Hypotheticals and hindsight are not typically the favoured topics of the professional sports team but there is an alternative England scenario worth pondering. Had Sam Curran been fully fit to bowl ahead of this Pakistan series, the likelihood is that the Surrey all-rounder would have earned a recall to the Test squad for the first time in five years, a replacement of sorts after Ben Stokes had gone down in a blaze of gory batting at Trent Bridge.
Would Curran have featured in England’s XI? The assumption must be that he would not have but the very fact that he was under consideration at all shows the tricky question that Joe Root’s side were attempting to answer. How does one replace the irreplaceable? Well, it seems, the answer is to not replace Stokes at all. There is no point, of course, selecting a seam all-rounder when you have specialists bowling the way that England’s pace foursome have in this series so far.
open image in galleryOne must weigh Pakistan’s paucity as mitigation against declarations of the brilliance of this attack but the evidence is increasingly persuasive about the group’s potential. After the Headingley Test, Root had declared that the quartet of Ollie Robinson, Jofra Archer, Josh Tongue and Gus Atkinson did not know how good they could be and another standout showing at Lord’s will not dim his praise. Of all English bowlers in Test history, Root can currently call upon three of the five men with strike rates beneath 44 and still have Archer to spare; if the fast forwarding of Test cricket is partly to blame, any skipper would enjoy that sort of potency.
“Each day it will be someone else’s turn,” Archer said during the second Test. “Everyone is relentless, everyone wants wickets and it feels like no-one is ever going to be overworked because everyone shares the overs out. You don’t have to do too much because someone is going to back you up until you find your feet again.”
open image in galleryClearly, there are bigger and better tests to come but this cohort has plenty going for it. All of Archer, Tongue and Atkinson have the capacity to push up towards 90mph, with the former two offering awkward actions and angles to challenge the batter. Robinson is an ideal attack-leader to knit things together; how England might have done with his new-ball accuracy in Australia.
“I think being able to be my own bowler and not try to be too attacking has definitely helped,” Robinson, who now has 99 Test wickets at an average under 20, said. “With those guys at the other end, it does allow me to sit in and be patient, be consistent, which is my super strength. That helps me a lot.
“I probably wouldn’t have got the wickets I’ve got in this series without those other guys. All of us are bowling really nicely. It is nice to have a four-man attack that could all take the new ball and could all bowl when the ball is older. Anyone can do any role, which is nice in an attack. To have three guys that bowl 90mph, you don’t have that much in world cricket, and it makes my job a hell of a lot easier to keep applying the pressure and let those guys just fly in.”
open image in galleryThere is, though, a problem looming – even if not immediately. England may be at the end of a sweltering summer but Root’s side have enjoyed clement conditions for seam bowling throughout the last fortnight, with limited need for Dan Lawrence’s whirling, spinning limbs as an alternative. With a three-Test tour to South Africa anchoring the winter itinerary, the incoming head coach Stephen Fleming will surely stick with this sort of strategy; four quicks, led by a Robinson type, and some combination of Lawrence, Root and a fit-again Jacob Bethell as the spin options.
Come next March, though, and a trip to Bangladesh will necessitate a rethink. The Asian side may have a good band of seamers of their own but England struggled mightily against the spinning ball on their last tour of the country in 2016, and can surely expect turning tracks. At least one, and perhaps two, spinners of relative repute will be required – and with it a rebalance of the winning formula.
An advanced examination of options would be no bad thing. While surfaces in England this summer have been relatively helpful for seam bowling, the general trend in the last five years has been of pitches that favour batters – particularly as the game goes on. Australia’s arrival for a lucrative Ashes next year may demand five-day Tests, and with it a broader range of skills. While Root’s men have looked well balanced against Pakistan, a callow XI that took the field at the Oval against New Zealand was shown up as lacking in control and variety.
open image in galleryWith this series won, there might be an argument to use the third Test to explore a slightly different composition. Shoaib Bashir, somewhat surprisingly, was retained in the squad for the first two matches – released to play for Derbyshire, he did not bowl and copped a first-ball duck in a rain-wrecked game against Middlesex. England would not necessarily mind a chance to assess his development again.
“I think it’s been a wonderful start to things, for sure,” Root suggested. “There will be times where we might have to call upon different skillsets, but everything that has been asked of this group of players so far, they’ve answered really well.
open image in gallery“If you want to build a squad of players, a group that can travel well across the world and compete in all conditions, that’s all we can ask of players. These guys have done that brilliantly. Even when conditions suit, you’ve still got to be skilful enough to expose the opposition. We’ve been brilliant at doing that in these two games. The challenge will be doing that in South Africa, Bangladesh and wherever we go in the world.”