Ben Stokes, everybody agrees, is a man on a mission. But it might be more accurate to call him a man on two missions. He doesn’t merely long to make Test cricket exciting: he yearns to make selection boring.
Picking the England team used to be a national sport. The worse they played, the more fun we all had working out who should take their places. Not any more. Selection has become a game that even the selectors themselves can barely be bothered to play. At the end of a Test, when we’re still trying to get our heads round the cliffhanger Stokes has just concocted, the news slips out in a single sentence. “England have named an unchanged squad for the next Test.”
Later, if we’re lucky, we get some faint speculation as to whether one seamer will replace another. Then comes the killer blow: “England have named an unchanged team.” And this happens a full day before the match begins. For a great sportsman, Stokes can be a terrible spoilsport.
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In the Ashes, the five Tests came so close together that rotation was pronounced inevitable. In the event, England used just 14 players. The only whiff of rotation came when Jimmy Anderson was left out of the third Test and even then it may have been on merit, as the most successful seamer in history had suddenly forgotten how to take more than one wicket in an innings.
That Test, at Headingley, was the one for which England made the most changes – bringing in Mark Wood for Anderson, Chris Woakes for the injured Ollie Pope, and the fit-again Moeen Ali for Josh Tongue. And it worked: between them Wood, Woakes and Moeen supplied 15 wickets in the match, plus four cameos with the bat. While Stokes’s loyalty to his troops has been admirable, and the proof is in the winning, selection is the one area where he hasn’t been funky enough.
Now it’s about to get more interesting, whether he likes it or not. His next assignment is the toughest yet: a five-Test series in India, starting in January. Over the past decade India have won 32 home Tests and lost only three. Stokes and the other selectors – the coach Brendon McCullum, the boss Rob Key and the invisible man Luke Wright – face some tricky decisions. Hell, they may even hold a meeting.
This is the agenda. 1) How to replace Stuart Broad. 2) How to replace Moeen. 3) Whether to retain Anderson, who is 41 and fading. 4) Whether to retain Woakes, who, when he packs his trunk for a Test tour, leaves his excellence at home. 5) Whether to recall Pope, who is England’s Test vice-captain. 5) Whether to recall Ben Foakes, who usually keeps wicket in the subcontinent. 6) Whether to risk Rehan Ahmed, whose wicket-taking this summer makes Anderson look prolific. Oh, and before he gets to all that, Stokes has to decide whether to have a knee operation in the hope that he can be an all-rounder again.
Some of these dilemmas are intertwined. With Broad gone, Anderson probably gets a reprieve: Stokes loves an elderly bowler (and Anderson does have the best Test average of any visiting bowler in India over the past four years). If Stokes can’t bowl, Pope and Foakes can’t play, because the top six is fully booked, with Jonny Bairstow hanging on to the gloves, and five bowlers are needed. Two of those five have to be decent batters, which means Woakes will remain indispensable unless Stokes turns to his mini-me, Sam Curran.
Even if Stokes is able to resume delivering epic old-ball spells, there is room for only one of Pope and Foakes. England can have either their best keeper or their best bat-pad catcher, not both. If Jack Leach had any hair, he would be tearing it out. The good news for Leach is that, as England won’t play four specialist seamers in India, he can take Broad’s place. He may have to spend the autumn working on his sense of theatre.
Let’s assume Stokes can bowl, by hook or by crook. For the first Test at Hyderabad, the XI could look like this: 1) Zak Crawley, 2) Ben Duckett, 3) Stokes, 4) Root, 5) Harry Brook, 6) Bairstow, 7) Foakes, 8) Woakes or Curran or Ahmed or Will Jacks, 9) Wood or Olly Stone, 10) Leach, 11) Anderson or Tongue. Ollie Robinson, the closest thing to Broad, should be in there too. But he may have to spend the autumn working on his batting, so he can join the queue for No 8.
It’s a team of two halves. The batting is settled, balanced and high-powered, albeit unproven in India apart from Root (Crawley and Duckett average 12 there between them). The bowling is a collection of bits and bobs and ifs and buts. It will only resemble a proper attack if Wood and Stone are fit, Anderson returns to form and Stokes continues to coax wickets out of part-time spinners.
Can Bazball possibly work in India? It can if your name is Rishabh Pant, but then he doesn’t have to do it against Messrs Ashwin and Jadeja. England have never scored three runs an over through a series on Indian soil, let alone the five that is Stokes’s preferred tempo. Last winter, he tore up the conventions of Test cricket in Pakistan: now he has to do it in India too.
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