Bad shots are bad shots, but in an age when the dumbest moments are endlessly replayed and dissected, it’s important to at least try and take in the bigger picture. A batter who sometimes plays the wrong shot is nowhere near as bad as a batter who’s always worrying about playing the wrong shot.

All the highfalutin talk about Ben Stokes’ England team rewriting Test cricket and boldly startrekking where no cricketers have ever startrekked before rather masks the fact that the biggest gain from their change in attitude has been that it allows for basic everyday competence with the bat.

Incredible pyrotechnic run chases and 500 in a day are great and memorable and all, but erasing the regular sub-100 catastrophes has been every bit as helpful. England were bowled out for double-digit scores five times between the start of 2019 and when Stokes took over as captain in June last year, but not once since. That period also featured 10 team totals between 100 and 150. There have been only two since – one of which was the first innings of Stokes’ first match in charge when some of the side may not yet have arrived on the same page as him.

Two ways batters get out

Many fans and pundits hear Brendon McCullum’s obvious reluctance to criticise batters for numbnuts shots that got them out and they think, “Oh these guys can get away with anything. Someone needs to tell them.”

You know what? Professional batters who get out to numbnuts shots don’t generally need to be told. They were batting and then they had to stop batting and the thing that brought about that change was a numbnuts thing they did. If your job is being great at batting, you’ll most likely notice a detail like that. You may even dwell on it to an unhealthy extent.

That is only one way batters get out though. Another way batters get out is they half-play a shot they aren’t entirely sure about. Half-played indecisive shots don’t tend to make good, clean contact with 90mph deliveries arcing through the air and/or skewing a degree or two off the pitch.

Furthermore, you don’t actually need to be caught very precisely midway between two different shot options to miss or mishit something. You can be 60, 70, 80 or 90% sure you’re doing the right thing and that niggling, self-sabotaging doubt can still be the difference between scoring runs and your dismissal.

We would guess that in Test cricket this way of getting out is more common than losing your wicket to a stupid shot.

Stupid shots v indecisiveness

England’s attitude at the minute is that bad shots are only dangerous when you play them, but doubt is dangerous all the time. The captain and coach therefore try and counter what they see as the bigger threat.

When you question a batter’s judgement in one specific instance, you almost certainly create a very small bit of doubt in them about every other instance. So they pretty much do not do that.

They say this instead: Whatever you want to do, just do it. Don’t think twice, just react. We won’t criticise you afterwards unless you were anything other than wholehearted going for whatever shot you chose.

They try to feed conviction.

International batters will almost certainly internalise truly bad decisions automatically. It’s also worth pointing out that the skilful ones will massively improve the percentages on what wouldn’t ordinarily be considered a ‘percentage shot’ by playing it with total certainty.

There’s no point painting this no-real-recriminations philosophy as a cure-all, because clearly it isn’t. It has however been a means of attaining some basic batting competence most of the time. In Test cricket, where every single decision is questioned by onlookers, that is a much harder thing to maintain than you might think.

> Why the word ‘Bazball’ is not helping any of us

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Bazball is a completely annoying word because any time it’s used – which is basically every other sentence in this Ashes – everybody is talking at cross purposes.

The foundations for this ongoing noisy surround sound argument lie in the fact that almost no-one knows or acknowledges the definition that Cricinfo UK editor Andrew Miller had in mind when he coined the word. Miller seems to have meant a stripped back, unencumbered mindset – essentially, ‘see ball, react to ball’.

Most people have however developed a narrower understanding – typically that it’s somehow all about trying to welly boundaries.

This is sort of understandable because an in-the-moment frame of mind probably does result in more shotmaking from the majority of players. But this doesn’t make slogging and Bazball synonyms. If a batter is shorn of outside pressures and preconceptions, they should in theory end up left with that trite old method, ‘playing each ball on its merits’.

It’s clear from the last year or so that a lot of England batters haven’t been seeing much merit in a lot of deliveries. That end result is much easier to see and understand than how it comes about.

In match commentary, ‘Bazball’ has therefore often come to be used as shorthand for attacking batting, in the same way that in recent years fours and sixes have often been hailed as ‘T20 cricket’, as if no-one hit a boundary before 2003.

That sort of usage makes the word misleadingly narrow and it means whenever anyone uses ‘Bazball’ to describe something more complex, at least half the people hearing or reading undertstand an entirely different meaning from the one intended.

As Brendon McCullum himself said recently: “I don’t have any idea what ‘Bazball’ is. It’s not just all crash and burn if you look at the approach – and that’s why I don’t really like that silly term that people are throwing out there.

