Batting flops have been failed by broken system
Obsession with short-form game is proving costly at the top level with players lacking basic technique
Brian Close used to say: “If you can’t think, you can’t bat.” A thinking cricketer is a better cricketer. But I do not blame Ollie Pope and Zak Crawley, or any of our other young players for struggling to adapt to Test cricket.
For most it is not their technique that is the problem but the structure of our game, driven by money and Twenty20, whack-it cricket.
They just do not play enough first-class cricket to train their brains properly and now I read that Rob Key, the director of England cricket, wants to reduce the County Championship even further. Youngsters should be playing more, not less. They learn nothing sat on their backsides or working in the gym.
Joe Root is a better Test player for not playing Twenty20. All he trains for is Test cricket. You never see Root play the scoop, ramp or any fancy shots. He does not need to because he is so good at all the orthodox shots. His mind is trained, his technique is honed and has been from a young age to play proper cricket.
At the moment Sir Andrew Strauss is leading a review into English cricket and talking to people from the outside, such as cycling’s Sir Dave Brailsford and football’s Dan Ashworth, but what do these outsiders know about cricket?
The England and Wales Cricket Board is besotted with big names from outside our game but do not ask us great players about the environment we grew up in, the coaching we had and what made us successful Test match batsmen.
They think because you are over 80, you know nothing. My generation grew up playing through the 1950s and 1960s, when there was no one-day cricket and we were coached from an early age to practise the correct way to bat so it became ingrained in us.
Over the past 15 years – since the start of the Indian Premier League – young kids have been taught to hit boundaries, try trick shots and invent ways to whack the ball out of the ground. It is all about how many runs you make off how many balls received. So youngsters have spent their formative years being trained to succeed at T20. They read of the riches to be earned from T20, all the counties play three one-day competitions and on top of that we have the new Hundred franchises, so championship cricket is squeezed.
Some want to reduce four-day cricket further. Madness. If you are a youngster growing up in the present structure of English cricket why would you make orthodox cricket your priority? All batsmen, whatever era they play, train and practise to bat and react instinctively to the ball coming at them. If that training has been about scoring quickly, how the hell do you expect young England kids to come in and play through difficult moments in a Test match like Root did?
When the going was tough in the afternoon on Saturday and New Zealand were bogging England down, he just hung in there, hardly scored a run, played excellent defensive cricket and then, when one of their bowlers went off injured, that meant a bigger load on the other three seamers.
They tired, the ball got older, and Root scored quickly at the end of the day, taking the game away from New Zealand. But it was second nature for Joe’s mind and technique to work out the situation. Our youngsters do not grow up in an environment that teaches them to play like that.
They do not play enough county cricket. Yet we expect these kids to change from T20 to 50 overs to Test match cricket like switching on a light bulb. Batting is not like that.
The best example was Jonny Bairstow’s innings. He scored 16 runs off 15 balls and played like it was a T20 match. It was dreadful. For the state of the game it was awful. He had just come from two months of T20 in India straight into a Test match and yet we expected him to think like a Test match batsman. Crazy.
Crawley’s timing of the ball is exquisite but he does not know how to defend. He does not have patience. He has never been trained to have any patience. That is all that is wrong. All this rubbish about his bottom hand, I do not care where his hands are on the bat, how he picks the bat up.
When you watch Crawley he nearly always gets himself out because he is trained to score. They do not know how to play through difficult situations.
That is what Test match cricket is. It is like playing chess. You defend and attack. The game ebbs and flows, you have to ride it, grasp it and adapt.
The main thing wrong with Crawley is his thinking. County cricket used to prepare us for Test matches. I played around 37 three-day matches in a season. These kids are lucky if they play that many championship games in three years.
There is nothing greatly wrong with the batting of Pope and Crawley, the problems are in their heads – but it is not all their fault.
If you were a youngster growing up in the present structure, why would you prioritise orthodox game?