Be it next month or next year, Joe Root’s expected appointment as successor to Alastair Cook as England’s Test captain will represent something of a step into the unknown, given the Yorkshireman’s relative lack of experience in the role at domestic level.
Though with this scenario now seemingly the norm, the national set-up, chiefly through their former head coach turned Lions director, Andy Flower, are looking to enhance leadership qualities in other ways, including lessons from the decorated former army captain, Gemma Morgan, over the past two years.
One such player being moulded for future responsibility in this way is Keaton Jennings, the 24-year-old Durham opener who was parachuted into Test cricket in India before Christmas and struck a century on his debut in Mumbai. Jennings is preparing to lead the Lions on their tour to Sri Lanka next month and while he feels captaincy remains primarily a suck-it-and-see pursuit, he has taken something away from the Sandhurst approach.
“A lot of it has been based around the military thinking of trust within a team, how they train each other, the lengths they go to to take responsibilities for their own actions and stay away from being a sheep,” said Jennings, who will also captain the North XI during the 50-over North v South series in Abu Dhabi in March. “One of the biggest things they said was to try to be proactive in everything that the team does and have nobody lagging behind.”
One of the tasks set by Morgan was for the Lions players to fix a broken sail on a boat in a howling wind, something used to improve decision-making under pressure. Jennings, who admits he was taken aback by the step-up in intensity during his two Tests in the international cauldron last month, got the intention behind it.
“Gemma was trying to get guys to be more precise, to make correct decisions more often and a little bit more quickly as well. When you are under the pressure [of a match] and a million people all over the world are watching, and you have to make a decision that will impact the rest of the game – they are trying to prepare you for that scenario.”
During the Lions tour of Sri Lanka, at which Morgan will be present for a spell, Jennings will captain in two A Tests and five 50-over fixtures. It will mean resuming the role he performed for two matches in Dubai last December before he replaced the injured Haseeb Hameed in the senior side and followed his fellow opener by providing one of the bright sparks in an otherwise chastening 4-0 series defeat.
That England’s hopes for the left-hander go beyond the promise of this early impact with the bat and the prospect that he, Cook and Hameed could, in an order yet to be decided, form the top three for the year ahead against South Africa, West Indies and eventually Australia should come as no surprise given his past experience of leadership.
While Root will have just a handful of matches leading Yorkshire and one Lions gig under his belt before his inevitable rise to the senior job, Jennings has plentiful captaincy experience with both South Africa Under-19s and Durham’s second XI. His 23 matches in charge of the former featured an away series win over England in 2011 before he switched allegiance to the country of his mother’s birth the following year.
Jennings, who claims to have also learned much about pastoral care of a group during his time as head boy of King Edward VII in Johannesburg, remains in the infancy of his England career, of course, and any future such role will hinge on establishing himself with the bat. In this regard he is refusing to get ahead of himself, not least since the next Test, against his former country, is not until July.
“Waiting for the next Test would be assuming too much,” said Jennings, who followed the 112 he made in Mumbai with a half-century on that crushing final day in Chennai. “There are six months of cricket, a Lions tour, a North v South series, up to nine championship games, so there is a lot of cricket to be played before any selection takes place.
“Look at a guy like Cook – the only opening batsman in the history of the game to score more than 10,000 runs – he’s done it over a period of time. To be a dead cert for something in six months’ time would be pushing my nose too far ahead.”
Should the runs that made him the top scorer in Division One last summer continue to flow, albeit in the second tier following Durham’s enforced relegation, would his preference be to open or bat at No3 in the Test side? “To open. I have opened the majority of my life. But if someone said to me you can bat No10 and play 100 Tests I would snap their hand off.”
While No10 this summer feels as likely for Jennings as it does for Jeremy Corbyn, the captain he will be playing under remains to be seen. If his time under Cook, who continues to mull over his position with the director of cricket, Andrew Strauss, is limited to his first two Tests, Jennings says he will have learned plenty from him as a leader.
He said: “[Cook] was brilliant for me. In those two and a half weeks he made a real impact on me and the way I viewed him as a person as well. I hadn’t met him before. You see people in the media and think how they will be, and he was 10 times better than that.
“He was very welcoming, warm, friendly, I suppose caring, and made me feel part of the group immediately. And his batting input was really good. To look at a guy who has achieved so much but still gave me so much is something to take note of.”
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