If they could have faced it after several weeks on the road, and managed to
fight off the jetlag, England’s batsmen would have done well to watch on
television the events from the India-South Africa Test in Madras. Virender
Sehwag may be freakishly good, but he is not alone in the way he approaches
Test cricket. These days there are plenty of players out there who can
seamlessly mix one-day improvisation with five-day application. This, plus
excellent pitches and even better bats, is transforming the art of
batsmanship. Run-scoring is becoming ever faster, ever bigger, ever more
spectacular.
Except if you play for England. In that case – provided your name isn’t Kevin
Pietersen – you will probably be pootling along in the slow lane, worrying
about your average, and satisfied with making 100, rather than 150, 200 or,
heaven forfend, 250-plus, a mark Sehwag has passed three times.
Since the start of the millennium there have been 82 double-centuries in Test
matches. Just five of these were scored for England, compared with 16 for
Sri Lanka and India, 12 for Australia and West Indies, eight for South
Africa and six apiece for New Zealand and Pakistan. When the number of
matches everyone has played is taken into account, England’s inferiority
becomes even more apparent. Their average of 21 matches per double-century
is almost as bad as that of the next-worst side, Pakistan, who average 12
Tests per double.
The mentality to make really big scores has not belonged to the England team
for a long time – the last time they had anyone top 230 in a Test was Graham
Gooch 18 years and more than 200 Tests ago – but the decline in the rate of
scoring is a more recent and even more worrying phenomenon.
Rather than congratulate themselves on beating a weak New Zealand side,
England might reflect that a key element in their Ashes victory of 2005 was
their aggressive approach, epitomised by them running up 407 on the first
day of the pivotal Edgbaston Test. Their batsmen sought to dictate terms by
rattling along at 3.87 runs per over. That was how they seized the
initiative from Australia; that was how they won the series.
This is common practice now and nothing speaks more eloquently of England’s
troubles over the past three years than the hesitant mood of their top six
and their frequent inability to show the bowlers that they were in charge.
The collective lack of confidence among the batsmen had much to do with the
defeat in Sri Lanka before Christmas and was still in evidence in New
Zealand, where it took until the second innings of the final game for them
to cash in as they had been expected to do. England’s scoring rate for the
series, a meagre 2.74 runs per over, was thoroughly put to shame by New
Zealand’s 3.38.
The malaise is deep-seated. Since January 1, 2006, England’s scoring rate in
all Tests has been a paltry 3.19 per over, lower than for every other major
side except West Indies, who, despite catastrophic form in five-day cricket,
still managed to score at 3.15 runs per over, only fractionally slower than
England. Alarmingly, England’s rate is more than half a run behind
Australia’s (3.70).
There may be several factors at play here, none of them particularly
encouraging. One is that England’s batsmen may be suffering a collective
crisis following the Ashes whitewash in 2006-7, a kind of posttraumatic
stress disorder that has left them incapable of dominating all but the
weakest bowling (they had no trouble lording it over West Indies at home
last year).
Five of the current top six were regulars in the Ashes defeat. Interestingly,
the one current England batsman who did not play in Australia is Michael
Vaughan, who was injured. He was once the side’s best player and when going
well was a little like an on-song Sehwag, virtually impossible to bowl to.
But much has changed for Vaughan since his return to the side last year. He
does not play one-day international cricket now; although he was never
particularly successful at it, the staccato nature of his existence during
the winter – a few weeks of Test cricket followed by several weeks of
inactivity –may be eroding his game.
More than once in New Zealand, Vaughan lost his wicket early trying to
dominate before he looked ready. His captaincy, too, occasionally looked
less assured than of old on the field, although nobody could say he had lost
his confidence when it came to taking tough decisions off it, such as
dropping Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard.
Vaughan was more of a force in Tests at home last summer when he was playing
county cricket between his commitments with England, and he may be again
this season. It was announced at the end of the New Zealand tour last week
that he would be available to play a full part with Yorkshire before the
first Test of the summer. In all probability, this will help him return to
form. If not, he could come under pressure. Vaughan looks the most
vulnerable of England’s top six on batting form alone.
A similar problem may be affecting Andrew Strauss, who was dropped from the
ODI team after the World Cup and saw his Test form subsequently decline
before he came good again with 177 in Napier last week. He does not look a
more confident player for being a Test specialist.
Nobody seems to have told England, but the whole idea of categorising players
as “specialists” in Tests or ODIs is falling out of fashion.
Outside England, one of the few Test specialists left in the game is India’s
Rahul Dravid, who kept Sehwag company for so long in Madras. Dravid seems
happy no longer to play ODIs if it means it prolongs his Test career, but
for many being a specialist Test batsman is a euphemism for not being good
enough for one-dayers. The truth is that if you are not good enough for
one-dayers, your game is probably quite limited and not adaptable enough to
be super-prolific in Tests either.
Look at Sehwag. He is an opening batsman, yet he is not averse in Tests to
playing reverse sweeps, or dropping his back leg out of the way and taking a
full swing, in the fashion of a baseball hitter (and, increasingly, a
Twenty20 batsman on the rampage). The Twenty20 game is threatening to take
over cricket in many ways, not least in its batting style. If an unorthodox
stroke can be played relatively safely in a Twenty20 match, why should it
not be tried in a Test? Power and extemporisation are the future of batting,
whatever the arena, and any batsman who is not up with the latest thinking
is in danger of being left behind.
This, essentially, is the problem with England’s Test batting. It contains a
top three made up of two men – Vaughan and Strauss – who do not play ODIs or
international Twenty20s and Alastair Cook, whose game is not suited to big
hitting (his first-ever six in Tests or ODIs came recently in Wellington
after two years in the side).
If Cook needs to work on anything with Andy Flower, England’s batting coach,
it is learning to hit over the infield as Sehwag is so adept at doing. If
Vaughan and Strauss want to improve, they should play more one-day cricket.
Even Paul Collingwood, a capable one-day player who can adapt his game quite
well to different situations, sometimes get stuck in Test mode and goes for
a long time without scoring. That happened to him in both innings in
Hamilton, where England’s chronically slow scoring directly contributed to
their disastrous defeat.
It is time for England to stop thinking of Test and one-day cricket as distant
cousins and more, perhaps, as nonidentical twins.
England’s shortcomings
SCORING RATES IN TESTS (SINCE JAN 1, 2006)
Runs per over
1 Australia 3.70 2 New Zealand 3.43 3 India 3.42 4
Pakistan 3.41 5 Sri Lanka 3.31 6 South Africa 3.24 7
England 3.19 8 West Indies 3.15
MOST SCORES OF 150+ IN TESTS (SINCE JAN 1, 2000)
Brian Lara, (West Indies) 12; Kumar Sangakkara (Sri Lanka) 11; Virender Sehwag
(India) 10; Sachin Tendulkar (India) 10; Ricky Ponting (Australia) 10
Most by England players Marcus Trescothick 6; Michael Vaughan 6
