After Lord’s crash will Cook be Strauss’s panel-beater?
Cook has a couple of advantages when it comes to knowing what is required to succeed – he is England’s leading scorer
When it comes to disputes between captains and selectors over who should play for England, 114 years may have passed but very little appears to have changed.
Back in July 1902, when the England skipper A.C. MacLaren was first shown the names of the side he had been given to lead in the fourth Test against Australia at Old Trafford, his response was short and to the point.
“My God,” he said.“Look what they’ve sent me.”
They, or rather, he, was the authoritarian chairman of selectors Lord Hawke, with whom MacLaren was regularly at odds, and the major point of contention was the decision to omit S.F. Barnes, C.B. Fry and Gilbert Jessop, even though Barnes had taken 6-49 in the previous Test.
MacLaren’s fears were confirmed when England lost by three runs to give Australia an unassailable lead. Hawke’s big pick, Fred Tate, dropped a catch, was last man out and never played again.
Even though he had figures of 5-3-7-2 in the Aussies’ second innings, he also had to play the rest of his career knowing “Tate’s Match” had been named after him, and not in a good way.
Alastair Cook did not quite go that far last week at Lord’s when apparently overruled by national selector James Whitaker over whether James Anderson should play in the first Investec Test against Pakistan.
But his disinclination to disagree with the proposition that he disagreed strongly with the decision to deprive him of the services of England’s leading Test wicket-taker and his somewhat lukewarm backing for the current system of selection on the eve of the second in Manchester suggests the age-old questions over who picks the England side and who should pick the side remain as thornily relevant as ever.
Cook did express “surprise” yesterday that this little local difficulty seemed to have mushroomed into stories that England’s director of cricket Andrew Strauss is about to sack Whitaker, Angus Fraser and Mick Newell from the panel, reports strenuously denied by the ECB.
But there have been enough nods and winks over certain recent picks to fuel a decent amount of speculation that Cook and his coach Trevor Bayliss, the last member of the panel, have been unhappy enough that their wishes have not been paramount that Strauss may well do what his instincts told him to do when he was appointed last May, and revamp the whole system to give them the power to pick who they want, when they want.
The retention of Nick Compton for the start of the summer following his inconclusive return in South Africa was the first issue over which captain and coach were said not to have seen eye to eye with Whitaker & Co. The refusal to consider picking Jos Buttler as a specialist batsman was another.
And when, after watching Gary Ballance score a century for Yorkshire against Middlesex at Scarborough, Fraser and Whitaker pulled him into the squad for the opening Test against Pakistan, Cook appeared to have been as intrigued by that call as the vast majority of observers who never saw it coming.
To be fair to Whitaker and his panel, once Strauss decided to put his axe away and let them come up with a side to win last summer’s Ashes, they did just that.
But present defeat has a habit of obscuring previous successes and despite the fact that England lost a close match they might have won at Headquarters, the selection system and those running it are now well and truly exposed, which is almost certainly behind their move to send Cook and Bayliss 14 players for the current match and let them get on with it.
Evidence of how not to run this particular railway is available from far more recent history than 1902 and memories are rather fresher of the unholy mess that England found themselves in during the mid-Nineties when skipper Mike Atherton found team selection taken completely out of his hands and placed in the care of “supremo”, Ray Illingworth, and his cohorts Fred Titmus and Brian Bolus.
Atherton, his control and authority undermined by the dirtin-the-pocket incident, could do nothing but scowl silently when, for the 1994-95 tour Down Under, Illingworth not only omitted his tried and trusted lieutenant Fraser from the squad, but picked instead Aussie-raised Kent fast bowler Martin McCague and Surrey’s Joe Benjamin.
That worked; dubbed by the local Press “the rat who joined the sinking ship”, McCague broke down during the first Test in Brisbane while Benjamin went down with shingles and never made it onto the field. Finally called up as a replacement, Fraser returned for the third Test in Sydney, his seven wickets in the match taking England to the brink of victory.
Whatever experience Illingworth was able to bring to the job, the fact was that he hadn’t played Test cricket for 20 years and some of his picks showed it.
Captains are not always right, of course, nor are they necessarily always more right than selectors and Cook’s personal views on players is restricted to those he encounters in Division Two.
But he does have a couple of advantages over them when it comes to knowing what is required to succeed in Test cricket, the main one being he is England’s leading Test run-scorer of all time.
Bayliss freely admits that his knowledge of county cricket is sketchy at best, which is why any new committee would have to lean heavily on, though not rely on, the views of a trusted network of scouts.
It may only be a matter of time before Strauss does act as has been forecast.
Provided the correct checks and balances are in place, a threeman committee on which the captain has at least a major say looks like being the best available option. It would certainly have helped Archie MacLaren.