“Because there’s actually quite a bit of thought that goes into how the guys manufacture their performances and when they put pressure on bowlers and which bowlers they put pressure on. There’s also times where they’ve absorbed pressure beautifully as well.”

The other reason why Bazball is such a dumb thing to argue about is because the word isn’t just used too narrowly; it’s used too broadly as well.

Its omnipresence as a label has made it possible to hang any part of the England team’s approach off it. It’s not just the batting; literally every single thing Ben Stokes or Brendon McCullum ever says has also become ‘Bazball’. It’s expanded into this great big basket of ideas about cricket – many essentially unrelated – all of which are attributed to some central guiding principle that can only ever be divined through the squaring of multiple circles. The end result is a nebulous and ungraspable concept, at which point people start filling the semantic void with whatever the hell they feel like.

What’s Bazball about? Fearlessness? Clarity of thought? Alleviating pressure? Playing with conviction? What else could we throw into the mix? Relentless positivity maybe? Lack of recriminations? Entertainment at all costs and total disregard for results? Is it about calculated aggression or all-out aggression? Is it about picking five mid-pace right-armers and asking them to bowl half-trackers for two-thirds of a day?

Maybe it’s some of these things. Maybe it’s none of them. It depends who you ask. And when.

Bazball is a weird, collectively built straw man that everyone sees from a different angle. Let’s talk about the details we can agree upon and accept that there’s nothing to be gained from discussing the whole.

> Know your Bazball – an illustrated guide

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Are you settling in for the Ashes and finding yourself a bit perplexed by all the ‘Bazball’ talk? If you’re struggling to know what is and isn’t Bazball and don’t want to embarrass yourself by making a faux pas – fear not! Simply consult our short and informative illustrated guide…

Bazball:

Bazbat:

Bazbit:

Wazball:

Wazbat:

Wasbat:

Wizbit:

If you now go and read our 10 things to watch out for during the Ashes you’ll be perfectly prepared for the series.

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It was a win that England were racing to catch from the outset. The Test began with Zak Crawley hitting three fours off Naseem Shah’s opening over and it ended with the light meters out. Ben Stokes’ men never really slowed in between.

Even if England hadn’t won, you’d have to respect the effort. It’s hard to improve on 657 in 101 overs in your first innings and you could certainly forgive a side for failing to take 20 wickets on the same pitch.

England could barely have done more. That it was only just enough puts all that batting impatience into perspective.

The haste

To quickly recap, England reached 500 quicker than any team ever has before. It was really bloody weird. It was like they’d deployed not just one, but a whole herd of Virender Sehwags – their four centurions all scored at somewhere around a run a ball, or, in Harry Brook’s case, significantly quicker.

With the ball, they needled and wheedled and just about managed to avoid giving up. Credit to Pakistan for almost persuading them to do so. Replying to a first innings like England’s can’t be an easy job.

Then it was England’s second innings. In for a penny, in for a thousand pounds: 264-7 in 36 overs – an effort that did as much to keep Pakistan’s hopes alive as it did their own. Perhaps in making the running, they kidded themselves they were the only team that could win and so enabled that decisive effort with the ball in the dying light on the fifth day.

But what if it had all gone wrong?

How much of a risk?

“There may be a time where you risk losing to win and if Pakistan are good enough to beat us, that’s cool too,” said England’s coach Brendon McCullum before this series began.

That’s easy enough to say at the outset and it sounds even better when your approach has been vindicated with a win. But what’s everyone’s take if England had fallen flat on their arses in that first innings? Or if Pakistan had hared along to their fourth innings target and all of those earlier efforts had been in vain? How cool would that have been?

We wouldn’t say we’d have been 100% fine with it. But we’d have been cool enough.

Risking defeat in pursuit of victory is always admirable and often productive and that’s why it’s one of Stokes and McCullum’s central tenets. However, in the modern era, the upsides also outweigh the downsides to an even greater degree.

There will always be a point at which proactivity becomes irresponsibility but we’d argue that point is further along than it used to be.

Think of the matches you remember. Then do the impossible and think of all the matches you don’t remember. The relentless tsunami of international fixtures means there are probably quite a lot of the latter these days. A lot of cricket simply gets washed away.

That’s the basis of the equation here: victory and defeat aren’t really of equal weight. We remember both the good wins and the great wins, but only really the absolutely godawful losses – and even those we don’t tend to dwell on. And at least they’re colourful.

So why not risk losing? In the grander scheme of things, what would actually be lost?

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“It’s a game of failure, batting,” said Joe Root five minutes after this Test finished. The statement was on the one hand very sage and on the other just plain wrong.

Four times in a row England have chased a lot of runs to win. This would be remarkable even if they hadn’t gone into this summer having spent several years being just about the collapsiest team in Test history.

