Why it can be hard to get all fired up about Zak Crawley

4 minute read

Zak Crawley is not a popular man in some quarters. If you want a measure of this, you could do worse than count how many times his name cropped up in this week’s discussion about wicketkeepers.

“And yet Zak Crawley still gets picked,” was a common reaction to the news that England had dropped “the best wicketkeeper in the world” for the Test against Ireland and presumably also the Ashes that follows.

A lot of people couldn’t help but set Ben Foakes’ strong recent Test performances alongside Crawley’s ongoing mediocrity to trigger paroxysms of befuddlement in themselves. “How can this be? HOW CAN THIS BE?”

Well, the short answer is that it can ‘be’ because they do different jobs. You can have whole flocks of truly exceptional milkmen vying for your business, but you wouldn’t hire one to toe and heel your bifold doors so that they open properly. You need a specialist for the latter job, even if that person does sometimes shatter glass panels and routinely forgets to fit the external gasket properly and still hasn’t actually got the doors working properly and, you know what, maybe you should just give one of the milkmen a go. How bad could it be? But no, that is a bad idea. The specialist might get there eventually and that’s probably your best bet right now.

The middle man and the top man

Jonny Bairstow may have batted in every position from three to eight in Test cricket, but he has never opened and England don’t want him to, regardless of his successes against the white ball. Quite understandably, England want Bairstow in their middle-order. So that’s what they’ve gone with even if the arrival of Harry Brook means he is now having to make a slightly different spot his own.

That’s tough on Foakes, who’s perhaps now tempted to ask Surrey if he can do a Bairstow and improve his odds of England selection by taking on another job. Maybe he could try his hand at opening the batting?

But therein lies the problem, because Surrey’s opening partnership is the aesthetically-challenging combo of Rory Burns and Dom Sibley – discarded England Test openers both. County cricket is awash with former England openers. (Surrey technically also have use of Jason Roy.)

This is the crux of things: There are more viable England Test wicketkeepers than there are openers. And there are more viable middle order batters than there are wicketkeepers. So of course a great wicketkeeper is going to miss out. And of course a so-so opener stands a decent chance of keeping his place.

Promise versus performance

Who would you pick instead of Crawley? The outstanding opener in the County Championship this season is Keaton Jennings. We don’t know if you remember Keaton Jennings playing for England, but in terms of public appreciation, it was pretty much exactly the same as Zak Crawley playing for England. We won’t risk a Venn diagram, but we suspect there was considerable overlap when it came to who was expressing dissatisfaction as well.

Crawley’s Test record is pretty meh, but he is keeping his place in large part because this is what he is being measured against. Jennings had 17 Tests and averaged 25.19. Crawley has had 33 Tests and averages 27.60. More pertinently, Jennings is 30 and Crawley is 25.

If you think even young players always get dropped with averages like Crawley’s, remember that Steve Waugh only averaged 30.52 after 26 Tests – and that was batting in the middle-order. At that point Waugh had never made a Test hundred, whereas Crawley has three to his name, including a double. Conversely, some players hover around this mark and keep getting opportunities without ever really coming good. Mark Ramprakash’s Test average of 27.32 was achieved over the course of 52 Tests. England will presumably argue their selection policy has more in common with 1980s Australia than 1990s England.

Someone else then

Of course there are always options. Our own preference right at this minute would probably still be Alex Lees, who always struck us as a skilful and resolute batter who wasn’t awed by top level cricket. But we’ll concede that Lees’ case is far from outstanding – just a couple of fifties and an average a clip under 40 in the second division so far this season.

That means we can’t get too worked up about Lees’ omission. And we can’t get too worked up about Jennings’ omission either. And we can’t get too worked up about Ben Stokes not setting the milk bottles aside to magically transform himself into an opener either.

We can’t get too worked up about any of the alternatives and so we also can’t get too worked up about the continued inclusion of Zak Crawley, a young opening batter who is capable of hitting Test hundreds.

Come on, he’s a natural.

Hello new readers – why not sign up for our email so that you don’t forget about us?

Hello old, jaded readers – why not help crowdfund some more King Cricket features?