Our cricket expert Dave Tickner considers the decisions that England have to make after being thrashed by South Africa in the second Test.
What’s that old truism about the England football team? We always believe we are the best team in the world or the worst; the truth is we are neither.
Now it can sometimes take the footballers four or even five tournament matches to prove that – although to their credit the trend is towards fewer – but the cricketers have managed it in two Tests this summer.
Just as some of the reaction to a large but patchy victory at Lord’s was over the top, the danger now is that the criticism that follows a Trent Bridge mauling will be similarly overblown.
England, though, must not shy away from the flaws South Africa were able to so ruthlessly expose across three-and-a-half one-sided days in Nottingham.
The hard truth is that there has been far more reason to call England the worst team in the world than the best recently; this was the Test side’s sixth defeat in eight games. At some point, this stops being something that can be ignored.
The middle four of those defeats, in India, were enough to convince Alastair Cook to fall on his sword, but there are questions to be asked of others. For all that Trevor Bayliss has achieved with the one-day team, has the Test team improved at all under him? It's possible that the two are directly linked. The gung-ho freedom that has transformed the one-day team just doesn't work consistently in Test cricket.
Bayliss cheerfully and repeatedly confesses his ignorance of county cricket, but that is becoming a serious problem when the selectors are unable to come up with their own answers.
Sadly for a good and talented man, Gary Ballance’s latest recall has thus far done nothing other than enforce the idea that first-class form is not always, and possibly not even often, an indicator of suitability for the top level.
Everything he has done in first-class cricket tells you this is a better batsman than the one who made four hundreds and raced past a thousand Test runs in his first spell in the side; everything he has done in Test cricket tells you international bowlers not only now know exactly how to bowl at him, but are able to do so consistently enough to shut him down.
His latest efforts see him join a list containing the likes of Sam Robson, Adam Lyth and Ben Duckett who have been unable to transfer to Test cricket the consistent first-class excellence that got them there.
But if first-class numbers alone aren’t enough, then you have to pick on ‘feel’, on spotting and selecting players who show something in certain situations. A gritty hundred on a tough pitch, a nerveless 80 not out in a run-chase, a hostile if unrewarded spell with an old ball on a flat deck. The sort of thing mere numbers can never convey, but that might show a player with the greatest of all qualities: Having Something About Them. England have, famously, struck gold in this regard before.
Think back to Duncan Fletcher’s time as England coach. Now there was a coach who knew the county game, and knew what he wanted in a cricketer. He identified Michael Vaughan, Marcus Trescothick and Simon Jones, none of whom had the first-class numbers to hammer down the door.
The current regime’s ‘feel’ picks have brought us James Vince and Liam Dawson.
If you can’t reliably fall back on first-class numbers, and you don’t have the knowledge to spot the hidden gems, then what do you do?
This summer’s ludicrous Test schedule means that the nine-day gap between this defeat and day one at The Oval almost obligates England to make changes; if not now, after that defeat and with time to make a considered decision, then when?
England put a lot of stock in consistency of selection, in giving players an extended chance to prove themselves before moving on. They would rather, as Bayliss put it last summer, give a player one game too many than one game too few.
Nobody, we are always told, wants a return to the 90s when England would chop and change every Test and a decent performance in a televised Lord’s final could land literally anybody a place on that winter’s tour.
As a sentiment, it’s hard to argue.
But you still need to see something to justify that faith. Sticking your head in the sand and sticking with a failing side looks every bit as risky here as tearing it all up and starting again.
And in recent years all it’s really given England is a string of players with a summer or winter’s worth of Test caps to their name but little prospect of adding to them.
It stems from the 2013/14 Ashes and its toxic fallout. That tour may have been the furnace in which Ben Stokes was forged, but it also burnt up what was left of the Andrew Strauss side that had risen to the top of the rankings.
Back then, consistency of selection wasn’t much of an issue. England knew their best team and stuck to it.
