Caught Out

Michael Henderson

For want of a nail…. the Ashes were lost. Rather, they were not regained. England can hide behind the Manchester rain if they like, but they shouldn’t be granted that indulgence. The reason they will not beat Australia in this series stands out like a shag on a rock: they preferred not to field their best players.

It’s a familiar tune, and the hurdy-gurdy man must grind it out one more time. If you regard the wicketkeeper as an extravagance, something to be settled by plucking a feather to see which way the wind is blowing, you are likely to pay a significant price. England have paid that price, and appear to be surprised by how heavy it is.

Those who went in to bat for Ben Foakes were patronised, and even mocked. Silly people! Can’t you see that ‘Jonny’ was always going to play? Bairstow’s runs, belted against the clock like a relativist trying to bend Time, would always be the dominant feature in any inventory. We can overlook a dropped catch here, a missed stumping there, if he answers the summons when the bugle sounds.

That’s what he does!

Indeed it is, and he was in midsummer form at Old Trafford, charging like a Hussar for 99 undefeated runs. Ben Stokes was, reporters were delighted to convey, ‘open-mouthed’ as the team’s leading biffer biffed away as though biffing would be outlawed at midnight. Afterwards Bairstow talked like a spurned lover, moaning that nobody wanted him any longer. Forget Anderson & Broad. This was Mills & Boon!

He wasn’t, he said, stamping his feet, a dumpy stumper. He wasn’t a Yorkie porkie. He was a proud man, whose broken leg, suffered in a strange accident on a golf course last autumn, had affected his mobility and his confidence. He had done jolly well to return to first-class cricket so swiftly, and should be given high marks for his eagerness to assist the team.

Not that anybody had deducted a mark on that score. The reporters who cover the England team have been very generous to Bairstow over the years.

Too generous, outsiders might say. Even when Foakes was keeping well, ands making runs, there were always whispers that ‘Jonny will wear the gloves when the Aussies are here’. Not ‘could’, but ‘will’. In the view of some commentators the verb of choice was ‘must’. There was an element of compulsion, as though the retention of England’s most capable wicketkeeper was a deviation from natural law.

As Bairstow missed catches and stumpings in the first two Tests, and let through byes with the aplomb of a matador, there were noises off suggesting that ‘even the best make mistakes’. They do. But the best wicketkeepers make fewer errors than those who are not so good, and over the course of a series their skill (defined, in part, by the absence of howlers) may help the team win tight matches.

When Bairstow held an excellent catch at Old Trafford to dismiss Cameron Green his supporters were swift to bless. Yet that is what wicketkeepers do. It’s why they wear the mitts. And if Bairstow can hold catches like that, once every Preston Guild, how many more can a chap like Foakes take, day in day out?

England should be going to the Oval 2-1 up, and they would be had Bairstow accepted a chance at Edgbaston that may haunt him for the rest of his days. In the opening over of Australia’s second innings Usman Khawaja edged a drive off James Anderson which flew to the wicketkeeper’s left. It was junior housematch stuff, yet Bairstow left it for Joe Root at slip, and the batsman collected four lucky runs. Reprieved, he went on to hold the innings together before Pat Cummins smashed the boundaries which carried Australia to victory.

We win together, players like to say, and lose together. Well, it’s very noble to exhalt the communal spirit, and it is a team sport. But there are moments in any contest when a match lies in the balance, and players have the opportunity to tilt the balance. Bairstow’s failure to claim that catch ultimately tilted the balance, and England went to Lord’s a Test down when they should have been a Test up. It’s that brutal, and that simple.

They have failed to win this series for a variety of reasons. The hare-brained batting in the first innings at Lord’s was a major factor in the defeat there, notwithstanding the extraordinary defiance Ben Stokes displayed on the final afternoon. That peculiar declaration on the first evening at Birmingham has not escaped scrutiny. And much of their outcricket has been sloppy.

But the most visible blunder was one of planning, rather than execution. Despite the evidence supplied by a century and a half of Test cricket England decided they didn’t need to select their best wicketkeeper. It was an act of insufferable arrogance, and it has cost them dear.

Stokes and Brendan McCullum have done so much to brighten the cricketing landscape after the dog days of Chris Silverwood (and Joe Root as captain). Everybody wants them to succeed, and by and large they have. If they win at the Oval, the series will be drawn 2-2, which is about right, in view of the strengths and weaknesses of both teams.

But they dropped a ricket by opting to play a second-rater they feel comfortable with instead of a proven performer who has never won their complete trust. Now they rage with the frustration of men who know they erred but cannot admit it. The Foakes fan club was right when the cherry was on the bough and is not wrong now the leaves have lost their sap.

There are many more important things troubling us, and we should never forget that sport is an adornment to life, not its main course. If you are the captain of England, however, whose greatest wish is to beat Australia in the oldest of all contests, you may take a different view.