Runs don’t win you a two-innings cricket match, but by Godfrey Evans, they sure as Shivnarine Chanderpaul help. The Surrey v Hampshire County Championship title run-in feels like it’s shed a bit of tension after Ollie Pope’s 136 and Hampshire’s 57 all out in the penultimate round of matches.

We wouldn’t normally report mid-match, but this felt like a significant day.

When Hampshire’s alphabetically unambitious pace trio of Abbas, Abbott and Barker reduced Kent to 32-5 and Surrey fell to 136-5 against Yorkshire, the geographically detached overall head-to-head seemed vibrant and alive.

From this point Kent scrapped to 165 – largely thanks to late developer Ben Compton – before bowling Hampshire out for 57. Surrey, meanwhile, worked their way to 292-6 with papal serenity.

Advantage Surrey, but the one thing you would say is that with Kent already 20-3 in their second innings, wickets are still tumbling at the Rose Bowl. There’s every chance Hampshire will end up with an ostensibly non-ridiculous fourth innings target to chase. And we don’t really know how the Surrey game’s going to go because only one team’s batted on that pitch so far.

But yeah, advantage Surrey.

Speaking of pitches, 26 wickets fell in the best-of-the-rest match between Essex and Lancashire in Chelmsford. Lancs were 7-6 at one point in their second(!) innings. “Days like this are really annoying,” said coach Glen Chapple.

Chief destroyer for Essex has been Zimbabwe-born Netherlands international, Shane Snater, who also happens to be the cousin of Jason Roy, who feels like he’s worth a mention at this point.

Regular readers will remember we did a whole big article about whether Jason Roy maybe needed to play a bit more first-class cricket to get a larger batting workload under his belt. Well Jason Roy may well need first-class cricket, but first-class cricket doesn’t necessarily need Jason Roy. We’re struck that he’s not playing for Surrey this week despite missing out on England’s tour to Pakistan.

Correct us if we’re wrong, but we’re pretty sure his omission from the Surrey team is on the basis of, “Well why would we pick him?” The man isn’t exactly in form and hasn’t played first-class cricket since 2019. He’s not so much beating down the clichéd selectorial door as roaming the streets wondering what building it’s in these days.

However, as a counterpoint to our theory that white ball batters build form on foundations deriving from a certain volume of batting, it’s worth highlighting the man who has effectively replaced Roy in the England T20 side. Alex Hales nearly matched the Hampshire first XI in making 53 on his return to international cricket against Pakistan yesterday.

Hales has thrived while operating as a T20 specialist these last few years. In 2018 he decided to prioritise white ball practice and extra rest over first-class cricket. His last first-class game was in 2017 and he hasn’t even played 50-over cricket since 2019. (Although he probably would have continued with the middle format if it weren’t for the impact of all the street brawls, naked selfies and recreational drugs.)

In contrast to Roy, specialism seems to be working for Hales. A mad disclaimer then: maybe different people need different things at different times.

These two openers are familiar absentees by this point. (Is that possible? Perhaps it makes more sense to say we’re accustomed to their absence.) But it still seems a shame that some of England’s other T20 players have had to move on from the county season before it’s actually finished.

It feels like Pope’s mere presence elevates this early autumn first-class crescendo, but that’s also a reminder that the two title contenders are shorn of Liam Dawson, Sam Curran, Will Jacks and Reece Topley.

Hey-ho, that’s the Championship, we suppose; a sprawling competition where the changing seasons and player availability are challenges as significant as your rivals.

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It was coming. It’s happened. England have named their T20 World Cup squad and they’ve dropped Jason Roy.

In keeping with this website’s policy of actively spurning all the audience-attracting potential of writing about a topic when it’s “hot,” we said pretty much all we want to say about this matter a month ago. So go and read that piece if you haven’t already done so. Go on. You know you want to. It’s got a speedskater in it.

There is however a secondary point worth making, which is that Roy’s omission has belatedly helped England get where they so desperately wanted to be back in 2007. This, we’re sure you’ll agree, is excellent news.

‘But what exactly were England’s limited-overs goals 15 years ago?’ you probably ask.

England’s main limited overs goal in 2007 was to have a wicketkeeper opening the batting. This was because Adam Gilchrist opened the batting for Australia in one-day internationals back then and Australia were better than England.

