How harshly should we judge Dan Lawrence for his fairly terrible performance as a Test opener?

3 minute read

England have named their Test squad for the upcoming trip to Pakistan. It’s one of those tours where appetite for spin bowling all-rounders is sufficiently great that even difficult choices between specialist batters will often result in the guy who bowls a bit of finger spin getting the nod. Dan Lawrence – a spin-bowling quasi-all-rounder utility player who has been in England’s first XI these last few weeks – will not be touring.

The reason Lawrence has not been picked is of course because he has not played very well. Invited to open the batting for the series against Sri Lanka, he made 120 runs in six innings with a highest score of 35.

Many people predicted this. Opening the batting is a specialist job. They therefore conclude that Lawrence was set up to fail and is now probably in a worse position than if he hadn’t played at all.

It’s a little like hiring a plumber to do some plastering, then later, when you’ve got a leaking pipe, you find someone else to do the job on the basis of their shoddy workmanship.

Or is it?

Test batting

Opening the batting is certainly a different job to batting in the middle order – but let’s be honest, there’s more than a little overlap. It’s not like estate agent versus snake venom milker. It’s still Test batting.

Lawrence probably isn’t someone who’d average 20 in Test cricket were he consistently walking out in a more familiar position. At the same time, we’ve all now watched him bat, in some Test matches, against Test match bowlers, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to conclude he wouldn’t average 50 either.

So he’s somewhere in between those very-far-away-from-each-other averages. And where exactly you think he’d land is influenced by how much you think opening has in common with middle-order batting.

Adapting

Adaptability is a pretty useful quality for a Test match batter – the ability to find a way to score some runs whenever you find yourself in a new situation.

Being an opener was a new situation. Lawrence didn’t adapt to it very well.

There’s a psychological side to that too. Batters who have conviction about the way they play and don’t stray too far from what has worked for them in the past tend to inspire confidence.

To our eye, Lawrence… we don’t want to use the word ‘unravelled’. It was more like his willingness to try new things eventually ventured into the area of placing random bets. Proactivity’s great, but by the end of the series, he seemed to be just wandering about his crease with shot selection set to ‘shuffle’.

Boldness can be an attribute, but the boldest gamblers are always penniless.

Conclusion

We feel for Lawrence. He was given a tough gig for which he wasn’t really equipped and now he’s dropped down the queue for a Test spot. At the same time, the evidence gleaned from his recent Test batting performances is not irrelevant.

Opportunities are great, but unfortunately Test caps are opportunities to show both what you can and can’t do.

Essex’s Jordan Cox therefore takes on the coveted role of “spare batter” for the Pakistan tour. (“Er, Jordan? Jordan Cox? Um… Um… Is this Jordan Cox?”)

> The three best parts of Dan Lawrence’s bowling action in escalating order of greatness

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