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By any stretch, Jonathan Trott’s Test debut has gone okay.
Making a hundred on your debut is generally considered to be satisfactory. Making a hundred when you arrived at the crease with the score reading 39-3 on a day when 15 wickets fell – that’s better than satisfactory. Doing all of this in an Ashes Test is a dream. Doing it in the deciding Ashes Test is the kind of fiction you wouldn’t have permitted yourself when you were playing in the back garden when you were 10.
Jonathan Trott has the odd technical flaw that will be explored by bowlers in future Tests, but the one thing he most definitely has – which is much harder to develop in the nets – is the relaxed frame of mind that allows a batsman to perform in Test cricket.
This now means that of England’s first choice top six, four were born in South Africa. No criticism in that, but it’s worth remarking upon.
I have Strauss, Trott and Pietersen..who’s the fourth?
ah! prior!
What what? Is the 4th South African knowable for the same reason as we know all bachelors are unmarried men? Sorry…
no criticism,
except that it’s now the downunder Ashes. The series has reinvented itself as Australia vs Sth Africa.
It’s true, definitely worth watching. Reform of English cricket is long overdue, the counties are not keeping their side of the bargain (providing a deep pool of home grown talent).
Even so, also worth mentioning that Strauss came to England aged 6, Prior when he was 11. Pietersen is a British citizen with an English mother and wife (Preston). Trott … well errr …. um … he’s qualified to play for England and looks like he’ll be very useful.
It’s a complex global world these days, folks.
Take Dawid Malan – a future England prospect, born in Roehampton, father from South Africa, mother English, raised for a few years in England, then for a few eyars in South Africa, still a youngster when he returned to Middlesex system and (potentially) England.
Love the prior pun, pat c – I appreciated it.
Brilliant, pat c. A cricket website with philosophy puns to boot – heaven.