In 1998, my first year with the Kent first team, I was sent on a run with Carl Hooper, the overseas pro, in the hope that some pearls of wisdom might be imparted and I might get into shape.
The first worked. Hooper didn’t even know my name, but I listened as he told me that cricket imitates life in that the way you play is a reflection of your personality.
I was thinking about that as I watched England’s batters, and especially Jonny Bairstow, in Antigua last week. Finally, England have got where I always thought they needed to be, with Bairstow playing as a specialist batter.
For England to get to the point where Bairstow wasn’t in the Test team required fault on both sides, and there was. England’s unwillingness to ruffle Jonny’s feathers by taking the gloves off one of their best batters (a compliment!) saw a fudge between him and Jos Buttler that not only cost the team, but Bairstow, too. Trevor Bayliss was a fantastic coach, but I thought that was one of his few poor calls.
Bairstow has eight Test hundreds, but could have 15 by now. Now he’s in the right spot, I hope his focus is on becoming one of the best batters in the world.
He is a huge talent, which brings me back to the Hooper point. The perception was that Bairstow’s failings were technical, because he kept being bowled. But Bairstow will never be a technician. He just needs to have a clear plan and watch the ball — the rest will take care of itself. What I am seeing now is a player who is simply thinking better. Jonny has to remain true to himself, and he lost that.
We see other players, like Ollie Pope, fall into technical rabbit holes and leaving their personalities behind.
This feeds into a wider point about how we look at the game in this country. We obsess over technique and guards, when our greatest ever run-scorer, Alastair Cook, had a pretty average technique that you wouldn’t teach. But he knew his plan. The game is purely about scoring runs, not how you do it.
Around Joe Root and Ben Stokes, with the promising performances of Bairstow at No6 and Zak Crawley opening — I also liked Dan Lawrence’s selfless second innings — England’s batting order is starting to take shape.
Lawrence has a good mentality and is his own man. He didn’t think about anything other than the team’s needs on that final morning.
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He was building on Crawley’s good work. Crawley had a tough year in 2021, but has simplified his game. He has recognised that his strengths are driving, clipping and pulling, so that is what he has set his game up to do. Just as he did in Australia, he is leaving the ball well.
A key for any modern player is blocking out the noise, but that is so difficult. When the left-arm spinner Veerasammy Permaul came on in Antigua, I saw a stat that said Crawley averages 10 against that type of bowling.
That felt a ridiculous stat to me; Crawley got a string of low scores against Lasith Embuldeniya and Axar Patel using the new ball on surfaces so dusty that Virat Kohli looked lost on them.
The challenge against Permaul in Antigua (the first really flat pitch England have played on for a while) was always going to be different, and Crawley looked totally at ease. Players of the past never had to deal with this level of noise and analysis around them, and it can be suffocating to try to ignore.
