The tail is failing to wag – and that is a big worry
Hindia’s lower order had a game-changing impact at Lord’s, England need their own to come to the Headingley party
Only six months ago England were flying. They had won three consecutive Tests in Sri Lanka and India, making six in a row abroad, one short of their record. At home, Joe Root had never lost a series as Test captain.
Since early February, England have lost five Tests and had the worse of the two draws.
Six months ago Root had three express bowlers in Jofra Archer, Olly Stone and Mark Wood; for the Headingley Test starting this week he has none. He had three decent if not world-class spinners, too, and Ben Stokes. He has not been party to the loss of all these assets, except for the exclusion of Jack Leach, but some aspects of England’s decline have been controllable.
A significant feature of England’s new weakness is their lower-order batting. It is so demoralising when tail-enders walk out and clown around instead of playing for the batsman at the other end. It is cause and consequence: the worse the tail bats, the lower the team’s morale, and the lower that morale, the worse their tail-enders bat.
Great teams seldom need their bowlers to bat, but when they do, they hang around or give it a whack. Of the West Indian bowlers of the 1980s and the Australians of the 1995-2005 era, Malcolm Marshall and Shane Warne could bat properly when they wanted; Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner and Brett Lee could hit, Colin Croft and Jason Gillespie could block.
At this fragile stage of their evolution, Root’s England have no option but to bat or block right down the order. Nothing so excited the Indians at Lord’s as that ninth-wicket partnership of 89 between Mohammed Shami and Jasprit Bumrah.
It feels like a long time since England’s lower order did anything similar abroad. It was the last Test of the four-match series in Johannesburg, England 2-1 up. Stuart Broad and Mark Wood batted exactly as Shami and Bumrah did, demoralising South Africa and converting 309 for eight into 400 in a riotous hour.
Although there have been honourable exceptions like Wood, England supporters have seen too many examples – especially in the two-test series against New Zealand
– of tail-enders giving their wickets away. And there is not too much comfort to be derived from the accompanying tables because Moeen Ali has had a single Test this year among the tailenders from numbers eight to 11. Sam Curran was England’s matchwinning No8 in two of the five Tests against India in 2018. Being so new to Test cricket aged 20, he allowed himself a little look before hitting out. He was man of the match in the low-scoring first Test with his 24 and swashbuckling 63; and in another low-scoring Test at Southampton he scored 78 and 46.
His Trent Bridge Test this year was profitable too – 59 for once out – before India angled full balls across him at Lord’s. Two sufficed. Dom Bess was a good No8, not scoring quickly but hanging in, maybe seeing off the second new ball, averaging 22. But the biggest loss has been Chris Woakes, quarantined in Sri Lanka, unwanted in India, injured in England. It can hardly be called a tail if Woakes is a constituent: he has scored more than 900 Test runs and averaged mid-twenties when batting at eight or nine.
If England are to compete in Australia, they have to break this new habit. Otherwise Ollie Robinson, if he becomes infected, could degenerate from being a bowling allrounder into just another tail-end slogger, like Darren Gough and Stuart Broad. Broad has the mitigating circumstance of that head injury when Varun Arun broke through his grille at Old Trafford, but he has scored 19 runs in his past nine Test innings.
India’s tail was criticised as defenceless, but they have had no need for defence because England’s bowlers have lapsed into bowling short and wide.
Shami, Bumrah, Ishant Sharma and Mohammed Siraj, scarcely able to hold a bat between them, have hit 162 runs off only 257 balls at an average of 27 runs per wicket. Game and set to India, if not quite yet the series.