Bowlers holding upper hand as the openers continue to flounder
Cook and Jennings are not the only ones to struggle in recent conditions, as Tim Wigmore discovers
‘You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett famously observed. All summer long, England’s openers have been like skinny-dippers exposed.
From the last throes of Mark Stoneman’s Test career, to Keaton Jennings’s leaden-footedness and Alastair Cook’s newly acquired penchant for rash driving they’ve been a source of exasperation. Yet it’s been the same for Pakistan and India, this summer’s tourists.
Eight batsmen have opened in Test cricket in England this summer. They have made a solitary score above 50 – Alastair Cook’s 70 in the very first innings of the summer – between them. In 42 innings, they average a combined 23.44 – barely more than No 8’s average across Test cricket this year. Not since 2000 – the summer of Courtney and Curtly, Gough and Caddick – have openers so floundered in England.
The steep decline in openers’ fortunes in the past two years – from averaging 29.82 since 2000 to only 24.73 last year, even allowing for Alastair Cook’s 243 against the West Indies – is testament to the chicanery of opening bowlers today.
Not since the late 1990s has Test cricket been so brimming with outstanding new-ball bowlers. In the past two summers alone, Kagiso Rabada, Morne Morkel, Vernon Philander, Kemar Roach, Mohammad Abbas, Mohammad Amir, Ishant Sharma, Mohammad Shami and Jasprit Bumrah have visited these shores.
All have wielded the new ball with the precision of knife-throwers in a circus act. Test batting may be unique across professional sport in being a skill that has deteriorated in the past 20 years, the victim of how commercialism has curtailed preparation for tours and the incentives of T20 have altered batsmen’s priorities. “With T20 being prevalent, a higher percentage of the batters we are seeing come through are gravitating to the white-ball game,” England’s batting coach Mark Ramprakash said in despair after the collapse at Trent Bridge a year ago.
It is a familiar refrain. And it is true that the only opener to thrive in England in the last two years, the West Indies’ Kraigg Brathwaite, is rare in prioritising Test cricket at the onset of his career. Yet most openers who have played in England over the past two years – England’s own triumvirate, Azhar Ali, Murali Vijay and Heino Kuhn – do not have games designed to appeal to the T20 rupee. They have been flummoxed anyway.
Perhaps they all have James Anderson to blame: not just those unfortunate enough to face him, but his England team-mates too.
When England became the No1 Test side in the world against India in 2011, it was underpinned by Graeme Swann. It was not just the excellence of his off-spin; it was that it led England to embrace a conservative strategy because they were so confident that Swann would out-bowl the opposition spinners. This long view was a boon to opening batsmen. In 2011, the apogee of the “bowl dry” era, openers in England averaged a combined 32.79.
Now, England have recalibrated their entire strategy based around Anderson’s brilliance. His mastery has been abetted by conditions that have become appreciably more bowlerfriendly. This year, the ball has seamed more than any other year in England this decade; it has only swung more in two previous years. In their determination to give Anderson the chance to effect maximum impact on the match, England’s own openers – sacrificed for Anderson and the greater good – have been collateral damage.
None of this obscures that, through injudicious shot selection – including the two aberrant drives that led to Cook’s dismissals this Test – openers have been complicit in their own downfall. Nor does it obscure that the decline in the productivity of England’s opening pair from the Cook-Strauss fulcrum when England reached No1 to recent years has been uniform, both at home and in more benign climes for openers. But it does provide a little mitigation.
In five Tests since his recall to Test cricket, Jennings averages 19.87. The sense that he is swimming naked when charged with facing the new ball in Test cricket – notwithstanding the modest encouragement of his 36 yesterday – has been inescapable.
Yet Jennings, for all that his game has been dissected, is only barely doing worse than everyone else who had opened in Test cricket this summer.
If this is not a vintage era for Test openers, it is also because it is not a vintage era to be a Test opener – especially in England. They are all skinny-dippers now.