School of hard knocks serves Burns well
England’s strong-minded opener learnt his trade the hard way in the county game, writes Scyld Berry
England spent years looking for a successor to Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook as a tough, resilient, Test opening batsman. They were searching in the wrong place. They looked for this successor at Loughborough in high-performance programmes, they looked for him in Under-19 teams and on Lions tours. But he was to be found in the least-suspected and most old-fashioned place: Rory Burns was learning his game in his own way, in the County Championship, scoring 1,000 runs per first-class season for Surrey.
Instead of being spoon-fed, Burns had to stand on his own two feet. And thus he learnt how to bat all day against Australia at Edgbaston for his maiden Test century, and how to survive more balls from a world-class attack than any other England player in the last Ashes – and to become a top-notch slip or gully fielder into the bargain.
It does not have to be northern grit: through the ages, most England batsmen to withstand Australia have come from Surrey as well as Yorkshire, and Burns manifested the toughness of Ken Barrington, John Edrich and Graham Thorpe.
During the last Ashes series, while facing Pat Cummins, Josh
Hazlewood and their mates, Burns reckons he was hit more times than the whole of his previous career combined. Not that he is complaining about bruises. “There were two at Lord’s when Cummins hit me in almost exactly the same spot on the shoulder – that went pretty dead. But I didn’t keep tabs on it, it was more my wife keeping tabs, it’s just part and parcel of being an opener. There are no bruises left, not that I’ve seen.” The barrage at Burns was intensified from the second Test at Lord’s onwards because he had scored 133 at Edgbaston, where the Australians had pitched the ball up. Burns raised his game to cope with the increased intensity and by the end of the series – though it was his first in England, after the Ireland game – was battle-hardened. It is possible for an opening batsman to have a poor two-Test series in New Zealand – 18 months ago here, Cook scored one run for every thousand miles he travelled to get to New Zealand and back – but even if Burns does struggle against new balls propelled by Trent Boult, he will remain inked in as England’s senior Test opener.
Boxing is one modern way to toughen up batsmen but not in Burns’s case, where there was a substitute in his early childhood. “I’ve never done boxing except the odd session with a strength and conditioning coach. I’d like to have done it but when my dad tried to get that past my mum for me and my brothers, she was not having it in any shape or form. But being the youngest, with two elder brothers, you end up at the bottom of the pile.”
As the youngest of three, Burns tagged along with his brothers when they went to the indoor cricket school at Ewell run by Neil Stewart, brother of England’s Alec. “I was going to the indoor school from the age of six, as I basically copied what my brothers did.” No wonder Burns was in Surrey’s age-group teams, as a batsman who either bowled off-spin or kept wicket.
If Jason Roy had been selected as England’s No3 for this series, instead of Joe Denly, England’s top three batsmen would have all come from Whitgift School: Burns, Dominic Sibley and Roy would have made a unique hat-trick. But Burns not only went to Whitgift, on a cricket scholarship, he also left it, aged 16, and thereby showed his ability to work the game out for himself.
“I essentially left Whitgift because there was a difference of opinion about where I was batting – I was batting nine or 10 and keeping wicket. I said that when I play for Banstead on a Saturday, I keep wicket and open the batting. I was going to move to Glyn School where my brothers went, but Neil Stewart was the coach at City of London Freemen’s School – that was the link, so I went there.”
Not being told what to do – or what he could not do – in an academy, Burns played rugby until he was 19 and it still informs his cricket, when he bounces up from being hit or dives full-length to pick up a thick-edged drive at gully. “I was a scrum-half or fly-half, as you can guess from my general scrappy nature of getting hit sometimes and brushing it off. My education came through the county system. I’d never been to the West Indies [before he toured last winter], I’d never been to Sri Lanka [where he made his debut].”
Ben Foakes, his Surrey team-mate who also made his Test debut there, had visited Sri Lanka six times for cricket. So it was that Burns worked out for himself his unique mannerisms at the crease to counter his left-eye dominance. Burns played in New Zealand, in Wellington, the winter after he left school, before doing one year of sports science at Cardiff University, where he kept wicket to Jack Leach. He has since taken every other winter off.
“Grade cricket is good but sometimes you can play too much, and you don’t get a chance to reset the batteries and take a step away. It gives you the drive and motivation to go again. Growing up in county cricket, a lot of the time you have to try and work it out for yourself, though you obviously talk to the coaches around. If you can establish yourself every time you take a step up, you take confidence from that. No one can bat for you. It’s about having a clear game plan in your head.”
Test-match batting is ultimately a test of character. Burns has succeeded because he has developed, both at the crease and figuratively, a stance of his own.