Size matters to James Taylor. It has defined him as a sportsman. Only not in the way Kevin Pietersen suggested it ought. Taking the family jockey gig, as Pietersen recently wrote he should, was never Taylor’s saddlebag. Instead he has been on a ride to prove that a lack of height should not be a handicap to an international batsman.
While Taylor is undoubtedly small in stature – at 5ft 6in he is only an inch shorter than the greatest of them all, Sir Donald Bradman – he has been big in numbers as a domestic cricketer. So big, in fact, that the selectors could no longer deny him a shot at a World Cup spot this winter. His county career statistics are awesome: a whopping 2,866 List A runs for Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire at an average of 59.69. His chain of white-ball scores at the end of the 2014 campaign were another level again.
In fact, Taylor’s selection for the tour of Sri Lanka which departs on Sunday was something of a throwback to an era when players earned winter plane tickets on the back of eye-catching displays in Lord’s finals. Only his was not a one-off TV drama, more of a three-part series. His trio of Royal London Cup hundreds for Nottinghamshire – following one for the England Lions against the Sri Lankan A side in Worcester – were all shown on the box.
“I truly love being in the spotlight and I always have,” Taylor says. “It’s easy to say you thrive in a pressure situation but I have shown over the last however many years that I score runs when it’s like that. I pride myself on putting in those performances when my team really needs it and if you look at my run of hundreds every single one of them was in a different situation, my tempo was totally different, the position the team was in was very different from the last one. It was nice to show people my biggest strength: adapting to the position that I am put in.”
That versatility was evident when, following his ballistic affair at Lord’s – Middlesex were flayed over 55 balls – he scratched his way to 50 off 75 in the quarter-final against Derbyshire, then exploded late on to hit a career-best unbeaten 146 and put Notts out of reach. In the lost cause that was the semi-final at Durham, his striking was clean from first ball to last, the one that signalled the end of the match. “The hardest thing can be to take ego out of the equation. You walk out to bat, especially on TV, wanting to show off and show people what you can do. But I have found that I am successful if I bury myself in the match situation.
“It means that people looking in from outside might say: ‘This is a village innings, what’s he doing here?’ Wondering why I am taking my time, not trying to hit boundaries. But I am always thinking about the end result and working backwards, planning my way through innings even if that means I am scoring ugly runs, which quite often at the start mine tend to be,” he adds.
The challenge now is to successfully replicate this process and its unorthodox execution at the highest level, proving Pietersen’s assessment wrong and the selectors’ decision to axe Gary Ballance three months shy of the World Cup right. Amid all the recrimination, recalcitrance and reintegration that emanated from events at the Headingley Test against South Africa in 2012 it is easily forgotten that the debutant Taylor shared in a 147-run stand with Pietersen, one that left them both in admiration; just not of each other.
So did the fact Pietersen called his fifth-wicket partner substandard hurt? “Look, you would be kidding yourself if you said you hadn’t got doubters. I know I have plenty. That acts as an added motivation for me. I don’t really think too much about him, to be honest, but people do say bad things about you. You have to be thick-skinned as a sportsman and deal with what’s said behind your back.
“He’s entitled to his opinions but I definitely know that I was ready to play and they made the right decision. I did my bit in that game, it is not like I didn’t help England’s position. We put on nearly 150. Of course, he did the bulk of the scoring but somebody had to be there with him in the situation of the game. The partnership we put on was for the team. I allowed him to play the way he did,” Taylor, whose contribution was 34, says.
Taylor has made a single international appearance since being dropped one Test later but, with England desperate for solutions in both rotating the strike in the middle and thrashing at the death, he has the chance to be a one-size-fits-all option. His power should not be underestimated either. Sitting opposite the 24-year-old in the Trent Bridge pavilion his lack of height is obvious but equally is the fact that he is – in modern parlance – ripped. More welterweight than waif due to his dedication to the gym, Taylor struck 15 sixes in Royal London action last summer, second only to Kent’s Sam Billings.
What has also been evident to men like Mick Newell, his director of cricket at Trent Bridge and one of the four men to assess his England credentials, is that Taylor can complement partners standing six-foot plus, such as Alex Hales, knocking bowlers off their lengths. “I have always used that as a strength. I can also play shots other people can’t, so it’s definitely not a weakness. It’s not like I have suddenly become small overnight. I have grown up like this and used my height positively,” he says.
After a fraught start to international cricket, it is time to show it is not tough being himself in this England team.