Set in that context, this run of matches seems about as predictable as Twin Peaks: The Return. (Oh look, the doppelganger’s awake. Oh look, it’s Nine Inch Nails. Oh look, the first detonation of an atomic bomb. Oh look, a humanoid form floating in the void spewing a stream of primordial fluid. “Got a light?”)

In actual fact, the most unpredictable development has been what has now become predictable.

That’s overstating things, but you get the sentiment. How did you feel when England were challenged to make 378? How did you feel when they were 100-0? How did you feel once Jonny Bairstow and Joe Root were up and running?

Our nerves would normally surge as the batters neared their target. Today? Not so much. Normally, as the prospect of victory increases we get nervier and nervier about the growing volume of good work that could be thrown away. Today every boundary made us calmer.

It’s a dramatic shift in attitude on our part. The players may well feel similarly. That would certainly help get the most out of them.

Getting the most out of them

Here are three lines from a piece we wrote about England’s failed 2015 World Cup campaign, each of which seems a weirdly good description of how Ben Stokes is trying to shape the Test team alongside Brendon McCullum.

• The will to win will always triumph when pitted against a fear of failure
• Self-expression thrives best in a stable environment
• Good cricket requires conviction

If you listen to interviews with England’s captain, you will repeatedly hear him alluding to each of these three principles.

Always striving for victory, no matter what the match situation, isn’t so much about blind positivity. It’s more about recognising that clear-mindedness is vital. And if you have to sacrifice a bit of wider sense and reason to ensure that ball-by-ball clarity, then so be it.

A mentality of trying to win games and not countenancing any other option may sound moronically simplistic, but it keeps players clear-headed and wards away the kind of second-guessing that so often results in getting out.

It helps ensure conviction. Stokes’ recent batting has been a bonkers attempt to instil the same thing in his team. “Don’t worry about making bad decisions, lads,” he is saying as he sashays down the pitch and bazzes wildly. “Just make sure you follow through with whatever you decide. Don’t get caught in two minds. I promise I won’t bollock you. I can’t really because just look at this mad shit that I’m trying.”

England haven’t found better players, but they do seem to be minimising that doubt and in-the-moment self-questioning that hampers performance. (Reflecting on your decisions later is a different thing.)

‘Don’t wonder what people think you should be doing’ is the message. ‘Just choose your shots and play them with conviction.’

Chasing

Elsewhere in that 2015 World Cup piece we said: “Practice makes perfect and the more times you’ve done something, the more confident you will be that you can perform the task in question.” This seems a fair summary of how England approached this latest run chase. It was unquestionably built on the three smaller ones that preceded it.

The best way to chase huge targets is to practise doing so. And you can only ever do that if you make those attempts in the first place. It’s all very ‘let’s see what we can do’.

Chasing 378 is a big ask, but it seems an entirely credible prospect when you made 296-3 to win the previous game. And that previous chase only really seemed credible after making 299-5 to win the game before that. That in turn seemed reasonable after England had made 279-5 to win the first Test of the summer.

If Jonny Bairstow has shifted his team-mates’ perceptions, it’s only because he’s been ambitious and had a go in the first place. That gave him a chance and having a go with conviction gave him a better chance.

Stokes’ position is maybe 450’s possible, maybe 500’s possible. Why rule it out? May as well have a go.

Now for the counterpoint.

The case against

One: While Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Shami are fantastic bowlers, India are not that long in the country and aren’t running as hot as they can. Some of the support cast in particular looked a step or two adrift from where they were last year.

Two: It’s shaping up as a good summer to be a middle-order batter. Whether that’s something to do with this season’s Dukes balls, we don’t know, but we’ve seen it in every Test – and not just from England. Daryl Mitchell and Tom Blundell made an extraordinary number of runs for New Zealand batting at five, six and seven. Rishabh Pant and Ravindra Jadeja made hundreds in this Test.

This doesn’t negate England’s recent achievements with the bat, but perhaps it contextualises them a little. Maybe the revolution has had a little bit of a tailwind.

Does that mean this isn’t sustainable? Chasing near enough 400 to win in the fourth innings probably isn’t, but the mentality of always making the attempt might be. And if the unequivocal nature of that modus operandi helps simplify the players’ approach then that’s probably a net gain.

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Violence is great, isn’t it? Violence is so much fun. We greatly enjoyed Jonny Bairstow, at Trent Bridge, with a cricket bat.

At tea on day five, England were 139-4, 160 runs from victory and Jonny Bairstow was on 43 off 48 balls, which is quick, but still within the bounds of normality.

