There are only two things wrong with this England team. They can’t Baz. And they can’t ball | Barney Ronay
Even losing seems to involve doing so without the qualities that were supposed to make England winIt’s a cruel, cruel summer.By the close of play in Adelaide, on the kind of superheated afternoon when just going outside basically involves setting fire to your own hair, it was clear this was the day the music finally died for England’s Ashes tour; even if that music has long since faded, like the tinkle of a haunted pianola in an empty house.The start of day two had presented a familiar challenge.Here was another occasion where it was necessary to bat properly.And yes, it is always this day.
The bat properly day.Do it.Do the batting.The proper batting.By now this seems to raise some very basic existential questions.
What is properly? What is batting? And what is this England team, when even losing a Test match seems to involve doing so without the qualities that were supposed to make it win: no panache, no boldness, no energy? There are only two things wrong with this England team.They can’t Baz.And they can’t ball.For a while in mid-afternoon Harry Brook and Ben Stokes conjured a slow-burn partnership in pursuit of Australia’s ever-retreating 371.Stokes was stoic, gripped by cramps in the heat, but still more or less immovable, batting as extreme endurance discipline.
Brook was in his new absorb-the-pressure mode, which is clearly the right choice, but somehow it still felt like watching a thrash metal band reel off two hours of light dinner jazz.At the end of which it might seem a little cruel to major on Ollie Pope, who faced 10 balls for three runs before lunch.Pope still has a second innings to go.But there is already a sense of an ending in train, of something fading in real time.It is never pleasant to see someone fail, and to do so in a way that involves losing a little bit of yourself in the process.
It felt doubly cruel Pope was matched here against Nathan Lyon, the wiliest, most authentically cricket-smart Aussie bowler imaginable.Pope is basically the opposite of this, avatar of a kind of Englishness Australians simply love to pull apart.Here we have sunburn, a hat and the essence of Clapham High Street compressed into a set of cricket whites.Here we have the kind of Englishman who pops up in an EM Forster novel sweating in a linen suit on some colonial railway platform and calling for a porter.If there is a sense of unease in Pope’s faux swagger under the current regime, then it is also worth remembering he is in a sense its most authentic embodiment.
Bazball is a clique, a cool-guy circle.And Pope is the most obvious product of English cricket’s modern-day pathway of privilege, always favoured, always with the head prefect sheen, from the Surrey age groups where he became the self-fulfilling chosen one, right up to the continuing run in the Test team’s prestige batting role.Failure at this level often takes on a recurrent physical form.For Zak Crawley this was expressed here in a kind of stillness, right down to his dismissal to a ball from Pat Cummins that angled in, held its line and took the edge of a bat presented in oddly static pose, as though a suit of ceremonial armour had been wheeled out to the wicket on a set of casters, a bat handle jammed into its gauntlet.For Pope the defining physical shape on his current run of 46, 33, 26, 0 and 3 has been his leg-side lean, head toppling over while he tries to play the world though midwicket.
This is a tell in itself, a debased version of the skip down the pitch acquired during his early Bazballian revivalist period, the pressure back on the bowler stuff, which has now been absorbed as a hiccup in his technique, a mocking echo of the good times,Crawley’s wicket brought Pope to the crease at 37 for one,In the event those 10 balls were a frazzled aside to the day,He was hit on the hand,He drove airily.
He kept walking across towards his hot zone,The shot that got him out was rotten, a plinked drive to midwicket that didn’t just open the door, but did so with a stoop and a flourish,Three balls later Ben Duckett was bowled by a ball that turned,England had lost three wickets in 15 balls and the day was starting to dissolve,And so Pope’s career in Australia stands at an average of 17 from 15 innings.
He won’t be back here again.Or maybe anywhere for a while.Overall his batting average is just under 32 against everyone who isn’t Zimbabwe and Ireland.It has been five years now.The talk of weak men, stuffed men, hollow men will circle.
Is it weak just to fall short, a No 3 with technical quirks that shouldn’t be there in what is classically the most crisp and orderly batting role, or to look a little awkward and forced in the current regime?None of this is Pope’s fault.The system has decided there is nobody else to pick.But then that same system has also degraded and demotivated county cricket.The idea that the domestic game is another code altogether can become self-fulfilling.If county runs are to be ignored because of the game required to score them, then you are also discarding those batters who have adapted to fit conditions, and rewarding those who don’t, but play instead with an eye on England selection.
Do this, and you might just end up with a bunch of one-note specialists.Not to mention a bubble in which Pope and others must be constantly watered, and a talent ID system that is convinced Jacob Bethell is the only alternative, a cricketer whose year has been spent like the cabin boy in Master and Commander, watching the men fight the waves.You get this too, the trapped energy of Pope in Adelaide, and a career defined above all by a sense of awkwardness.There is still time to explore what Pope’s best qualities may actually be.He may come again.
Who knows, he may end up being the member of this collective who spills the beans, cracks, gives the real skinny on the leadership.For now he seems to be fading with England’s southern summer.
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