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Can Alex Hales end England quest for a Strauss replacement?

Since Andrew Strauss retired in 2012, the Test side has lacked a reliable opening partner for Alastair Cook. Stephen Brenkley assesses whether Notts’ converted No 3 can be the answer to the selectors’ muddled prayers

Stephen Brenkley
Saturday 19 December 2015 01:26 GMT
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England’s latest opening pair, Alastair Cook and Alex Hales (left), in warm-up action against a South Africa Invitation XI
England’s latest opening pair, Alastair Cook and Alex Hales (left), in warm-up action against a South Africa Invitation XI

Towards the end of the penultimate day in the third and final Test at Lord’s in August 2012, Andrew Strauss, the England captain, shouldered arms to a straight ball. It was a distracted, careworn non-stroke. It was the last he would ever play in international cricket and it would set off a confusing chain of events, sending the selectors down an ill-starred path they are still treading.

As leg before wicket as it is possible to be, Strauss walked into the sunset. A few days later he retired officially: 100 Tests, 7,037 runs, average 40.91, substantial by any standards. Strauss and Alastair Cook had put on 4,711 runs together as an opening pair, comfortably an England record, third by any pair any time.

The three years, four months and a few days since have been spent in a quest, so far unfulfilled, for Strauss’s replacement – someone, anyone, who can offer durability, purpose and skill, someone with whom Cook can walk out to bat in at least the near certainty (nothing is that absolute in sport) that the same chap will be alongside him the next time.

Strauss himself, as England’s director of cricket, is now involved in searching for his own replacement. The latest to be anointed, the eighth in 40 Tests, is Alex Hales, the Nottinghamshire batsman who will play next Saturday in Durban, unless there is a late change of mind – which itself would be as alarming as any of the decisions made over the last three years – provoked by the fear that Hales might really not be quite up to it.

Despite the mischievous comments of Junior Dala, the bowler who twice bowled him in England’s warm-up match this week, Hales has as much chance as any of his immediate predecessors. There are glaring defects in his method, though not his approach, as a traditional Test opener and it is wholly appropriate that Geoff Boycott should consider the mere mention of Hales as a betrayal of an ancient craft. Hales will not score 8,000 Test runs as Boycott did, but since a dreadful 2013 county season he has reconfigured his method in Championship cricket.

He is not the gung-ho merchant that his scything Twenty20 style might suggest. The patient, perhaps nerve-wracked eight he made from 42 balls in Potchefstroom this week was more like how he creates a championship innings. Hales has adopted and adapted a fashion of trying to see off the new ball, hardly bothering with the strike rate at the start and then putting his foot on the gas as an innings goes on.

It is to be hoped that he and Cook, and the England hierarchy, have talked about this because part of the opener’s job description – one not always adhered to by Boycott – is to rotate the strike by picking up singles.

Hales’s strike rate in the Championship since the start of 2014 is 67, very modern first-class stuff, and his average is 50. It almost defies belief, given the trust that England are to place in him, that he spent the greater part of last season batting at No 3 for Nottinghamshire. An opener is an opener is an opener. Ask Boycott, ask Graham Gooch.

But this partly epitomises the selectors’ hesitant, wayward approach to the whole business since 2012. They have never really known what they wanted, they have never conveyed the impression that they have complete faith in those whom they have chosen, they seem not to have been dictated by what kind of innings they may want to construct. Not only have they been uncertain whether to stick or twist but what kind of bet to place initially.

There was always an inevitability about what might happen to the poor sap who took over from Strauss at the first time of asking. A short tenure is often the curse of those who follow longevity. There are too many comparisons, the need for instant gratification is huge. In the event, England cocked it up.

Trevor Bayliss, the quietly observant coach and sage who took over in July, does not quite recognise the mess he has inherited. On several occasions lately he has offered a sincere opinion on the unending quest.

“If there was someone in county cricket who was putting their hands up then we would pick him,” he said in the UAE a couple of months ago. “But there isn’t and that makes the process more difficult.” Well, yes and no.

Picking on county form is precisely what the selectors have done in many recent cases when part of the art of selection is choosing those who might have the necessary but are not cutting the mustard regularly on the county circuit for reasons varying from boredom to lack of challenge. Michael Vaughan averaged 27 for Yorkshire in the season before he was chosen for his first tour, to South Africa, in 1999. Marcus Trescothick was an intermittent (very intermittent) slayer of county attacks when he was belatedly recognised as an obvious international talent.

The order of Cook’s partners post-Strauss is: Compton, Joe Root, Michael Carberry, Sam Robson, Jonathan Trott, Adam Lyth and Moeen Ali. Of those Compton (twice), Root, Robson and Lyth all scored hundreds in the position. Carberry ran up against a potent Australia side, Trott was already sadly broken as a Test batsman and simply should not have been picked.

Cook has been an opener in all 39 Tests that England have played since Strauss, and despite his own well chronicled lean times has scored 3,225 runs at 46.74. The others, by contrast, have made 1,860 runs at 25.13.

The tangle emerged from the start. England’s first engagement post-Strauss was in India. It was not clear when the squad was selected who would keep Cook company and Compton was thought to be vying for the place with Root. In the event, the tour management went for Compton’s greater cricketing experience.

In one of England’s most laudable series victories, Compton was admirable, stoic and dependable. He made 208 runs and faced 613 balls, sharing two century opening partnerships with Cook. Later that winter in New Zealand he scored two resolute hundreds. They were old-fashioned innings in their way but Compton was still new at the game. He knew what he was doing.

At the start of the home summer in 2013 he seized up amid rumours that he was not fitting into the dressing room. It was Compton’s heart’s desire to play in the forthcoming Ashes series. He was dropped. Perversely, he has been recalled for this series and will seemingly bat at No 3. Root took over in 2013 and when he scored 180 in the Lord’s Ashes Test it seemed there might be an opening batsman for the ages.

More confusion followed. Root, originally designated to open that winter in Australia was dropped down the order (and eventually dropped) after Michael Carberry made runs in the opening tour match, in which he played only because of the strain the long flight had taken on Cook’s back. Carberry acquitted himself well considering the debacle the series became.

He never played again and since then the selectors have either been sticking pins in the donkey’s tail or writing names down on the back of a used Post-it note. They have come and they have gone. Hales, a batsman with a natural swing and sense of ebullience, should be wished well. But it is hard to stop thinking that the selectors should simply have stuck with Compton.

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