To say England’s summer of Test cricket has not gone entirely to plan would be a bit of an understatement. At times it has been like watching Gromit frantically laying track in front of a runaway locomotive. Even now the England and Wales Cricket Board find themselves throwing down the sleepers, reacting to footage of centrally-contracted Brydon Carse in police handcuffs outside a bar in Derby on Saturday night following a match for Durham.
Whatever the precise details – Carse was released without charge – it continues a madcap season. To recap, their talismanic captain was stung by a disciplinary and then retired mid-Test to turn a series defeat into a bizarre Viking funeral. The head coach was then sacked from the format soon after, both men having been backed to continue just weeks earlier.
Little wonder a common sight at nets has been folks in official training kit puffing out their cheeks with a wide-eyed “WTF” expression. Joe Root now wearing the captain’s blazer full-time and working with a new coach who is 11,000 miles away via Zoom, is clearly not the vision of stability that Richard Gould and Rob Key sold during their Ashes review back in March. But for all the upheaval and neurosis, including a curfew that has since evaporated, it may yet be that the darkest hour came just before dawn.
Clearly there is a danger of getting ahead of ourselves by declaring an on-field resurrection. For all that England’s quickfire innings victory over Pakistan in the first Test saw the attack crackle and put smiles back on faces, it was a jarring mismatch. When people start asking whether a side is the worst to visit these shores in X number of years, huge pronouncements are dangerous territory.
Yet before Carse’s night out, the temperature around the team did lower a touch last week. Ben Stokes is a remarkable, compelling cricketer, who as captain lifted a team up by their bootstraps. Players loved sharing a dressing room and breathing in the residual fumes.
But perhaps it is not the worst thing that the team’s mood is no longer pegged to a player whose emotions lurched a fair bit. It wasn’t just the era-defining Ashes defeat, where Stokes abandoned England’s attacking mantra at 2-0 down and a confused team blinked on the one surface, Adelaide, where it could have delivered. In Pakistan the previous winter England weren’t just spun out on fan-dried pitches but also “treading on eggshells” as Stokes lost his cool to the point of feeling moved to apologise.
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