Strauss himself had already gone but that series finished or significantly shortened the careers of other core members of that side: Kevin Pietersen, Graeme Swann, Jonathan Trott, Matt Prior.
That was the last time England really knew, with any degree of confidence, their best side. No opposition captain would now try to repeat Michael Clarke’s pre-Ashes trick of naming the England team; it would be a decent effort for an England captain to attempt it more than a few days out.
There is an 18-strong club of players to have played fewer than 10 Tests for England since that 5-0 defeat. The 18 includes a couple of players with very decent careers behind them - Trott, Prior - but we can generously say perhaps four at most may go on to significant future ones: Jake Ball, Haseeb Hameed, Ben Duckett, and Keaton Jennings. And only in Hameed’s case does that feel probable rather than possible. He is the only member of the 18 to average over 30 with the bat, while the only man on the list to manage a sub-30 bowling average is James Tredwell after taking five wickets in his one appearance against the West Indies in 2015.
It’s a sorry list. So where do England turn now? They can’t really go back to any of the batsmen on the list, and anyone else they pick would have to be gut picks from a group of selectors who keep getting it wrong for a coach who doesn’t know any better, or based on Championship runs whose value has never looked weaker in the light of Ballance’s summer of feast and famine.
Equally England surely cannot continue with the top three as selected here and at Lord’s, despite Joe Root’s protestations. Something has to give.
The Ballance decision is perhaps the thorniest. He has not failed dismally in a series where being England’s number three makes you a de facto opening batsman, but he certainly hasn’t succeeded. And his technique is such that no matter how many runs it gets him it will always look awful when he gets out.
Nobody will ever look at a Ballance dismissal and say “Ah, not much he could have done differently there”. Even if the ball pitches leg, swings and seams, then keeps low, as happened today. People were questioning his method when he was averaging 50; those murmurs have grown into a cacophony as it tumbles toward 30.
To drop Ballance now, though, would surely be to end a Test career at 27 years old. (For comparison, the age when Strauss made his debut.) If he goes now, just two Tests into the reign of a new captain who fought for his recall, when he has averaged over 100 across the first half of the season, it becomes impossible to imagine the conditions under which he could return. Averaging 200?
His x-ray on an injured finger may, perversely, prove to his and England’s long-term benefit. If a damaged digit rules him out then he has not technically been dropped, yet the top three gets its required shake-up.
Who replaces him, though? Mark Stoneman? Tom Westley? Is it in any case cruel and unusual to continue subjecting Keaton Jennings to Vernon Philander and a new cricket ball? Are all these question marks just a distraction attempt to mask not having any clever solutions to a difficult question?
Elsewhere, Dawson surely must make way. It feels like a joke that's got out of hand; I don't think I've ever understood an England Test selection less. Bayliss may have felt very clever with his labelling of the spinners after the warm glow of Lord’s, but it was palpable nonsense then and looks plain daft now. If England are honest enough to admit that they don’t want a first-choice spinner, but rather someone to bowl some tidy overs and shore up the lower-middle-order batting, then they should also be honest enough to admit that a far better option for the short term is already there in that accursed Gang of 18; step forward, Samit Patel.
Toby Roland-Jones is next cab off the pace-bowling rank and will likely replace Mark Wood. His struggles to cope physically with back-to-back Tests may expain his insipid performance here, but not at Lord's.
Then the question becomes rather more existential; whether any of this is enough against a revitalised South Africa.
Returning captain Faf du Plessis got everything right from the moment he bravely chose to bat first under grey skies at Anderson and Broad’s favourite haunt to the moment he threw the ball to the hitherto-disappointing Duanne Olivier, who promptly took the last two wickets with successive deliveries.
On paper, South Africa will be stronger again at The Oval, with Kagiso Rabada returning in place of Olivier.
Can England do anything to provoke another swing as dramatic as that managed by the Proteas this week?
It’s one of many tricky questions they must answer.