Straight after tea, England made 59 runs in four overs, 45 of which were scored by Bairstow, which is very much not normal – particularly in the context of a Test match, where you actually have a choice about how how you go about things.

In a limited overs match, circumstance forces your hand. Jonny Bairstow chose to do this.

It’s no great exaggeration to say that in that short passage of play, England went from losing the match to waltzing it. As tonal shifts go, it was reminiscent of the church scene in Kingsman.

If you don’t know Kingsman, it’s a knowingly daft and at times incredibly violent spy comedy. The church scene is by far the most violent and best.

The context is that Samuel L Jackson’s character has distributed free mobile phones to people and when he triggers them, they make a noise that somehow turns the owner into a frenzied murderer.

Colin Firth’s Harry Hart is in a church that very quickly goes from this…

To this…

There’s a comic quality to the scene, but as you can no doubt deduce, the comedy’s built on extreme frenetic violence, so bear that in mind if you want to actually watch it.

Everyone in the church goes nuts, but because Harry Hart is a highly-trained secret agent, he kills somewhere around 40 people all on his own.

Jonny Bairstow is Harry Hart.

Matt Henry bowled short. Jonny shot him in the gut.

Trent Boult bowled length. Jonny impaled him with a wooden pole and then shot him in the face.

Michael Bracewell pitched one outside off. Jonny set fire to his head.

For whatever reason, the part of the mind that asks you whether you’re sure you’re doing the right thing was switched off during the tea break and from that moment on Bairstow just got on with the simple reflex job of hitting the ball/murdering people.

The soundtrack to the church scene is the guitar solo from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird. A fun game that you’re now too old to play is to listen to that solo and try and guess when it’s about to end. If you’ve only heard it once or twice before, you will be wrong dozens of times. It’s the rock guitar solo version of the climax of Dudley Moore’s Beethoven sonata parody, which has well over a minute of ‘ending’.

Bairstow’s innings had a similar multi-climactic quality. How do you follow a barrage of fours and sixes? With another barrage of fours and sixes, of course. Then another. Then you impale three people with a giant wooden spike. Then more fours and sixes.

Shackles are bad

There’s a lot of casting off of shackles in the headlines about England’s win. Writing in the Telegraph, Michael Vaughan has lauded Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum for ‘ripping’ them off.

“It is the same team, more or less, but they have been freed up and it has totally changed their psychology,” says Vaughan.

It sounds such a simple instruction: “Shackles are bad, mmkay. Cast them off, mmkay.” But it really isn’t simple at all. As an illustration of the potential response the players are up against, it was only a week ago that Vaughan deemed a Jonny Bairstow dismissal “dumb” and “pathetic” when he was out trying to drive Kyle Jamieson.

“You can have all the preparation and team meetings, but until you play smart… See him off. Get rid of him. Play a defensive shot. It is just dumb,” he said.

This is not meant to highlight hypocrisy on Vaughan’s part. He’s probably right. That was a dumb shot from Bairstow. And this was a fantastic, liberated, freewheeling innings. Vaughan is calling it as he sees it, but England are viewing things differently because they want to steer Bairstow towards what they think will be a more effective approach overall.

McCullum’s philosophy is not really about throwing off the shackles, so much as it’s about not second-guessing yourself. Sometimes your first guess is wrong, but England’s new coach believes that second guesses can be wrong too and that being caught between two guesses will inevitably be wronger still. So the instruction is just go with what you think is right, be decisive, and we’ll back that overarching approach and forgive specific errors.

That is actually not an easy message to convey. As we’ve said before, you can tell a batter to play freely, but he’s not necessarily going to buy that unless you can somehow show him that it’s what you really want.

To resort to cliché, talk is hugely affordable and actions are more audible than words. It’s hard to properly assess the actions of New England at this early juncture, but a common theme is a broad expression of faith in some players, which by extension becomes a similar message to everyone else in the team.

In marked contrast to the previous regime’s management of Jack Leach, Stokes has often been at pains to say how much he wants someone around. He definitely wanted James Anderson and Stuart Broad to be available for selection, for example. He definitely wanted Ollie Pope in the side too, no matter where there was an opening – even if it was at number three where Pope had never batted before. McCullum has also sounded out Moeen Ali to see if he was willing to unretire.

> Captain Stokes v Captain Root

Crucially, they’re not saying they need these players because saying that would undermine other squad members. They’re saying they want them. Bairstow may well reason that if Stokes so desperately wants Pope in the side that he’ll bat him out of position, he must want Bairstow in the side even more. That must be a bit of a boost.

One day, “You’re all great! You’re all amazing!” might start to wear thin, but for now England players feel like the coach and captain have faith in them.

