Cook has to find special ingredient
ENGLAND had a good day yesterday at the start of this second Test in conditions that suited them. If they go on to bat themselves into a strong position, they can look at it in one of two ways.
England can be happy they are good enough to take wickets at home and when the ball is swinging and conditions are in their favour — like here. If that’s the case then carry on as you are, but a position of strength is often a good one from which to take a long hard look at yourself and say ‘how can we improve?’.
The biggest reason why England have not won away from home since 2012 is that they are lacking something different in their attack.
The whole of England’s bowling psyche is about containment, it’s about bowling maidens and building pressure, as we saw for much of the first day here in Grenada until West Indies started to crack.
That’s fine and it has been very successful for them but with so much batting depth now, with Jos Buttler arguably the best Test No 8 England have ever had, they can afford to pick someone who gives them an extra ingredient.
There are those who feel it could have been provided here by Adil Rashid (right) but by all accounts he hasn’t been bowling well enough to warrant selection.
England have a good spinner in Moeen Ali — even though he looked rusty yesterday — and a more than capable back-up in Joe Root. So perhaps that trump card could come in place of one of the four seamers who all have similar attributes.
The one I would keep an eye on is Mark Wood. From what I’ve seen of him there is a bit of Simon Jones about him and the Welshman was a key element of England’s best attack of the last 20 years — the 2005 Ashes line-up.
Jones learnt a lot of the skills that made him the 2005 trump card on the Caribbean tour a year earlier, for instance the ability to gain skiddy reverse swing on flat pitches, and Wood might have done that now.
I don’t like building players up before they have played Test cricket and then quickly passing judgment on them when they are given their chance but Wood seems to have that different trajectory which should suit overseas pitches. He is the sort of bowler who almost takes the pitch out of the equation — like Jones and like Darren Gough and perhaps Craig White from my day.
In England we don’t produce enough of that sort of bowler and when we do get one we can hold them back a bit because they can be considered a luxury, or too much of a gamble.
Look at the championship game which has just finished at Chelmsford between Essex and Kent. Wickets fell cheaply to medium-paced seam bowlers like David Masters, Jesse Ryder and Darren Stevens. Players like that will never have the attributes to take wickets overseas for England. A bowler like Tymal Mills, a left-armer with real pace who moved on from Essex to Sussex last winter, might. But will he be trusted to form part of a county attack in English conditions? Ben Stokes was the pick of the bowlers for me yesterday because of the fuller length that he bowled. I was a bit surprised at how ‘ back of a length’ he was in Antigua because I’ve seen him play in county cricket, bowl full and reverse it. He was definitely searching for that fuller length yesterday.
Yes, at times England bowled a bit short. It might have been a case of coming from Antigua, where it was certainly not a ‘ hit the top of off stump’ pitch, to here four days later where they found conditions conducive to bowling.
I would have done exactly the same as Alastair Cook and bowled first and even though England were not quite at their best wickets started to tumble.
Yet you have to remember that conditions and pitches change during the course of a Test — Antigua swung for three days and then didn’t for the last two — and sides have to aspire to a balanced attack.
This England attack might be good enough for Grenada on a day like yesterday but they must seek that little bit more.