Before England left for New Zealand, Nasser Hussain accused their batsmen of having a "softness" about them that was "preventing them delivering the big runs". Paul Collingwood, naturally, disagreed (though wouldn't it have been wonderful if he'd said: "Aye, we're a bunch of nancies, and it's all my fault!") We might just be about to find out who is closer to the truth. The New Zealand Tests, starting tonight, could resolve the marshmallow/Murray Mint conundrum once and for all.
The absence of Shane Bond from the home attack because of his deal with the Indian Cricket League means Michael Vaughan's men will have one of their best chances to plunder Test runs since the visit of Bangladesh in 2005. This isn't to denigrate the Kiwis: the Spin is well aware it risks being called all sorts of unpleasant names by Chris Martin for making such a call. But without Bond, New Zealand are overly reliant on Daniel Vettori and Martin himself. No one else in the squad has 50 Test wickets.
So what now? A stat that was both impressive and alarming came to light on the last day of the Adelaide Test between Australia and India at the end of January that rather put the efforts of England's batsmen into perspective. Virender Sehwag's 151 was the ninth time in a row he had converted a Test hundred into at least 150, a sequence that included scores of 309, 254 and 201. Yes, that's flaky old Sehwag, a player not deemed good enough to be picked for the first two Tests at Melbourne and Sydney.
Yet when Kevin Pietersen scored 226 against India at Lord's last summer, it was the highest score by an England batsman since Graham Gooch's 333 a full 16 years earlier. What, you might ask, have they been doing with their time? The answer, by and large, is failing to cash in, as Hussain pointed out. Since the start of the 2004-05 tour to South Africa, England have registered 48 individual hundreds in 40 Tests, of which only 12 have been 150 or more: that's an innings of 150 in only 30% of their Tests. QED, as Nasser would almost certainly put it after a few babychams.
But to nail the point, you need to compare and contrast with other sides in the same period. Not surprisingly England do not come out well. Sri Lankans have made 15 scores of 150 or more in 28 Tests (53%); Pakistanis 14 in 30 (46%); Indians 12 in 28 (42%); Australians 12 in 33 (36%), but lots of lesser hundreds besides; West Indians - West Indians! - nine in 28 (32%); then England, followed by South Africa (eight in 37), Zimbabwe (one in 8) and Bangladesh (one in 20).
Yes, centuries can be over-rated (why should 100 be so much more feted than 99?). But big centuries win games, and England have lost the knack, if indeed they ever had it. Just as worryingly, of those 12 scores of 150-plus, four have come from Pietersen, the in-house genius, and four from the still-absent Marcus Trescothick, leaving Collingwood (two), Vaughan and Ian Bell (one each) as the only others. Andrew Strauss, recalled for New Zealand on the strength of his colleagues' butter-fingers in Sri Lanka, has made 10 Test hundreds without going past 147.
Do these things really make any difference? Forgive a piece of uber-statistics for a moment. On the 13 occasions Sehwag has reached 100 in Tests, he has gone on to add a total of 970 runs at an average of 74; for Strauss, the figure is 265 at 26. Even factoring in Sehwag's capacity for making hay in the subcontinent sun (eight of those 13 innings took place in either India or Pakistan), this is still an astonishing discrepancy.
If Peter Moores can discover why England's batsmen fade once they get to 100, he might yet silence the murmurs which will grow louder if his CV ends up with a third Test-series defeat out of four.
· Extract taken from the Spin, guardian.co.uk/sport's weekly take on the world of cricket
