Recalled Gary must show he can keep pace at No 3

I have no problem with the recall of Gary Ballance to Test cricket. his sheer weight of runs for Yorkshire has been hard to ignore, and it wasn’t as if he was a disaster first time round. In fact, he played very well until bowlers started to work him out. When he was first dropped by england, he was averaging 47 — not exactly a mug, then. What worries me is that he’s going straight into the No 3 position. and it worries me for a few reasons. The first is that england’s innings had a nice tempo to it when Joe Root came in at first drop. With Ballance coming straight in after alastair Cook, the danger is that the innings plods along, potentially handing control to the opposition. Then there’s the neverending debate about his technique. There haven’t been many players in the history of the game who have flourished against the new ball by staying as deep in the crease as Ballance does, which is why I’d have played him at No 5 or 6 instead. What we saw when he first played Test cricket was that guys like Mitchell Johnson and New Zealand’s Trent Boult would push him even further back with short stuff, then slip in the full-length delivery. It was a sucker punch, and Ballance kept nicking off or getting bowled — 70 per cent of his Test dismissals against seamers have come from full-length deliveries. he’s clearly mentally strong, because you don’t score as many runs as he has, with a technique like that, without having faith in your own game. But we’ll find out how strong he is when he’s up against someone like Morne Morkel, who’s an excellent bowler to left-handers. The answer will lie in how well he deals with that sucker punch. I heard that his Yorkshire coach andrew Gale says he looked really good driving Steven Finn down the ground recently. But from what I’ve seen, Finn is bowling early 80mph at the moment. and that’s the difference between county cricket and international cricket. Ballance will be facing highclass bowlers operating around 90mph. If he succeeds against this South african attack, we’ll know he’s made serious progress.