That’s also why you hear these coded non-criticisms like ‘the intent was right’ when a player gets out to a shit shot. It’s not a cop out. It’s a way of saying the batter made the wrong choice but in the right way. The aim is to be supportive of the approach in the belief that this will result in better returns for the team in the long run.

Reacting to the criticism of Bairstow’s dismissal last week, Stuart Broad said, “he could be happy that he committed to a certain way of playing and didn’t alter that.”

You could say the same about this knock.

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Everything’s amazing and fun and positive under the new England captain. Remember that previous guy? Man was he a miserable arsehole. Didn’t have a clue, did he? Whatever happened to him?

Sometimes you accidentally reveal something about the past.

We remember being on this cookery course in Thailand once with a handful of other tourists. During one of the breaks, one of them asked another if she was Dutch.

If we remember correctly, the woman was actually Canadian, but she wanted to know why she came across as Dutch.

“Oh you can quite often spot a Dutch person,” said the girl, who was from the Netherlands herself. “If you see a dark-haired couple camping and their kids are blonde, they’ll be Dutch.”

If she’d left it there, it would have been a bit weird but okay. Instead, she proceeded to run through a whole load of other scenarios and fine detail. Much of it was pretty funny, in the way these pet theories often are.

It came across like a stand-up comedy routine and towards the end, with everyone giggling away, she emphasised that the most important quality was that a Dutch person would always, pretty much without fail, “look a bit wrong somehow”.

And then we all sat in uncomfortable silence trying to work out if any of the other qualities she’d identified potentially applied to the Canadian woman or whether this was perhaps the only one.

“There’s been a good vibe,” said James Anderson after Ben Stokes’ and Brendon McCullum’s first match in charge. “I’ve enjoyed the positivity.”

“It’s been one of the most fun weeks we’ve had as a team,” said Stuart Broad.

Everyone seems aware of this. Moeen Ali has said he’d be open to unretiring. Adil Rashid is keen to play.

This is all highly lovely and everything, but when we hear these comments and see these developments, all we can think of is what they say about the preceding years.

This is the problem with saying how great and amazing things are now. There’s an implication that things really weren’t that great and amazing before.

It’s pretty obvious that England weren’t having a load of fun when they were losing every single game – and fair enough really. The issue comes when players start fiddling about with cause and effect and suggesting that performances are improving BECAUSE the team has started having fun. There may well be truth in that, but it also kind of implies that all of the previous losing was because Joe Root and Chris Silverwood were making everyone miserable.

You can get away with the Silverwood bit because he’s off in Sri Lanka now, trying to deal with a very different palette of problems. But Root’s right there. He’s right there in the same changing room as you, listening to you imply that his captaincy made the team more rubbish than it actually was.

This works another way too. It’s not just comments made about the present that can alter perceptions of the past; comments made about the past can also reflect on the present.

In the wake of Root’s latest hundred, Ben Stokes suggested that the batter perhaps felt like he’d had “the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders” by passing on the captaincy.

So where’s that weight now, Atlas?

(Point of order: Atlas didn’t actually carry the world; he held up the heavens, which are often depicted as a celestial sphere in art. We wouldn’t especially want to be condemned to carrying either ourself. We struggled enough with a very large flagstone yesterday. The celestial sphere is presumably pretty gassy and therefore maybe not that heavy, but by the beard of Zeus, it’s got to be unwieldy, hasn’t it?)

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Has any man credited with such great influence over two teams ever had less direct influence on either?

Brendon McCullum undoubtedly laid foundations for the current New Zealand side. Just as Nasser Hussain added vertebrae to England between 1999 and 2003 before they delivered higher profile successes, McCullum set the Kiwis on a path to being habitual finalists in multiple formats.

But at the same time, he did retire in 2016 (after an unbroken run of 101 consecutive Test matches). That’s a fair while ago. No matter how big the splash he made as captain, by this point the contemporary team is only being buffeted by small ripples.

Meanwhile, his influence on England hasn’t really begun. He doesn’t know most of the players. He’s taken a back seat on selection. He hasn’t yet been coach for a single match.

In both cases, McCullum’s contribution is really not much more than vibes. (More Bez than Baz as Ali Martin put it – which is a great joke if you’re of the correct age and cultural background to instantly get it.)

So despite his name appearing twice in the headline, let’s not talk about Brendon McCullum. Let’s take a look at some of the other likely first Test talking points instead.

(1) England’s number three

Ian Bell and Jonathan Trott used to bat at three and four for Warwickshire and at four and three for England. Almost as if he’s wilfully spurning the relentless comparisons with Bell, Surrey’s number four, Ollie Pope, has just taken on the Trott role.

