Ed Smith’s clever picks have given England a Ferguson-style makeover
It’s often said that selectors, like wicketkeepers and umpires, are doing their best work when you don’t notice them. Since taking over as national selector, Ed Smith has been in the news more than many of the players he has picked – yet he’s doing a brilliant job.
There are two main reasons for Smith’s profile. The first, a slightly cringeworthy media obsession with his education, is not his fault. And the second is a virtue – a series of selections that have managed to be innovative and eye-catching without being ostentatious.
In just over six months since taking over, Smith has revolutionised the culture of selection in English cricket. Most of what he has done is not new, but he has accelerated the move towards rotation being the norm rather than an occasional occurrence for old pros to grumble about.
When the Wisden History of Rotation is written, the decision to omit Stuart Broad from the first Test at Galle will surely be recognised as a symbolic moment in this development. Broad was not dropped. You can say he was rotated, omitted, left out, bought the big one or did not make the final XI, but don’t you dare say he was dropped. That word has been erased from the dictionary of English cricket.
While the extent to which the England camp have avoided the D word, as if talking about the Scottish play, is quite amusing, the Spin is buying what they’re selling. We don’t see such phrases as a euphemism but appropriate language for a development that has been coming since Steve Waugh started to rotate Australia’s one-day team in 2001.
Smith, Joe Root and the rest of the selection panel have put a weary old anachronism out of its misery: the best XI. That old-fashioned idea has little place in the modern world, and not just because of burnout and fixture congestion. Rotation is about more than resting players – it’s about form, confidence, conditions and tactics. Each match is different. In this, cricket can learn from football and especially Sir Alex Ferguson, who became the keenest tinkerer in football in the second half of his career. Ferguson won the European Cup twice, and on both occasions the XI he picked for the final never started a game together before or after. There can still be consistency of selection – but in the squad rather than the team. The future is bespoke XIs and a best XVI.
Those pejorative teams from the 80s and 90s – horses for courses, bitsand-pieces players – are now in fashion. That’s not to say the selectors of the 1980s, whose approach sometimes involved little more than browsing the county averages, were misunderstood visionaries. (Smith, incidentally, has more reason than most to look beyond averages – his short Test career was ended by a dodgy lbw at the Oval in 2003. But the book said Smith lbw b Hall 16, and that was that.)
Nor does it mean David Graveney and Geoff Miller, unsung heroes behind the brilliant England teams of 2004-05 and 2010-11, were wrong to preach consistency of selection. Smith’s approach is the right one for this team at this time.
Especially because they have so many all-rounders. There are infinite permutations of both the XI and the batting order, and Ben Foakes has added even more mud to the water with his century in the first Test.
The number of all-rounders means that one selection informs so many others, more than would be the case with a team of specialists. Once England decided to pick Jack Leach, a spin bowler who is not a great batsman, Broad was in trouble because it meant England needed the runs of Sam Curran. Those are tactical reasons; it’s not a euphemism.
The modern balance of a Test team has been six batsmen, a wicketkeeper and four bowlers. At the moment England have only three specialist batsmen and two specialist bowlers. They think not in terms of batsmen and bowlers, only runs and wickets. It’s a fascinating, perhaps unique way of building a team, in part a pragmatic response to an underperforming top three. It doesn’t matter how you get runs and wickets so long as you get them. Since Smith took over the spread of runs up to the end of the first innings in Galle has been so extreme that Nos 7-11 have a higher average (29.00) than Nos 1-6 (27.58).
Smith and his team have interrogated normative thinking. Why can’t you have a specialist batsman at No7? Why can’t you have a wildcard bowler like Adil Rashid? Why can’t you leave out a bloke with 433 Test wickets?
Smith cannot get everything right, especially as his approach means a massive increase in the number of variables and therefore the scope to get things wrong – or be seen to get them wrong. But the freshness of thought and the scope for change from game to game makes this a great time to be an armchair selector. It’s legitimised tinkering, the fun of picking XIs in the 1980s and 1990s without the guilt of instant gratification – or of those changes being prompted by yet another England defeat.
It’s a brave move from Smith. He surely knows that, in the simplistic game of cause and effect played in the media and on social media, he could be heavily criticised once England start to lose series. One way or another, he will
stay in the spotlight. But in the Spin’s eyes, it’s almost entirely for the right reasons.
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