Pope’s call-up proves England making young talent the priority

New policy suggests the Test careers of an older generation are finished, writes Tim Wigmore

They called it The Process. In the NBA, the Philadelphia 76ers developed an audacious strategy – essentially, losing for years to get the best draft picks, and then using these to build a brilliant young team.

England cricket, of course, has no such luxury. There is no draft in international sport selection – and, besides, losing on such a scale would not be tolerated. But this summer it is possible to glimpse the contours of England’s own process: bringing the average age of the side down, and developing a selection policy designed to forge a new team for the long-term.

At Lord’s on Thursday, Ollie Pope is poised to become the third 20-year-old debutant, after Dominic Bess and Sam Curran, for England this summer. In each case, the players were selected because they were simply felt to be the best for the job.

And yet something broader appears to be at work: a concerted attempt to regenerate the Test team through youth.

In recent years, England have not quite been as bad at Test cricket as the Philadelphia 76ers were in the 2015-16 NBA season, when they lost 72 games while winning only 10. But England have not been very good at all: they have lost more Tests than they have won under Trevor Bayliss’s reign.

From Dhaka 2016 to the Lord’s Test against Pakistan this year, England won five Tests, drew three and lost 13, including defeats against all seven Test nations they played in the period.

Last summer, four England batsmen in their late 20s or early 30s – normally considered the prime of a batsman’s career – were called up to the Test side based on their county records. Now, none of Gary Ballance, Dawid Malan, Tom Westley and Mark Stoneman remain. Test careers come and go, but the fate of this quartet feels like it has a deeper significance. It is not just the Test careers of four English Test batsmen that have, in all probability, ended.

It feels like the Test careers of an entire generation of batsmen in county cricket might have ended, too. Besides Pope, the next batsman closest to a call-up at Lord’s was Worcestershire’s Joe Clarke; he is only 22.

Predicting how county players will perform in Test cricket is notoriously unreliable. Every selection is filled with jeopardy. No amount of character analysis or data mining can ever completely gauge how a player will cope with the heightened scrutiny and elevated challenges that Test cricket brings.

And yet in Test history one trend is inescapable. Those who have the best careers are generally those who debut youngest. Of the 40 batsmen to average 50 or more over at least 20 Tests, 27 made their debuts before turning 23, and 13 before they turned 21.

In a sense, this is unsurprising: the most vibrant talents simply tend to bloom swiftest. But it also shows that, statistically, there is

more chance of uncovering a prodigy than unearthing the next Mike Hussey, who made his Test debut aged 30 and averaged more than 50.

Hussey had to wait so long because he played in the greatestever generation of Australian batting depth. Unlike then, England’s pretenders in their late 20s and early 30s – of whom James Hildreth has the most compelling case – have seen an abundance of their contemporaries tried and discarded. With each failure, so fishing in the same pool of talent – rather than going to someone outside the County Championship system, such as Jos Buttler, or empowering a new generation – has become less attractive.

The selection of Pope is infused with risk. He has played less than a

Statistically, there is more chance of uncovering a prodigy than the next Mike Hussey

full season’s worth of County Championship matches. He has had the great benefit of playing his home games at the Oval, the best first-class batting conditions in the country. Should he play, Pope will bat at four for England – higher than he has ever batted in the County Championship.

The counter-argument is two-fold. First, Pope does not need to be that good to represent an improvement. After being picked last summer, Ballance, Malan, Westley and Stoneman averaged a combined 26.81, passing 65 only once across 59 innings.

The best argument, though, is simply to glance at the first-class averages of all current England batsmen. First, there is Pope, with that absurd average of 63.25. Then there is daylight – a lot of it. And then, with averages in the high 40s, there are Joe Root and Alastair Cook, both a few months older than Pope now when they made their Test debuts.

The start of any international career is unknowable, but the tantalising promise of Pope is that he could enjoy a Test career of equal repute.