There are worse people to try and copy. Trott is arguably the kind of cricketer England have most been in need of this last however many years.

Does Pope have it in him to be a Trott though? That kind of pared-back minimalist approach surely diminishes the very qualities that make Pope the batter he is? Or perhaps batting at three will drag him from his pigeonhole and encourage him to take a few steps in that direction. Maybe that short walk will land him in the kind of risk/reward sweet spot so beloved of Joe Root.

(2) New Zealand’s number four (or five, or two)

In January, Luteru Ross Poutoa Lote Taylor played the last of his 112 Tests. The tourists have become an excellent side in recent years, but surely not one that can easily replace a man who averaged 44.66 while playing half his cricket in New Zealand and who still scored hundreds even when he couldn’t actually see very well.

Taylor’s legacy is still a little hard to put into words, but as Trott has shown us, sometimes it’s the games you don’t play that clarify matters.

Taylor’s replacement at four is not really his replacement however. Henry Nicholls, averaging 40, has simply moved up a spot. That means his absence will more likely be felt elsewhere.

Daryl Mitchell has made a solid start to his Test career and could bat at five. Or New Zealand could instead retain the top order they’ve used when Lord Megachief of Gold has been unavailable (Tom Latham, Will Young and Devon Conway) and shunt Nicholls back down to five.

Young would be the beneficiary in that scenario, which leads us into a digression about his namesake and the most jarring cultural shock we’ve ever experienced.

We were in India during the winter months of 2001 and 2002. This was a pretty big culture shock in itself, but somehow it was less than what we experienced upon our return. The first series of Pop Idol was broadcast on UK TV during this period you see, and when we came back normal human beings were having conversations about “Will” and “Gareth” and these people DID NOT HAVE SECOND NAMES.

We did not know who these people were. We did not know what was going on. We’ve never felt so alienated.

If you’re wondering when British popular culture went completely and irreversibly shit – this was when it happened. We were away. We missed it. Before that everything was kind of okay and afterwards everything was forever slightly wrong.

It was like going into space and returning to Planet of the Apes. We’ll try not to hold any of this against Will Young the New Zealand opening batter, but we can’t promise anything.

(3) Matty Potts

We’ve discussed this in the comments already, but England’s latest seam bowler appears to be getting his -y suffix in early. Maybe by applying it to his first name he’s shooting for a mononym like Gareth or Will.

Our favourite Matt Potts story so far is the one recounted on the BBC website where he apparently mistook ‘getting picked for a cricket team’ with ‘being sent to a maximum security prison’.

Take on the biggest, scariest prisoner on day one and no-one will mess you again, they always say in terrible films. “I am going to fight everyone in the changing room and I’m going to start with you,” Potts apparently informed the largest of his Washington team-mates when he was 15.

It’s a slightly odd approach and a precedent Craig Overton may have in the back of his mind ahead of Potts’ Test debut – especially as he appears to have grown.

And just how big is Potts? That’s the main question floating around our mind right now. Rob Key called him “a point of difference” and when you’re a right-arm seam bowler, that can only really mean one of two things: either you’re fast or you’re ludicrously tall.

From what we’ve read, Potts isn’t fast-fast (90mph+). He’s more ‘hits the bat hard’ pace (85-88mph) and supposedly capable of hitting the bat hard deep into the day.

So surely that means he must be massive? Except we haven’t actually seen his exact height mentioned anywhere and very tall bowlers ALWAYS have their exact height mentioned when they come into a side because that’s their most obviously important quality. (Steven Finn used to tell people he was 6ft7in even though he’s 6ft8in because he thought that extra inch was “embarrassing”.)

So now we’re back to pace again. Do people secretly think that Potts might actually be 90mph+ and that he just hasn’t been clocked recently?

(4) Jack Leach

Jack Leach has a strong claim to be considered England’s most dicked-about player in recent times, then he finally got a bit of a run in the side in the West Indies and performed pretty well.

Good, good… except now the previous owner of that title might be making a comeback.

Moeen Ali retired from Test cricket last September, but reportedly told McCullum this week that he’d be open to a comeback. Adil Rashid’s name has cropped up as well – although it sounds like he’d only ever come into the reckoning as a second spinner.  

What does this mean for Leach? It means that he should do what he can, when he can, and anything beyond that is out of his hands.

Same as it ever was.

(5) Kyle Jamieson

When New Zealand last toured England way, way back in 2021, Kyle Jamieson sat out the second Test to conserve his strength for the World Test Championship final. This seemed to work out okay as he basically won that match for New Zealand – but it does mean England have seen very little of him.

