nick Compton, Mark Stoneman, Jason Roy, Rory Burns and Alex Lees were all older than he is now when they made their debuts – it’s quite hard to go back on dropping someone who has already amassed such a sizeable body of so-so work.
Crawley has been given a great many opportunities to prove himself – enough, you could argue, that he has already done precisely that. For years and years, he has generally done just enough to maintain the idea of Zak Crawley, without ever really managing to move things beyond that.
Crawley’s upcoming task is therefore not really to prove himself, but to disprove himself.
Ollie Pope – STILL OUT
Technically, Pope’s been dropped already, which is just one of several reasons why it’s probably a little unfair that he’s so often lumped in with Crawley as a batter who deserves to face sterner judgement.
While the two men have played the same number of Tests and roughly the same number of first-class matches, Pope has hit nine Test hundreds to Crawley’s five and also averages almost 50 per cent more than him in first-class cricket with twice as many three-figure scores.
He is, in short, a far better batter and could probably do okay if someone could prevent him falling victim to some of the more broad brush team messaging that doesn’t really benefit him.
Jamie Smith – NOT OUT
Jamie Smith played the worst shot of the winter, but the brain of many an otherwise excellent cricketer has momentarily melted in the Ashes environment before now and Smith had also been shouldering a sizeable workload in the field.
His first Ashes went wrong, but that alone shouldn’t see him ejected from the side, should it? He might need to find a bit of early season form, but England want to do well in five-Test series and in the one before the Ashes, less than a year ago, Smith made 184 not out against India as well as several other useful scores.
Will Jacks – OUT
If anything Will Jacks’ fantastic T20 World Cup performances served only to better highlight the utter pointlessness of his presence in England’s Test team.
With the red ball, he is not a spin bowler, but a cricketer who sometimes bowls spin. This would be a lot more useful to England if he also happened to be a Test batter, but unfortunately, as things stand, he is not.
In the longest format, Jacks is a buyer of wickets and a scorer of meaningless consolation runs. England need more than that.
Brydon Carse – PROBABLY NOT OUT
Brydon Carse had a terrible Ashes in which he was the second-highest wicket-taker. This combination of facts is still hard to make sense of. We feel we summed up the essence of his experience in the article linked below.
If England can avoid giving him the new ball, we’d guess Carse is probably still in the team? Isn’t he? Maybe not. We have no idea.
Matt Potts – A BIT FURTHER OUT
Matt Potts is in that age-old position where he shouldn’t really be judged too harshly based on one hospital pass appearance at the arse end of a disastrous Ashes tour, but he also unavoidably will be.
England had worked their way down the pecking order when Potts played in Sydney but you feel they’ll have to get a little bit lower still before he gets to play again.
Jofra Archer and Mark Wood – NOT OUT, BUT ARE THEY EVER TRULY IN ANYWAY?
It seems faintly insane to suggest Jofra Archer or Mark Wood might be members of England’s first XI given the availability disclaimers inherent in such an assertion. In that respect, it’s business as usual really.
Wood is currently recovering from what he was told was “an explosion” in his knee during the Ashes. Archer is in the equally familiar position where he’s fit enough to bowl four overs but no-one seems much inclined to engineer a situation where he might prove himself capable of bowling a greater number.
Likely openings
So what are we looking for then? One opener and one spinner, plus maybe an opening bowler if they conclude that a Gus Atkinson, Brydon Carse and Josh Tongue attack is a bit too first-changey?