English cricket is nothing if not cussedly predictable. For all the restlessness of the past few years there are still few things more likely to induce a funk of self-destructive confusion than the sight of uncooperative, unorthodox, unarguable talent. At which point enter Alex Hales of the Mumbai Indians, who has this week flown out to play for them in the IPL on a short-term deal, despite a clash with the start of the NatWest T20 Blast. And who is, age 26, already close to becoming an English cause célèbre before he has even had the chance to explore his full potential as an international cricketer.
This is not to suggest Hales belongs in the established A-list of maverick English talent. He’s not a Botham, a Gower, a Snow or a Pietersen. In fact, he is in his own way more interesting, a player who stands at one remove simply because of the way he plays, the nature of his talent as much as its extent.
Only in England could the style of a man’s cricket – the ability to hit a ball with exhilarating venom outweighing his ability to block it out on a difficult pitch – become a kind of macro-political issue. But this is the way we seem to be heading, with Hales as a kind of Princess Diana for the Twenty20 generation; not to mention providing all the evidence you need in one under-explored international cricketer of the basic stodginess that threatens to stifle not just the England team’s success but its connection with a broader, younger public.
One thing is clear – Mumbai have cherry-picked English cricket’s most exhilaratingly pure striker of a ball, not to mention its most modern, state of the art, new world-ish talent. Jos Buttler has a case, too, on this front, although England are currently doing their best to sweep him under the carpet by batting him down at No8. But Hales has the runs, the ICC ranking and the IPL bench spot.
And yet, for all that, he also has just 10 ODIs to his name, no central contract or prospect thereof, no immediate hope of playing Test cricket, and is of most interest currently as an example of how not to cultivate an outsize but unorthodox talent. Certainly letting him fly across the world to warm the bench in cricket’s glitziest domestic competition is not the worst thing English cricket has done to Hales this season: that would be flying him around the world to play only one live match at England’s meekest, most abject World Cup to date.
With this in mind there is an element of just deserts for anybody concerned with Hales’s absence from the ECB’s relaunched T20 competition – albeit for just a single match – is in some way a show of disloyalty. Frankly who could blame him? “It has been my aim and goal to get into this tournament. When I found out for sure that I would be a part of it, it was just elation for me,” Hales said on Monday. Contrast this with the sheer sense of all-consuming blue Lycra gloom around England’s tearfully-borne World Cup campaign. Or indeed with the weary disappointment in Hales’s own reaction to England’s then-coach Peter Moores musing publicly on his being “found out” by international bowlers able to duck the ball into to him.
“I got bowled once by Bhuvneshwar Kumar with an in-swinger. That’s not being worked out, that’s a good delivery,” Hales pointed out, rightly miffed. More striking is the urge to dismiss a talented player so easily. This is enough to make you weep a little in itself, with the suggestion that even at the highest level, cricket in England is still as it was in the 1950s: a sport where weakness trumps strengths every time; where selection must be based above all on even-handed blanket competence; and where concentrating on what a player can’t do is more important than glorying in what he can.
In this sense the real point here is not about Hales at all, but about the ability to promote and nurture the most talented in what is, like it or not, a glorious public entertainment rather than a self-nourishing corporate bubble. Hales may or may not be good enough to flourish more broadly. But as ever, a player other selectors and coaches might have treated like a new toy, to be cherished and allowed to fly, will instead have to ferret at the fringes, to doubt his methods, and to knock twice as loud as a more orderly talent just to make it to the same place.
This despite the fact England’s only successful modern short-form team, the 2010 World Twenty 20 champions, were notable for their startling boldness, with openers who simply attacked without fear of censure (a policy that has not been seen since). Not to mention the fact Hales himself has achieved enough in a cut-and shut international career to deserve a little faith. His unbeaten hundred against Sri Lanka last year is up there with the best international Twenty20 innings ever played. He has 353 T20 international runs at an average of 44 in the past year. In first-class cricket he has scored 1,693 runs at 55 with five hundreds over the last two years batting No3 for Nottinghamshire (Hales would make a thrillingly potent Test No5).
There is no template for how an international cricketer should emerge these days. Hales is neither a David Warner, authentic child of Twenty20; nor a Kane Willamson, whose orthodox success opened the portals of the Twenty20 circuit. He is simply a curiously unexplored talent who faces a vital year or two. Some success next season in the IPL (he probably won’t play this time round: Mumbai have only just settled on an opening pair) could yet kickstart his career in another direction. Alternatively, a new England regime might feel emboldened to trust in an uneven but undeniably exhilarating batsman.
Either way we will probably never know how good he might have been. Hales has, to an extent, already been decisively mucked about and under-nurtured, challenged to justify his sense of adventure when he might have been encouraged simply to go with it.
What is certain is there will be others, that the future, even in England, is roughly Hales-shaped. And that English cricket would be a happier place all round with the knowledge that talent, however ragged-edged, will find a home.
