'Cook remains a key man but England have picked cautious squad'
Thursday 6 July 2017 09:52, UK
New England Test skipper Joe Root has proven himself streetwise and silky skilled, says Mike Selvey, but his greatest challenge begins now...
It took only as long as the first meeting of the England selectors under his new captaincy tenure for Joe Root's latent pragmatism to reveal itself.
Cherub-faced young man he may be, the irritating younger brother of Graeme Swann's time in the dressing room, and one of the silkiest skilled batsmen in the modern international game, but he has played 53 Test matches now, one more than Sir Don Bradman, which is a sort of benchmark for such things, so has been around the block.
He is as streetwise as they come, and for all the chatter of brave new worlds, and exciting brands of cricket, the reselection of his Yorkshire team-mate Gary Ballance, and that of the all-rounder Liam Dawson has attempted to throw a security blanket over the team he has inherited from Alastair Cook.
He might want to win well, which is an admirable ambition, but, the selections are saying, he would rather not risk losing in the process, particularly in his first series, against a depleted but most resilient opponent which has not lost a series in England for almost 20 years. It is an insipid start.
Ballance returns on the back of a prolific summer thus far in Championship cricket. But his presence is predicated on the dramatic manner in which Haseem Hameed's batting has stalled this season. After the tour of India, it seemed straightforward that barring mishap, he, Keaton Jennings, and Cook, in whatever order, would constitute England's top three against South Africa.
Since then, it is not too fanciful to suggest that Lancashire's drive to make Hameed an all-round batsman in both red and white-ball cricket has had a negative impact. Allied to his obvious Test match temperament, Hameed's greatest asset was his awareness of the location of his off stump, and thus, as with Cook, judgement of which deliveries at which to play, and which to leave.
The imperative to score more readily against the white ball means that an essential element of that form of the game can become ingrained to the detriment of long-form batting. Essentially, a strength in one becomes a weakness in others: he has been nicking-off.
So back comes Ballance, whose own idiosyncratic technique was cruelly exposed once Test match bowlers had cottoned on that his weakness was not the ball aimed in at his pads, which his method of playing no further forwards than the crease seemed to encourage, but rather the ball leaving him, particularly when propelled by left arm pacemen such as Trent Boult.
As with all of us, the Australian pace bowler Mitchell Starc will watch his progress over the next few weeks to see whether it is essentially the same old method being successful against county attacks or if indeed his batting has undergone a significant technical transformation. The latter seems unlikely but we shall have to trust Root's judgement on that one: there is no Dale Steyn in the South African ranks, but a trio of Kagiso Rabada, Morne Morkel, from around the wicket, and Vernon Philander will offer a searching examination.
In the continuing absence through injury of Chris Woakes, Dawson's inclusion owes more to a desire for late middle-order belt-and-braces than calibre as a Test match spinner. The England coach Trevor Bayliss likes him, though, perceiving a strong competitor and fertile intuitive cricket brain. It further confirms a mistrust of Adil Rashid as a Test match bowler, a form in which batsmen can simply sit back and wait for the regular inevitable bad ball, rather than have to attack the good ones.
Mason Crane will have been deemed too raw, although the success of the two teenage wrist-spinners - Afghan bowler Rashid Khan, and Shadab Khan of Pakistan, both his junior - have rather changed the rules on that. An adventurous choice might have been Samit Patel, who is in the batting form of his life, but maybe Bayliss saw sufficient in UAE and South Africa, both of which Patel toured with England, to mitigate against him: he would surely have toured India otherwise.
Either Dawson or Toby Roland-Jones, a potential new cap, will step aside, the latter likely to play only if the bowling fitness of Ben Stokes is in doubt, such is the fragility of the condition of Jimmy Anderson, Stuart Broad and Mark Wood. Unimaginative choice he may be, but Dawson would be expected to do a solid if unspectacular holding job.
From the moment he conducts his first pre-Test press conference, Root will be under the spotlight. How will he respond to leading a side that remains essentially that of Cook, and, in turn, how will they respond to him? The transformation from able lieutenant, offering options without the responsibility, to the person making the executive decisions can be daunting. How comfortable will he feel with the captain-emeritus in his side, and, indeed, at his side in the slips; and how easily will Cook sit on the backbenches? And, crucially, how will it affect the captain's own game?
Mike Atherton, who has experienced all that international captaincy entails, says that there is a natural lifespan to a captain of around four to five years with enthusiasm at the start and mental fatigue by the end. He ceded the captaincy after a Caribbean tour but played a further 36 Tests beyond that. The last six months of his tenure, he says, were just wearying, and by contrast, the period beyond that, equally invigorating. But, he warns, you tread a fine line then between wanting to be helpful and actually interfering.
Captaincy ultimately drained Nasser Hussain so much that he handed over to Michael Vaughan mid series which meant that unlike Cook and Atherton, he was straight into the next match, but no longer as captain. "My mind was scrambled," he told me this week," It took me a month or more to come to terms with it. Captain one match, in the ranks the next. I remember Vaughan having to remind me of that." It depends on the characters concerned and circumstance though.
Quite clearly, though, casting aside the cares of captaincy and the long break that followed have rejuvenated Cook's batting to which his six centuries across formats for Essex will testify. Cook was utterly spent, taken down by the decline in the team's fortunes and his own desire to lead from the front with the bat. Free now of the ancillary chores that Root must now include in his routine, and refreshed by the international break, Cook will happily slip into the background, become absorbed in his batting, and offer countenance only when required, such is his nature. There are some fine years left in him.
Root is in for a tough baptism. In addition to Steyn, there is no AB de Villiers for South Africa, and, in the short term, no Faf du Plessis, with Dean Elgar in temporary charge. But they will offer little respite with the ball, and have high-quality batsmen in Hashim Amla and, a latter day troubleshooting Adam Gilchrist in Quinton de Kock. Next winter comes an Ashes series. No cricketer has had a career path mapped out so precisely as that of Root, from junior to international levels. He has long been earmarked for captaincy (and in truth, his appointment now was Hobson's choice) but has minimal experience of it.
It will be tough learning on the hoof, but he is both liked and respected in the dressing room. He would be foolish not to take counsel from Cook, Anderson and Broad as well as his vice-captain Stokes. The experience of Virat Kohli, Steve Smith and Kane Williamson shows that captaincy can go hand in glove with enhanced personal performance, at least initially. Taking over Cook's side will be as seamless as it could be: it is the next six months, the honeymoon over, that will test his mettle as batsman and leader.
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