How Zak Crawley can force his way back into the England XI

As one door opens, another slams shut.

And as Emilio Gay walks down the fabled steps of the Lord’s pavilion for the opening Test of the summer against New Zealand, Zak Crawley will be watching on, wondering if his international career is already over at the age of 28.

There will be plenty who will suggest he has been lucky to stretch it out this far.

At the conclusion of England’s Test series against India last summer, no opener in Test history (that’s over 148 years of matches) had opened the batting so often but averaged as few as Crawley’s 30.88.

Yes, stats can sometimes be misleading but, generally, 94 innings is enough to give you a pretty accurate picture of a player’s attributes and manifest faults.

When Crawley was dropped, social media did what it does best – it kicked into Bazball-style overdrive.

Endless snippets of his finest moment were shown on repeat, namely that searing off-drive off the bowling of Aussie captain Pat Cummins, to open the 2023 Ashes series at Edgbaston.

A few Tests later, he smashed 189 off just 182 at Old Trafford as England almost won to bring the series level.

This was peak Crawley.

The irony is that while most batters struggle against high pace, Crawley’s kryptonite is far more mundane.

“If you put him on against Cummins on the flat wicket, 90-mile-an-hour bowler, he plays pace really well,” says Toby Radford, currently batting coach of Afghanistan and a man who spent a season in the same role at Crawley’s county, Kent.

“It’s lateral movement where he struggles when there’s swing and seam, hence why New Zealand do him, and why he struggles against county bowlers on a county-type pitch early season.”

Crawley has endured a dismal start to the season at Kent, scoring just 226 runs at an average of 20.54.

Radford has run a number of posts on LinkedIn which have examined Crawley’s technique in the early part of this season. Including one which compared his body and head position in red-ball cricket to the position he adopted in his T20 innings for Kent against Sussex, when he hit 75 not out off 41 balls—his highest score of the season.

“Early season he’s getting out a lot to the straight ball,” says Radford. “What’s happening is, just at the point of release of the ball, his head and his body are moving across the wicket and starting to go almost towards extra cover.

“By the time the ball has come out of the hand, instead of his head going up and down the wicket, he’s moving across, and once the ball then comes inside his eyeline, his head and hands are well outside of stump.”

Radford then analysed his set-up in white-ball cricket, where he has taken a different guard; his stance is slightly more open and his head and hands are in line with the stumps.

“Now if you bowl a straight ball, on middle stump, he’s meeting it with a straight blade and the middle of the bat,” says Radford.

Technically, this is a fairly straightforward problem to resolve.

What’s more complex is getting inside the head of a batter who has come in for such stinging criticism.

Neil D’Costa has worked with some of the finest batters in world cricket, most notably former Australian skipper Michael Clarke, and Marnus Labuschagne.

And he wonders whether there isn’t something far more fundamental to question, not just in the demise of Crawley but also Ollie Pope.

“The key to winning in Test cricket is to keep winning the mini-moments, but if you can’t identify them, then what hope do you have?” he says. “We keep hearing the word ‘intent’ – have the intent to score every ball.

“But you have to have the ability to define the moments that you can score quickly in, and the times you need to hunker down.

“Sometimes scoring no runs is more important than losing a wicket.

“Ollie Pope was like [Ricky] Ponting; he had that beautiful drive down the ground that he used to play early on.

“Then, suddenly, it looked like he had to play every shot in the book. It’s the same with Zak: he gets on top of a bowler and then he chucks it away.

“In a batting line-up you don’t need everyone playing the same way.”

D’Costa has a point. Joe Root attempted to be far more aggressive for a time before slipping back into the mode which has delivered him so much success in the past.

Whether Crawley has the ability or inclination to change, only time will tell.

If Gay hits his straps, he’ll have plenty of time to ponder where it all went wrong.