There is going to be a hole in the England Test team this winter and, since it is over 12,000 runs deep, it will take some filling. That is about 15% of all the team’s runs in the 12 years since Alastair Cook made his debut. After all that time his retirement feels like the ravens leaving the Tower. Everything is going to be that much more precarious from now on and it was already pretty rickety. For the selectors, partnering Cook has been hard enough. They have been looking for six years and still have not really found the solution. The search has gone on so long that he has finished before they did, so now they need a replacement for him too.
Since Andrew Strauss quit, Cook has had an entire cèilidh’s worth of partners. He might have been stripping the willow rather than swinging it. There have been 13 of them – dashers, biffers and blockers, old hands, young guns and journeyman pros. Add all their runs together and you find that between them they made only around two thirds as many as Cook in that time, that he scored 12 centuries compared with their six and averaged 42 to everyone else’s combined 27. Which is why they come and go like Spinal Tap’s drummers.
First there was Nick Compton but his runs dried up. Then it was Joe Root, before he switched back down to No 6. Michael Carberry kept getting starts, but he went after the disaster in Australia. John ‘Stumpy’ Pepys died in a bizarre gardening accident. Sam Robson could not stop getting out bowled or caught behind. Jonathan Trott did it in the West Indies. Then there was Adam Lyth; he was always being caught in the slips. Moeen Ali had a go against Pakistan. Alex Hales had a long run one summer. Eric ‘Stumpy Joe’ Childs. That was ugly. The official explanation was he choked on vomit. Someone else’s vomit, actually.
Ben Duckett did it in Bangladesh but got bumped down the order and bounced out of the side because he was so baffled by Ravi Ashwin. Haseeb Hameed broke a finger. Keaton Jennings just could not seem to figure out how to bat against Vernon Philander. Mark Stoneman, even when he was playing well, never seemed to make it anywhere past 50. Somewhere in the middle of all this Jos Buttler did it once, too, during a run chase. Oh, and Peter ‘James’ Bond. He exploded on stage. A flash of green light and that was it. And then Jennings again but he has hardly made a run all summer.
Some of these stories started well. Compton scored back-to-back centuries against New Zealand, Lyth and Robson both made hundreds in the second Test they played, Jennings got one in his first. After a year in which Stoneman and Jennings can boast a top score of 60 between them it seems odd now that England felt able to be so picky as to drop people so quickly. It seems likely Rory Burns will take a turn, too. He has earned it, since he has scored 1,000 first-class runs in each of the past five seasons. There was talk earlier this summer that Middlesex’s Nick Gubbins, too, might get a shot.
Hameed was the one, of course, or he was supposed to be. He came into the team when he was 19, on the tour of India in 2016, and scored 31 and 82 in the first Test at Rajkot, 13 and 25 in the second at Visakhapatnam, where he was cut short by an unplayable shooter in the second innings, and nine and 59 not out in the third at Mohali. He played that last innings even though the little finger on his left hand was broken in two places. He swallowed a couple of paracetamol, learned a new grip and got on with it. Hameed might have the technique and the temperament England need. The trouble is he certainly does not have the runs.
Hameed has made only three fifties in the 51 first-class innings he has played since, the best of them an 88 against Essex this time last year. This season he is averaging a shade over nine in the championship. England were persisting with him, he was playing for the Lions at the start of this season but it has become impossible to pick him. There are a few theories floating around about exactly what has gone wrong with his game. The most interesting is that he was so determined to prove he could succeed in limited-overs cricket, too, that he compromised the method that got him into the Test team to begin with.
Hameed spoke about it to the Manchester Evening News. “I have always said I want to play in all three formats,” he told them. “It is me being who I am, not just being content with being a Baby Boycott as such. I want people in, hopefully, 15 or 20 years to say, ‘He could play the way he did in Test cricket but could also adapt to 50-over and T20 cricket. too’” Whether it is true in Hameed’s case, it certainly speaks to a truth about the modern game, which is that the skills needed to open the batting in first-class cricket in England – the skills that served Cook so well in his Test career – are at odds with the ones needed to succeed in T20.
Which is one reason why, for the first time in a generation, England cannot be sure who is going to be opening their batting after this next Test. For now Cook looks like the last in a line of openers that stretches back through Strauss, Michael Vaughan and Michael Atherton. All four of them were great Test match batsmen, of course, but not one will be remembered for the way he played a white ball.
