2 minute read

We don’t believe you can draw meaningful conclusions from players’ debuts – but we report on them anyway.

Ben Stokes lauded Jacob Bethell’s ‘swagger’ after his Test debut. It’s a characteristic that can mark you out as something of a tool in everyday life – but Test cricket is not everyday life. While confidence alone won’t carry you far, its absence can undermine even the most talented.

This current England side recognise that even delusional conviction is preferable to uncertainty. Clear-mindedness is the goal. They don’t much care how any given player maintains that.

“Pretty much every time I’ve played against better people, I’ve played better,” Bethell told the press after making an unbeaten 50 in his second Test innings. “The step up to the Hundred: played better. Straight into internationals: played better. I didn’t really have a doubt in my mind that coming into Test cricket that I’d have done well.”

If that reads a bit like he set the game up with an unbeaten double hundred in the first innings rather than merely having enjoyed himself a bit in a facile chase of 104, then his words do at least suggest a man with some sort of bulwark against self doubt. Bethell won’t always have made a fifty, but it doesn’t seem like a run of failures would derail him.

At the same time, it is of course quite often the insecure who talk themselves up most, the brashness of their confidence directly proportional to the fragility within. This isn’t the sense we get here – but who knows?

In terms of the actual nuts and bolts of batting go, the only thing we’ve really gleaned is that Bethell has a pull shot at his disposal and he’s not afraid to use it.

His first boundary in the second innings was inside-edged past the stumps. All of the rest of them looked like this:

Yes, they were all that blurry.

Some were off the front foot, some were off the back; some went in the air, others went flat; some went into the leg-side, others went straight. But all, basically, that shot above.

Maybe New Zealand won’t bowl so short to him next time. Almost certainly they won’t continue dropping eight chances an innings. England and Bethell have a lot of cricket still to play.

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