Back when Keaton Jennings was a coming man, he was one of a group of English players picked to take part in a military training camp. One of the tasks, Jennings said then, was that the players had to fix a broken boat during a storm.
Turns out that while this may have been good metaphorical preparation for the experience of playing in this England team, it was less help getting him ready for the actual business of Test match batting. Jennings made such a strong impression at that camp England earmarked him as a candidate to be Test captain. Two years later, he is barely hanging on to his place in the team.
The point of the boat, Jennings said, was to practise for the moment “when you are under the pressure 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”. On Thursday morning, he made a decision under pressure that did not just impact the game, but his career, too. After 10 and a half Tests in which he has scored 417 runs at an average of 22, Jennings was out to the sort of egregious dismissal that can cost a player his place as well as his wicket.
There are an awful lot of ways for a batsman to fail and England’s top order ran through a few on the first morning. After grafting for an hour, Alastair Cook steered a wide ball straight to third slip as if he wanted to give Virat Kohli the catching practice. But if Cook gave it away, Jennings never had it to begin with. His top-order teammates at least tried to play the deliveries that dismissed them. Jennings left his well alone. So far as decisions under pressure go, this was a poor one, because it hit him on the back pad flush in front of middle stump.
It was a bad dream of an innings, and must have left Jennings feeling so completely denuded that, when it was over, he would not have been surprised to look down and find that he had come out to bat without his trousers. He faced four balls, all from Jasprit Bumrah, who has that awkward, mechanical action, like a wind-up toy, a stiff catapult whang which makes his bowling so hard to pick. Jennings was utterly baffled by it.
The first three deliveries slid across him towards the slips. The fourth swung back in. Jennings had already thrust his bat away, as if he imagined it was that he had to protect rather than the stumps. When the ball hit him, he finally tried to jerk his bat down towards it. The shot was so late it might have come by rail replacement bus. It was almost as if he had forgotten where he was, that he had snapped out of a momentary blackout when the ball slapped his pad.
The sympathetic explanation is Jennings was concentrating so hard on leaving the ball outside off that he was caught short when one came the other way. But some dismissals are worth more than the one wicket they cost, and this one was the kind that can scar a player’s career, in the way that Chris Read’s reputation as a batsman never recovered from the time he was bamboozled by Chris Cairns’s slower ball when England played New Zealand in 1999.
It was the shot of a batsman who was mentally spent, one who, if he does not score a lot of runs in the second innings here, may very well find he has been dropped for the next Test. There is a certain unfairness to that. Jennings is only one part of England’s dysfunctional batting unit. They are a team with four No 6 batsmen, a lineup designed to play off a platform they never actually manage to build, and which they hardly even seem to have the blueprints for. England’s top four are averaging 21.33 each so far this summer, which is their lowest figure in a home season since 1932.
So it is a collective failure but Jennings is the weakest link. His highest score since he was recalled is only 42. And his catching in the slips has become such a liability that they have moved him out of the cordon. At this point, the merciful thing to do may be to put up one of those big green curtains they use when a horse falls at a racecourse, to spare the crowd the sight, and afford the man some privacy, for the ruthless but necessary end of his Test career.
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