At 6ft8in tall and not much less than that across, Kyle Jamieson is a very slightly frightening point of difference.

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Our loosely-held editorial guideline of “no-one cares what you think” isn’t necessarily one that drives productivity at what is, fundamentally, an opinion website. It means there’s a whole bunch of recent news stories we haven’t covered because no-one cares what we think.

The County Championship

Let’s start with the latest round of Championship fixtures, because four-day first-class cricket lends itself to easing into things.

There was only one win in the first division last week and even that featured its fair share of runs, Somerset racking up (high scores are always ‘racked up’) 591-7 before Jack Leach took eight wickets to secure an innings victory.

It was a similar story in the second division where Durham took the only win, thanks to another 11 wickets from Matthew Potts. An England Test debut was already being floated for Potts before the match, so that’s starting to seem like a thing that will probably happen.

After a winter of moaning about April pitches, run-scoring has been almost comically heavy so far this year. Is it pitches though? Presumably at least a little, but when high scores are common pretty much everywhere in the country, we suspect it has more to do with this season’s batch of balls. Not that you care what we think.

Update: Sounds like there have been some complaints about the balls. Also sounds like Durham may have some assertive captaincy from Scott Borthwick to thank for last week’s win – at least partly.

RIP Andrew Symonds

Depending on which route you’ve taken into the site today, you may already have read our piece on Andrew Symonds. Here’s a link if you haven’t. It features a reference to the time Symonds called Brendon McCullum “a piece of shit” which takes us neatly onto…

England’s new Test coach

This really is one of those where we have very little to contribute – although you might want to revisit our review of Episode 1 of This Could Go Anywhere, which isn’t especially featuring in other people’s coverage of England’s latest hire.

We’re broadly in favour of Brendon McCullum’s appointment. There’s been talk of him lacking qualifications and experience, but how many people have been in charge of an ailing Test team and completely turned it around? Not many. That seems a pretty good qualification and pretty relevant experience to us.

We get where people are coming from and why some might feel a bit put-out that someone can so easily bypass all the coaching badges they’re working so hard to attain, but we kind of see international cricket like writing. There are certainly useful skills you can acquire, but there’s also a sort of innate understanding of how it works that can’t really be taught.

Brendon McCullum made international cricket slightly better during his playing career. We think that should earn him a shot at doing the same as England’s Test coach.

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If you want to be highly regarded as a wicketkeeper-batter, one of the smartest things you can do is not actually keep wicket in a whole load of Test matches.

At what point do you become a wicketkeeper? How frequently do you have to don pads and gloves and chunter away relentlessly to be considered a proper specialist in that weird squatty role?

There was a spell a few years back when a bunch of people started referring to Ollie Pope as a wicketkeeper – England selectors mainly.

Let’s be clear: Ollie Pope was not and is not a wicketkeeper. Ollie Pope is a batter who has occasionally kept wicket. He may own a pair of gloves, but that is only because he is the kind of posh kid who owns all the equipment for every last thing he is even faintly interested in. Ollie Pope has a snowboard. Ollie Pope has a Gretsch County Gentleman. Ollie Pope has wicketkeeping gloves.

How do we know Ollie Pope is not a wicketkeeper? Because at the time of writing, Ollie Pope still hasn’t stumped anyone in professional cricket. There are many ways to put together your definition of wicketkeeper, but we put it to you that at least one stumping is a prerequisite.

Maybe if it’s your professional debut and you’re keeping wicket in that game, we can give you a bit of leeway. And we suppose stumpings aren’t always that common, so it might take a handful of matches before you got that first one. But if you’re Ollie Pope and you’ve played over 100 matches as a pro and you’ve never stumped anyone, you are not a wicketkeeper. You are a glove owner.

There have been a few players down the years who have progressed from glove ownership to being fully-fledged wicketkeepers and this is where things get a bit tricksy. Where is the line? What other factors are we looking at?

We don’t want to overcomplicate this. We’d argue there are really just two main, overlapping types of genuine wicketkeeper.

1. The player who currently keeps wicket most of the time
2. The player who has done a lot of wicketkeeping

If a player keeps wicket more than half the time, it seems fair to consider them a wicketkeeper. Equally, if a player no longer keeps wicket, but previously did so for several years and has a pretty big body of glovework behind them, we’re happy to consider that person a wicketkeeper too.

That’s not precisely what we’re digging into today though. Today we’re looking at five players who people widely consider to be Test wicketkeepers, who quite often didn’t actually keep wicket.

Jos Buttler – a Test wicketkeeper 65% of the time

37 matches as keeper, 20 as an outfielder

Despite his memorably pioneering work as a specialist number seven batter, Jos Buttler has actually kept wicket for England rather frequently.

