It was just muggy enough at Headingley on Friday morning for the spectators to work up a sweat on the short walk from Burley Park station. A lot of them were left mopping their brow and muttering about how close the weather was.
England’s batsmen seemed to be suffering with clammy palms and sticky collars too, especially the three greenhorns, Mark Stoneman, Tom Westley and Dawid Malan. They had a warm morning of it, toiling away against a very different sort of West Indies attack underneath all that heavy grey cloud. And soon after lunch, all three had come and gone, Westley lbw for three, Stoneman caught behind for 19, Malan bowled for eight. The trio have made only two fifties in 12 Test innings between them.
Westley was the first to go. From a distance he seemed the most nervous of the three. He had spent the morning’s training session practising his straight driving against a series of short-range throw-downs and was still rehearsing the shot even as he walked out to bat, as if the last-minute cramming was going to make all the difference.
His was a skittish little innings, which included an edge just short of slip, a single squirted out to the leg side, one whippy cut shot which he did not quite catch cleanly, and then ended when he missed with that very same stroke he had spent the morning working on. Westley got out in a similar way in the first Test. Once is a misfortune; twice begins to look like carelessness.
Westley, who was so endearingly enthusiastic about his intentions when he was first called up – “I’ll walk down the wicket and whip it!” he told an interviewer in All Out Cricket – now has the air of a man who is four weeks into a severe crash course on the particular difficulties of Test cricket. He is making a close study, in particular, of all the extra scrutiny a Test player can expect to be subjected to, from the media and the opposition’s analysts. He looks horribly exposed at No3, where there is barely a lick of cover for him to shelter behind as he tries to figure out how to cope with the step up.
A similar thing is true for Stoneman. He followed Westley back four overs later. Stoneman had looked comfortable enough holding one end in those early overs, as unobtrusive as a man napping in a corner chair. He has the knack of playing late, with a flickering backlift, in which his bat twitches like the second hand of a stopped clock before he finally commits to his shot. He saw off Shannon Gabriel, who bowled superbly well in his first spell, by batting out back-to-back maiden overs but he fell the very minute he decided to try something more ambitious against Kemar Roach.
Stoneman threw a loose drive at a delivery that moved just enough to slip between the wide gap between his bat and pad. It flicked his inside edge on the way and he was caught behind. Mindful of all that and the fact England were three down, Malan, next in, decided to try to play very conservatively indeed. He made two scoring shots in the 31 balls faced before lunch, his admirable assiduousness undone when he played on off Jason Holder soon after the break. Holder had only just switched to bowling round the wicket and the change of angle seemed enough to fox Malan’s thinking.
In amid all that upheaval Joe Root mustered more authority in one shot, a cover drive for four, than his three new team-mates did in all the 97 balls they faced. Root’s bat cracked like a teacher’s ruler on a desk, an announcement of his own authority. This was the 12th consecutive Test in which Root has made at least 50 but even he cannot succeed every innings. And the fact he was dropped at slip when his score was eight was a reminder of just how fragile England’s top six are at the moment.
They are running out of time to fix it, too. There are 10,000 miles between Leeds and Brisbane but that first Ashes Test is starting to come into view. It is 90 days away and Malan, Westley and Stoneman have, at most, three more Test innings to prove they should be in the XI for that match. The Australians are watching. Mitchell Starc has been talking about how England “are certainly not as settled in the batting stakes as they were a little while ago,” on Cricket Australia’s in-house podcast. “You don’t really quite know who they’re going to bring to Australia yet,” he added. “It will be interesting. It’s a nice one to watch for the bowlers.”
Before this Test Root said that, if his new batsmen wanted to “nail down those spots”, they would need to “get in and make it really count”. None has done it yet. But then they are not alone in that. England have given debuts to 10 batsmen since they were last in Australia and Stoneman, Westley and Malan, the last three in, are the only ones still in the team.
Whether they still will be come that first Test in Australia or not depends on what they do with those few chances they have left. If West Indies seemed a warm proposition on a sticky August day in England, one would guess the Gabba is going to be much too hot to handle.
