Pendulum is swinging in favour of Zak
AS the ball described a gentle parabola to Jason Holder at short midwicket, Joe Denly would have been forgiven for wondering if the stroke was his last as an England cricketer. If so, an innings of 29 would be a fitting farewell: neither here nor there, not insubstantial, but not exactly unanswerable.
For a while now, Denly’s conversion rate — of twenties into fifties (low), and of fifties into hundreds (non-existent) — has been tolerated as England forge a new top order in the post-Alastair Cook era. But it is danger of becoming his epitaph.
Joe Root will return from paternity leave for Thursday’s second Test in Manchester, and the question that has needed no resolution in Southampton will demand an immediate answer.
Who makes way for the captain: Denly or Zak Crawley? With Crawley yesterday contributing a classy 76 to this engrossing Test, the pendulum is twitching.
The batting order going into this game was in Denly’s favour, since Crawley was apparently keeping Root’s shoes warm at No 4. Then there’s the perception that Denly has a powerful advocate in Ed Smith, the national selector, though Smith is too savvy to get drawn into such debates, and would baulk at claims of favouritism.
But at what moment do he and his fellow selectors decide that an England No 3 has to do more than average 29, with only two scores above 69 in 28 Test innings, and no hundred? The moment is approaching.
Denly has offered England a consistency of sorts since coming in as an opener for the second Test in the Caribbean 18 months ago — despite moving position four times in nine games. But the consistency has been more plateau than peak.
Since making 50 in the Boxing Day Test against South Africa at Centurion, he has scored 31, 38, 31, 25, 27, 8, 18 and now 29. He has repeatedly hung around for a couple of hours, then played the kind of shot you might expect from a batsman new to the crease. Too often, his hard work is too easily undone.
Early in his tenure, England’s head coach Chris Silverwood laid out a template for a top order that, under
Trevor Bayliss, had struggled for an identity. He wanted old-fashioned crease occupation, big scores and defining firstinnings totals. Denly has given him a little of that, but perhaps not enough. At the age of 34, his clock is ticking.
The 22-year-old Crawley does not deserve to inch ahead of his team-mate on youth alone but an admittedly small sample size so far has offered rather more than that.
At Hamilton in November, he made just a single on a nervous debut against New Zealand. When he got another go, at Cape Town in January, he did little better, with four and 25, but clung on to a smart slip catch late on the final evening as Ben Stokes swept aside South Africa’s last three wickets.
He knuckled down: 44 at Port Elizabeth, then 66 and 24 at Johannesburg. On England’s abortive tour of Sri Lanka in March, he made 43, 91 and 105 in the warm-up games before coronavirus intervened. The 10 that he scored in Southampton on Wednesday went against the grain.
Yesterday, it was impossible to resist comparisons. While Denly occasionally got bogged down by — and eventually fell to — Roston Chase, Crawley used his height (he is 6ft 5in) and his feet to hit him over the top. Twice, he lofted him for four. Crawley had 24 when Denly fell, and had already helped the innings move up a gear after opener Dom Sibley’s 161ball half-century — England’s second fifty took 180 deliveries, the third 86.
Soon after tea, he brought up his own half-century with a reverse-sweep for four off Chase. He was scoring highly on both style and substance.
So there was disappointment when, the over after Stokes fell for 46, Crawley tried to work Alzarri Joseph to leg and got a leading edge back to the bowler.
A century would surely have ended the debate. Even so, if England stick with Denly, the worry is that they will do so as much as out of hope as expectation.