He’s mostly been okay too. Certainly better than some would have you believe. Not brilliant. Not 100 per cent reliable. Bit shonky against the spinners. But more okay than he usually gets credit for. The fact he often gets pushed towards the batter-who-keeps pigeonhole is probably more to do with longstanding wicketkeeping tropes than his actual aptitude for the job.

In Tests, Buttler averages 29.60 as wicketkeeper with one hundred, and 35.68 without the gloves, also with one hundred.

Weird closing fact: Buttler has way more professional stumpings to his name than either Ben Foakes or Jonny Bairstow. That’s in large part down to the nature of limited overs cricket, but it’s still the kind of thing you might like to post on Twitter next time you’re having a dumb argument with someone about those three players.

Alec Stewart – a Test wicketkeeper 62% of the time

82 matches as keeper, 51 as an outfielder

Stewart is well-known for being the ‘better batter’ option in the Alec Stewart v Jack Russell 1990s wicketkeeping tussle. He’s also a good example of how keeping can sometimes impact a player’s batting.

> The 1990s-est England Test XI

The Gaffer averaged 34.92 as a wicketkeeper with six hundreds, but 46.70 as a specialist batter with nine hundreds.

For what it’s worth, Russell averaged 27.10 in 54 Tests with two hundreds. We haven’t really investigated this thoroughly, but being as it was the 1990s we know for a fact the various batters who played instead of him definitely didn’t average 39 – which is what was apparently needed to make up the 12 runs the team shed each time it put Stewart on leaping and jabbering duties.

Jonny Bairstow – a Test wicketkeeper 59% of the time

49 matches as keeper, 34 as an outfielder

There are part-time wicketkeepers, occasional wicketkeepers and out-and-out wicketkeepers. And then there’s Jonny Bairstow, for whom being a wicketkeeper is a part of his identity on a level more profound than probably even he understands. England have at times been guilty of not really properly appreciating that fact.

David Bairstow played four Tests for England (which was enough for him to get that all-important stumping). His son has so far kept wicket in 49 Tests.

> Buttler, Bairstow and Foakes – England’s embarrassment of adequacy

Bairstow’s record is currently the reverse of Stewart’s. He has averaged 37.37 when playing as England’s wicketkeeper, with five tons; and 30.45 as a specialist batter, with three tons.

Brendon McCullum – a Test wicketkeeper 51% of the time

52 matches as keeper, 49 as an outfielder

Just as a measure of the inaccuracy of some of our perceptions, you probably think of Brendon McCullum as both a wicketkeeper and a captain – yet he played in 100 Test matches when he wasn’t entrusted with both those roles. Captain-keeper was actually something he did just the once, against England in 2013. (Jonny Bairstow also played in that match, but didn’t keep wicket.)

> Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews: Conjoined Lord Megachiefs of Gold 2014

McCullum was captain in 31 Tests and wicketkeeper in 52. He averaged 34.18 as a stumper (five hundreds) and 42.94 as a batter (seven hundreds).

He also kept wicket in 184 one-day internationals, which gives you a pretty good idea why our perspectives can sometimes end up skewed.

Kumar Sangakkara – a Test wicketkeeper 36% of the time

48 matches as keeper, 86 as an outfielder

Jayawardene kept wicket in more Test matches than Sangakkara. That is a 100 per cent true fact that only becomes believable when we reveal that we are talking about Prasanna Jayawardene.

Even so, a surprisingly large proportion of people just didn’t seem to notice that their all-time favourite wicketkeeper-batter only actually kept wicket in a third of the Test matches he played. Granted, that was still a lot of matches, but it does mean that Sangakkara played more Test matches without the gloves than Ian Chappell, Martin Crowe, Denis Compton, Len Hutton and Michael Vaughan. Steve Smith will catch him pretty soon – but he hasn’t yet.

Sangakkara is a rare player whose reputation has been positively burnished by multitasking. Normally any attempt at all-rounderism only serves to double the criticism you attract and this is especially true for wicketkeepers, who are routinely slaughtered for dropping a catch when they’re batting well or for making a duck when their keeping is slick and polished. Sangakkara, in contrast, is falsely perceived as a man who made dozens of Test hundreds while playing as a wicketkeeper.

Don’t get us wrong – his record is extraordinary. But of his 38 Test hundreds, only seven came in matches when he was wicketkeeping. His impressive batting average as keeper (40.48) also soars to an outright ludicrous 66.78 when he played as a specialist batsman.

People think that the impressive thing about Sangakkara is that he made so many runs when he was a wicketkeeper. The far more incredible feat was just how many he made when he wasn’t.

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