Short-sighted hosts pay price of

Golden day at Lord’s has downside of England’s flimsy batting in Tests, writes Nick Hoult

For weeks Australians have been pleading with England fans to stop booing David Warner. Finally the crowd found a different target for their jeers – England’s batsmen. There were boos at Headingley after England were dismissed for their lowest Ashes score since 1948 and at that moment the joy of the World Cup win felt like an age ago.

But it cannot be a surprise that England’s batting in Test cricket is so flimsy, for one of the pay-offs for that golden day at Lord’s is that the one-day mentality has afflicted their game in the longer format.

The only established Test batsman in the team is Joe Root and his batting has been weakened by the need to always look to score and be positive, traits that have crept in from trying to prove to everyone he can be a T20 player.

One of the first moves Ashley Giles could make as he turns the emphasis from white-ball cricket to Tests is compensate Root so he stops chasing T20 contracts in his very slim spare time. He spent last Christmas struggling in the Big Bash hoping to improve his T20 game to lure an Indian Premier League scout or two, when he should have taken a break.

What a waste of time and effort when he could have been resting before the biggest summer of his life. It was certainly no way to prepare for batting at three in England in Test cricket, a job that has exposed his technique. The angled bat face he showed to Josh Hazlewood would have brought runs down to third man in the white-ball game but cost him his wicket here, caught at slip by Warner. It was a good ball, and there was no shame in the dismissal, but it was not a one-off.

Root is averaging 31 since the start of last summer, and is tinkering with his technique half way through an Ashes series. His conversion rate of 50s to hundreds has been an issue for a long time, a problem that can be traced to lapses in concentration, mistakes that are not exposed in one-day cricket but are fatal in Tests.

A team take their lead from the captain and the need to be positive and score has seen England bowled out for under 100 four times in 18 months. They have lost 10 wickets in a session three times in three years, a phenomenon that has not happened since 1939. Trevor Bayliss will depart as England coach at the end of this series with thanks for the World Cup win but little to show for his time in charge in Test cricket. Not a single specialist batsman has established a career on his watch. A total of 12 have been tried and of those only Haseeb Hameed has an average above 28. Described as “baby Boycott” when he made his Test debut in India, Hameed was released by Lancashire yesterday, his game having disintegrated ever since he tried to be more expansive to play one-day cricket, a fitting representative of the frailties of modern English batting.

The system below the Test team is rotten and will only become worse as the England and Wales Cricket Board puts its resources into the Hundred. A draft schedule for next summer seen by The Daily Telegraph shows county championship cricket again shoehorned into April and September when pitches are juicy early in the season and tired at the end. The odd championship game dropped into June and July only makes things more confusing. Sam Billings, the Kent captain, described the schedule as