Ashes 2015: Ian Bell is back on home soil in his battle for survival in England team

England’s selectors have promoted Bell to No 3 in a batting order whose upper portion has lately tended to capsize at the first sight of a ripple

Ian Bell has never scored a century for England on his home county ground of Edgbaston (Getty)

As England gathered in Birmingham on Sunday, one of their number waited for his team-mates to join him. Before they arrived, Ian Bell will almost certainly have pondered on the week ahead, playing again at the ground he cherishes, where he started life as a professional and where some day he intends to finish it.

This is as crucial a Test for Bell as it is for England. The future route of his career and the destiny of the Ashes seem intertwined this week at Edgbaston. If he can emerge from here with something then so can England; if he cannot halt his recent paltry sequence then their chances of a positive result from the match and thus the series diminish accordingly.

England’s selectors, presumably prompted and guided by the director of cricket, Andrew Strauss, have promoted Bell to No 3 in a batting order whose upper portion has lately tended to capsize at the first sight of a ripple. Bell has played his full part in creating the turbulence. But he finds himself the recipient of considerable faith, invited to move from the berth lower down where he has lately floundered. Not drowning, but waving, Strauss must have figured, or actually hitching a lift from four to three.

Bell has been saved by his long service, which goes back 11 years and 112 Tests; his record, which includes 22 Test hundreds; his undoubted willingness; and his unquestionable class. He has a Test batting average of 43.18, which bespeaks quality, though is not as high as it should be. Yet even now, at the age of 33, he is capable of persuading us that there is more to come.

Once the decision was taken to drop Gary Ballance, there remained several options. Bell, with 128 runs in his most recent 12 Test innings, could have gone with him, but while there is always someone else there was no one who had earned sufficient trust, respect or runs.

The old retainer having been thereby retained, it was then decided that Bell, rather than Joe Root, should occupy the blue-riband batting spot. It is a position that Bell has always craved without outrageously seeking it, a position that is always redolent with the most desirable batting qualities, a determined nature and a sense of style.

England’s most successful No 3, Wally Hammond, embodied the second of those and the second most successful, Jonathan Trott, the first of them. But players such as Peter May, Ted Dexter and David Gower all occupied the position for more than 40 Test innings.

When you think of No 3, you think of a team’s top batsman. To do it effectively demands patience and nerve. You can wait for five minutes or half a day.

Bell himself has done it 38 times for England in his 194 innings, but only with any resounding success when he was its temporary caretaker. In 2009, in the match that decided the Ashes, he made a well-crafted 72 at The Oval. In 2011, when Trott had made the berth his own but was injured, Bell scored two cracking No 3’s hundreds against India, including his highest Test score of 235. When Trott came back, Bell moved down.

But now Trott is gone for good from the Test team and Ballance, his replacement, has gone temporarily and if, when, he returns, it is unlikely to be at first drop. Bell’s elevation has been made from a feeling that it is somewhere he ought to thrive.

He has the footwork and strokeplay, the experience and the method, he can play off front foot and back, against pace and spin. All that will have been in the selectors’ thinking: well, he ought to be able to do it and the time has come again when he jolly well has to.

What will also have been in their thinking is what might be in Bell’s thinking. He wants another four years in the England side, perhaps seeing 2019, when he will be 37, as his last year. Then he would like to go back to Edgbaston awhile and give something back to the county where it all started.

These have not been idle thoughts on Bell’s part, they are part of his career plan. He still loves batting and he still loves batting for England and Warwickshire. In the past few months, however, it has been possible to sense the signs that the relentless nature of the profession is grinding him down. Why else would such an elegantly appointed craftsman keep getting out for no apparent reason? He has been worn down without realising it.

No one will take more seriously than Bell the role in which he has now been cast. No one will want more to score another hundred at Edgbaston. If you had asked him at the start of his career to name the one ground in England on which he wanted to score a Test hundred it would have been Edgbaston and it still would be.

There have been Test hundreds at all eight other venues, four of them at Lord’s, but none at the place where his heart lies. For Warwickshire, eight of his 37 first-class hundreds in England have come at the ground, five of them at No 3.

He wants desperately to make those figures nine and six some time this week, he wants to make his mark on these Ashes. He may be running out of ideas about how this might happen. But he will have mused on these matters while awaiting his colleagues.