Nobody ever feels completely ready for the start of the English cricket season but here it is all the same, blooming up out of the April mulch with an agreeably heavyweight opening round of fixtures on Friday. As ever it is a part of this process to feel a bit anxious. A sense of decorative decay, of fighting constantly for space and air has always been a part of cricket in England.
This is, after all, a sport where the entire season tends to fold together into a microcosm of a single family day out at the English seaside, a five-month blur of travel, wet shoes, existential gloom, the consolations of ritual food and familiar faces, and buried somewhere along the way those brief, chancy moments of sun-drenched beauty that end up defining the entire experience in a snapshot.
There is an extra layer of uncertainty this time around, something nagging away just out of sight at the start of the seven-Test summer. Sporting anxieties come in various shades. This one is highly specific and also something of a tell when it comes to wider currents of change.
Yes, it’s the top six! It’s Cook-Stoneman-Vince-Root-Malan-Stokes, incumbent members of England’s Test match top six, which was once a matter of vital shared urgency but has become an oddly troubling thing, a little strange, a little distant and blurred.
England’s No 3. England’s No 5. These are important people. Knowing exactly who they are at any given moment is a bit like knowing who the current James Bond is or the latest Doctor Who. The first really epic‑feeling top six I can remember was England’s 1985 Ashes powerhouse: Graham Gooch and Tim Robinson at the top, followed by the miracle of David Gower at No 3, swaying and bobbing in his wide-brimmed hat, like the most divinely talented scarecrow ever to raise a bat; and below him the reassuringly paunchy, sweating rump of Gatting-Lamb-Botham.
Fast forward to the present day and it seems the same batsmen from England’s disastrous Test winter will keep their spots against Pakistan next month. This despite the fact there is a fair statistical argument they add up to England’s weakest top six of the modern age.
Trevor Bayliss has already announced the cupboard is bare when it comes to alternatives, a masterstroke of demotivation for every single current county cricketer and a statement that confirms the impression of Bayliss as a lavishly rewarded head coach who is not only unmoved by Test cricket but also inconvenienced by its basic existence, wincing and prevaricating beneath his floppy hat like a crisis-ridden minor shadow cabinet minister ambushed by TV cameras on a fishing trip.
Meanwhile the basic notion of the Test match top six, its primacy as a thing, continues to atrophy. There have been periods of fragility before but this top six feels different: miscast and a little vague, a product of carelessness and category mistake.
Even the openers feel wrong. Alastair Cook has been a giant of English cricket, a patch of cold white light in the middle of all that gruelling heat. But he plays now with a constant flinch, most often seen wandering off with that air of wounded nobility, a minor central European monarch being marched through the palace colonnades en route to his own impeachment.
Mark Stoneman has been a fun addition, an opener, finally, who strikes the ball aggressively. But when playing the short ball like a man swatting flies with a frying pan is no longer reason to be dropped as an England opener, then we might as well all give up.
No 3 remains an odd kind of problem. The ideal Test No 3 has some base note of genuine aristocratic talent. Brian Lara came jogging out still casually putting on bits of kit, waggling at the buckles of his pads, as though he’d just tumbled out of bed and into the Rolls and down the pavilion steps. James Vince does have a real beauty in his batting, most obviously in that easy yawning drive through the covers. But it seems pretty obvious Joe Root at No 4 scoring fifties should be Joe Root at No 3 scoring hundreds, defining this team from the tipping point.
Below him, Ben Stokes at six is pretty much the only real note of authenticity, a No 6 who comes out as all No 6s should, in a genuine fury, reeking of cigars and body odour, with a sense of bristling disdain for his opponents, for the five batsmen ahead of him and for the five still to come.
So what now? As ever, this becomes a discussion about changing times, talent-drain, old forms being shunted to one side like an outdated combine harvester. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Test cricket is not dead. There is no reason to accept this. The product is still good. It just needs some care, to be nursed along as it always has been, not to be abandoned or left to wither while T20 defines itself on another stage.
For now, England need to rip out the cobwebs, to take a chance on talent, to give the Test team the same invigorating approach afforded the white-ball line-up. Get Jonny Bairstow up the order. Haseeb Hameed needs to play, and keep playing. We can handle it. Just give us a team and a top six to believe in, while the memory that all this matters still remains.
