England’s Test year in review: From robbery in Hyderabad to hiding in Hamilton
Overall, buzzball is all about batting. It is the area of the England team that causes the most vocal debate. Destructive at their best, the collective failures of England’s batsmen have led to their most devastating defeats.
Take Ben Duckett, for example. He is the first England opening batsman since Alastair Cook in 2016 to score more than 1,000 runs in a calendar year. A favorite saying of McCullum is that successful England opening batsmen are knighted. If we ignore Sars Chef and Andrew Strauss, the last person to surpass 1,000 in a year was Marcus Trescothick in 2005.
In many ways, Duckett is successful, yet he is also the man who ran down the track on the third evening in Hamilton and sent Tim Southee onto his own stumps. Perhaps we can’t have one without the other. This is buzzball in microcosm.
While Duckett is not under pressure, his opening partner is. Jack Crawley is to Matt Henry what David Warner was to Broad. Crawley has not reached 30 in his last 10 innings. Of all players who have opened the batting in Test cricket, Crawley has scored at least 84 runs, with only ex-Zimbabwe batsman Grant Flower averaging worse than Crawley’s 29.59.
England is completely dependent on Crawley. Like a broken clock that is right twice a day, they are counting on his timing coming against India and Australia. Given what they did with him at Old Trafford in 2023, Australia will be very happy if Crawley does not move to Perth in a year’s time.
Below Crawley, England’s Ashes picture may have been shaped by a man born in Surrey while playing for New Zealand.
Will O’Rourke’s dreadful spell on the fourth day in Hamilton was everything England could have hoped for in Australia. Speed, bounce and hostility. It was not handled best by the two best batsmen in the world, Joe Root or Harry Brook, but by 21-year-old Bethel.
In his three Test matches, Bethel has shown a calmness on debut, which Ollie Pope will appreciate. Before the Wellington Test, Stokes said he expected Pope to return to number three for the domestic summer. After Hamilton, McCullum had the opportunity to support Pope, only to say that Bethel had given England a “headache”. The rhetoric has changed.
