Pringle: Buttler’s form England’s only concern
There will be those fixated on strike-rates who will be tut-tutting every time Joe Root soaks up balls they feel others might smite to the boundary. And yet there are many, as well, who feel Root, England’s best all-round batsman, is integral to England’s chances of hoisting the Champions Trophy in four weeks’ time.
Root, fresh, if that is the right word, from England’s recent training camp in Spain, made 37 off 51 balls against South Africa on his home ground of Headingley on Wednesday. It was a curious innings, one that began brightly before slowing to a strike-rate of 72.5, a figure five runs below that of Alastair Cook, which was considered too pedestrian for white-ball cricket.
It is obviously something Root acknowledges might be a weakness as he has been working with Julien Wood, a former Hampshire batsman and someone now teaching baseball hitting techniques to England’s one-day players, with Root the latest to utilise them. Mind you, if it was a baseball technique which caused him to hole out off Andile Phlehlukwayo on Wednesday, he might be better off sticking to agricultural cricket shots.
In a series such as this one against South Africa, you can make a strong case for hitting and hitting by batting deep and hanging the consequences. If you ‘play without fear’, as Eoin Morgan has advocated since England returned in high dudgeon from the 2015 World Cup, it could come off twice and you could win the series.
But tournament play, where there are knockouts such as the Champions Trophy, require the team to play well in the big moments, which requires brain power and bottle, two provinces in which Root excels.
An example of this was evident early on in England’s innings on Wednesday. Jason Roy, one of those whose experience in the Indian Premier League has not been overly beneficial (he hardly played), tried to smash the cover off a ball from Wayne Parnell and was caught behind as he lost control of the bat. Root, more balanced and less gung-ho, twice punched the self-same ball from Parnell for two threes through the covers (when did you last see two threes in a match let alone in the space of a few balls?). It is an approach that utilises care without being beholden to caution and one Alex Hales now adopts, at least until he is seeing the ball well.
You also need batsmen like that when you bat first, to help post a competitive score. Few teams want to bat first now for fear of not knowing what a good score is with regard to the conditions, but it remains something one team has to do every match. It remains unpopular, though, with many teams imploding trying to post 380 plus “just in case”.
Quite why this has happened is a puzzle. It wasn’t long ago that most sides preferred to bat first in one-day cricket, providing the pitch wasn’t too juicy at the start. With conditions unlikely to vary for the duration of the match, the argument was that scoreboard pressure added a telling dimension that many teams could not cope with.
Yet day-night matches (the majority of ODIs these days though not during this Champions Trophy) do seem to cause conditions to change, often to the advantage of the side batting second (dew makes the ball skid on making it easier to time while simultaneously making it trickier for the bowlers to grip). Batsmen seem to cope with pressure better now, too, while shrinking boundaries and the better rebounding qualities of bats have made bowlers a lot more more nervous than they used to be.
With 300 the new par score, teams tend to bat deep with any compromise coming in the bowling department rather than the batting. It is a strategy that certainly helped England when setting South Africa a total at Headingley. With Hales out for a run-aball 61 and Root gone for 37, it needed a superb hundred from Eoin Morgan, with some hearty contributions from the lower middle-order, such as Moeen Ali’s 77 off 55 balls, to get England above that threshold.
Having endured a lean 2016, Morgan has been reeling off big scores for fun this year, a player with all facets of the batting process in synch. It is rare for all those cherries to be lined up in a row and having a captain in such fine form will have knock-on benefits for the team – the confidence from one transferring to the other, especially with regard to strong body language and sharp decision-making.
England are fifth in the world one-day rankings and if they are to exceed their position you feel some of Morgan’s stardust will have to be transferred to Jos Buttler, either that or hand the gloves and number six slot to Jonny Bairstow.
You can understand why the selectors want Buttler in the team. He has a bewildering array of shots and hits the ball in unpredictable ways to parts of the ground not easily defended, something Bairstow does not offer (though he does offer considerable muscle).
In an opposite convention to Morgan, Buttler has had a stinker in 2017, passing 30 only once in his last eight one-day innings. Clearly you need great confidence to play at such a high tenor and his is probably low at present. To address that he needs to persuade, if not the selectors, then certainly himself that he can still turn it on when required, something he can still do over the remainder of this series against South Africa.
When you look at England’s batting, at least the top seven, only Buttler looks vulnerable currently, though his potential to hurt opponents in a very short space of time remains a tantalising option. Otherwise, the order contains a good mix if one perhaps a tad over-reliant on captain Morgan’s runs at present.
But if Root can overcome his ring-rust (remember his cerebral match-winning 70 off 44 balls against South Africa in the last World T20) and Roy can temper his lust for world domination in the opening overs, England have a batting line-up that can post challenging scores.Then, it will be over to the bowlers.
When you look at England’s batting, at least the top seven, only Buttler looks currently vulnerable