Alastair Cook has been speaking to the media in recent days, as England begin preparations for the tour of the West Indies. Cook’s own batting form remains one of the pressing issues facing England, especially after lacklustre scores (three and five in two innings) for MCC against Yorkshire in Dubai last month. It was therefore predictable, perhaps, that Cook reaffirmed his determination to score runs at the top of the order:
“That’s what I’ve got to do at the top of the order – I’ve got to score runs to set up England wins,” Cook added. “You saw, they weren’t hundreds but they were nineties and eighties and seventies in those last three games and runs at the top of the order always make England a harder side to beat.” (ECB http://www.ecb.co.uk/news/articles/cook-refreshed-and-raring-go)
Historically speaking, Cook is right. In his career as an opener, he has recorded only five centuries in a losing cause. Only once, the first Test against India in Ahmedabad in 2012, has England wasted his aggregate score of 217 (41 and 176) to lose by 9 wickets, though to be fair they did win the series in the end. By contrast, Cook has contributed aggregated totals of over a century in 20 England wins and 12 drawn matches, all at or near the top of the innings.
But even if the data appears significant, the mentality is troubling. Cook’s contributions at the top of the order have been invaluable for England, but a reliance on them suggests the same one-dimensional approach to the game that have beleaguered the ODI side. It may sound simplistic to say, but surely it does not matter where the runs come from, so long as the side’s accumulated total creates scoreboard pressure or, even simpler, exceeds that of the opponents? This is not to dismiss Cook’s feeling that early runs, like early wickets, create momentum and make life in the middle easier, but true batting depth, the kind that England has historically lacked, means that the top of the order in turn is under less pressure to secure the innings. It is the middle order collapse, rather than the top order one, that makes a batting side fragile, and it is that, as India’s Sharma demonstrated at Lord’s last summer, that still plagues England.
The two finalists of the recently ended World Cup demonstrate the point well. Australia’s is the simpler form: they bat deep, aggressively, and for the most part, consistently. Whether they can retain that form outside Australia and in other formats will be crucial for this team’s prospects of measuring up to the storied achievements of teams past, but their attitude of relentless aggression, all the way down the order, has certainly caught the eye.
New Zealand, on the other hand, have a weaker tail, and the styles of the frontline batsmen vary rather more than that of their Australian counterparts. In this way, they make for a rather more apt model for England. McCullum has been the talk of the tournament for his uncompromising high-risk, high-reward blacksmithery, but Guptill and Williamson, for all their memorable lofted sixes, are more calligraphers than anvil-smashers. Yet what unites both Antipodean sides, whether batting one to eleven or one to six, is a refusal to depend on a formula. Those fixating on McCullum’s besting by Starc in the final must pass silently over the captain’s failures against West Indies, Bangladesh, or Scotland, where New Zealand’s victories rested on contributions from several other batsmen right down to Anderson at six.
Taking responsibility, as Cook’s well-intentioned mantra is intended to do, is all very honourable, but on his current form it serves only to condemn the team before they even step onto the pitch. Rather than preparing an individual, and subsequently collective, act of seppuku, England should give the entire team a vote of confidence: being selected implies that one can be a match-winner, however inexperienced, and one isn’t there simply to share in a collapse wrought by the captain’s personal failure. This is competitive sport, not Athenian tragedy replete with its fallen king and a doomed chorus of captives.
How valuable Cook’s runs will be remains to be seen. It was no surprise, however, that England’s resurgence against India in the summer coincided with Cook’s return to run-scoring, though which was cause and which effect was more unclear than the recent World Cup coverage’s comically naive ‘keys to success’ would suggest. But Cook himself is only one piece of this puzzle: England must be able to withstand a low-scoring opener or even two if they are to have any sort of chance against serious bowling attacks. The talent is there. Ali, Bell, Trott, Root, Ballance, Buttler and Lyth all have the potential for racking up big scores, and the lower order, especially if Broad rediscovers his batting technique, needn’t be anonymous. Lest we forget, even Jimmy Anderson seems to have discovered a test batting style that suits him.
But at the heart of this resurgence must be a certain resilience, and a desire to avoid the English cliché of middle-order collapse followed by a heroic rear-guard action that ends in gut-wrenching failure. If Cook can lead from the front, as he likes to do, all well and good. But if he can’t, his captaincy must exceed the sum of his runs – by changing the narrative to which he, the team, the management, and the media have been so needlessly beholden.
