The lack of quality pace and spin-bowling options in the County Championship is not going to help England as they look to pick a squad for this year’s Ashes series.
“He will now,” read the message from Nottinghamshire when I asked why Ben Duckett had not been opening for them. This was last winter when Duckett had just made a triumphant return to the Test side, scoring a century against Pakistan in Rawalpindi at the top of the order.
Last year Duckett asked Nottinghamshire to bat at No.3 and made 1,012 impressive runs at an average of 72.28, but it is refreshing to see that this season, of his own accord – with no diktat from England – he has moved up a spot in line with his international role and is scoring runs freely. So too is Ollie Pope, who is batting at No.3 for Surrey, having been thrust into that spot by England last summer with no previous experience there in first-class cricket.
These things do matter, even in this modern age of flexibility and adaptability, where so many accepted truths are so easily disproved, and the hegemony of international cricket is being challenged almost by the day through the rise and rise of the franchise game. Whether counties should always be dancing to England’s tune is a wider issue that raises the question of the very purpose of the county game. In my opinion it should be a delicate balance of each county producing players for themselves and for England from their pathways, providing high-class cricket for the community to watch and hopefully being successful in the process.
However, this also reignites the debate about whether scoring runs in the county game is actually any real sort of preparation for Test cricket, as hinted at by Duckett’s comment after his excellent century against Middlesex at Lord’s last week. “I don’t think I’ll be walking at bowlers as much or paddling Pat Cummins,” the 28-year-old said about the forthcoming Ashes challenge.
Indeed, it was one of the more striking statistics to emerge from Sir Andrew Strauss’s high-performance review last year that less than 20 per cent of the bowling in county cricket exceeds 84mph, while that figure goes up to above 40 per cent in international cricket. Also, in county cricket, 22 per cent of overs are bowled by spinners – the lowest of any country’s domestic system – while in internationals it is 41 per cent. Little wonder, then, that Strauss lamented county cricket’s lack of encouragement to develop the “extreme skills” of pace and spin that are required in international cricket. This understandably makes life very difficult for selectors when attempting to gauge a player’s readiness for the huge step up to Tests, with Kent’s Ben Compton a salient example.
Compton’s opening partner at Kent, Zak Crawley, is the England incumbent alongside Duckett, and I am pretty sure that Crawley, with a slightly altered and much improved set-up at the crease, would have been selected for the Ashes even before his blistering 170 off 183 balls against Essex on Saturday.
However, the late-developing left-handed Compton, 29, had a fine season in 2022 and is continuing that form this year. Is he a Test player? Ask most insiders and they point to a potential weakness against the short ball and Surrey’s Jamie Overton hitting him last year, with his helmet falling on to the stumps (he was not out because of a new ECB regulation). But then how much of the short stuff has he faced? How much practice is needed against it these days?
Compton is not an obvious “Bazball” player, with a strike rate of only 39.86 last year when making 1,193 County Championship runs at an average of 54.23 – but his strike rate is up this season to 52.09 and so is his average at 71.75. Surely at some stage such a flood of runs must break the dam of selectorial uncertainty? That was always my plan years ago in a situation that I would say was very similar to Compton’s, where I was a late developer too and exceeding most expectations, and it was almost as if people considered all the runs to be just too good to be true.
Another left-hander, Keaton Jennings, is also a fascinating case. The 30-year-old played 17 Tests between 2016 and 2019, averaging only 25.19, but his outstanding form last season earned him a spot on the winter Test tour to Pakistan, where some thought he would play instead of Duckett, but he did not. The Lancashire opener is in superb touch again this term, as evidenced by his unbeaten 189 before retiring hurt against Somerset last week. Could he come again at international level?
My colleague Mike Atherton’s description of his style during Lancashire’s opening match against Surrey as “upright, stiff-looking and a touch mechanical” was perfect, detailing exactly why Jennings has had problems at home in Tests – averaging 17 as opposed to 35 abroad, where his excellence on the sweep and reverse-sweep has come to the fore.
“He will always struggle in England while he does not bend his front knee,” one prominent coach told me some time ago, and while I am still not sure Jennings has his weight quite forward enough (the crucial change Crawley has made) at ball release to do that regularly, he has at least made efforts to alter his method. Previously he would hold his bat aloft but now, inspired by watching a video of the Australian great Matthew Hayden, he waits for the bowler while tapping his bat on the ground. This is manna to me as a coach. If only more players would do this. The modern way is to stand with bat aloft, but too many then drop their hands without taking them back up again, thus only being able to offer a jabbing motion at the ball with a dominant bottom hand.
With one’s hands starting low they have to be taken back to play any sort of shot, creating a rhythm and flow to batting. The young players I coach are probably tired of my exhortations to “take their hands back” as they move towards the ball (front foot) or away from it (back foot), but I hope they understand its importance. You cannot be a top batsman without doing it, a fact Jennings recognises.
His innings against Somerset was made at a healthy strike rate of 76.51 and he has undoubtedly taken on board the merits and demands of Bazball, with the ECB’s managing director of men’s cricket, Rob Key, saying even last winter that he had “gone about things in a manner aligned to what Ben [Stokes] and Brendon [McCullum] are after”.
But if players want a warning about the extremes of Bazball they should look at how Warwickshire’s Chris Benjamin fared last week in a second XI championship match. He made a pair in a 490-run defeat by Somerset, with his second-innings dismissal coming first ball attempting a reverse-scoop. Benjamin was one of the successes of the inaugural Hundred, making a match-winning 24 not out off 15 balls on debut for Birmingham Phoenix. On commentary Kevin Pietersen screamed, “What is that?” to Nasser Hussain in awe when he played that same reverse-scoop to London Spirit’s Blake Cullen for six.
We can presume that the same question was asked in a rather different sense at Warwickshire’s Portland Road ground last week.
Originally published as Feasting on lacklustre County bowling won’t help England ahead of crucial Ashes series
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