Australia’s 2022 T20 World Cup squad basically features zero wicketkeeper-openers. Matthew Wade’s done the job before, but he’s been coming in down the order this year, while Josh Inglis has never yet opened for Australia in a T20.

In contrast, ALL of England’s T20 World Cup openers are wicketkeepers.

All of them.

Jos Buttler – wicketkeeper.

Jonny Bairstow – wicketkeeper.

Phil Salt – wicketkeeper.

England 3, Australia 0.

England are the best. England win the 2007 T20 World Cup on countback. Bad news for India and bad news for the subsequent birth of the IPL, but them’s the breaks.

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Jason Roy isn’t at his best. He’s not even in a place where he can try and bat at his best. How can a white ball specialist like him get back into good batting form these days?

Let’s start in the obvious place with a story about a speed skater.

The Nils van der Poel Method

Sweden’s Nils van der Poel is the current world and Olympic record holder and reigning world and Olympic champion in the 5,000m and the 10,000m.

Elite athletes are usually pretty cagey about giving away details of how they train because they’re wary of giving their rivals any assistance. Van der Poel instead published a website called How To Skate a 10K, comprising a 62-page document summarising how he trained from May 2019 to February 2022 when he won his Olympic golds.

Van der Poel reckoned that whoever skated the most 30-second laps in the last three months prior to the Olympics would win the 10,000m. So what he did was he trained to become a person who could train to do that.

You might think we’ve made a hash of that last sentence, so let’s be more specific – or rather, less specific, because van der Poel’s initial bout of training wasn’t much to do with speed skating at all.

From May 2019 up until August 2020 our man didn’t compete on ice and instead focused on building a strong aerobic base through cycling. He reckoned that doing this would eventually allow him to perform more high intensity work than ever before.

For that period – and in fact for his whole training period – van der Poel trained five days a week and had weekends off. In his ‘aerobic season’ he built up to doing three seven-hour bike rides and two six-hour rides each week. There was pretty much zero intensity in this training. It was just a long slog.

He trained to train. And then in August 2020, he started doing 10-, 20- and 30- minute intervals on the bike at significantly higher intensity.

10 weeks later, he finally started speed skating.

During this third period, van der Poel binned off the harder efforts on the bike and rode easier and for fewer hours the rest of the time. But when he skated, he skated at race pace. Always.

“Thanks to a successful Aerobic season and Threshold season, I was able to perform these sessions five days in a row,” he said.

What van der Poel had done was he’d given himself strong foundations on which to build.

What does this have to do with Jason Roy?

At the time of writing, Roy is struggling to get a toehold. At his best, he can play balls straight back over the bowler’s head right from the very start of his innings. ‘He should just try and do that then,” you might think – except he isn’t even in a position to try. His timing’s off, his rhythm’s off. Roy’s ‘best’ is only accessible to him once he’s already in form.

So how does he recover form? ‘He just needs time in the middle’ is the truism.

The problem is that prolonged time in the middle is quite hard to come by for an England white ball batter like Roy. His last first-class match was in 2020 and changes to the domestic schedule mean he doesn’t even play domestic 50-over cricket any more.

One-day internationals alone don’t really guarantee him a lot of middle practice.

Even if Roy doesn’t excel in the longer formats, there’s a case for saying that first-class cricket has historically provided him with a vital ‘base’ on which to build.

Obviously batting doesn’t have quite the same emphasis on physiological capability as speed skating, so we’re not talking about exactly the same sort of thing here. In fact there are plenty of players who’ve recaptured form in an entirely different way.

David Gower is the classic example. If Gower was batting badly, he’d make a conscious decision to avoid practice. ‘Why groove bad habits?’ he reasoned.

> A dog’s eye view of baseball-bat-wielding thug David Gower

Gower would instead get away from cricket and strive for a reboot, trusting that his normal timing and rhythm would return. We suppose he felt that the central influences on his batting form were less forgettable than anything else, so a bit of a mental flush-out would eliminate far more bad than good.

We wonder whether it’s quite the same for someone like Jason Roy though, who simply does not have the same volume of match batting under his belt. Roy has played 87 first-class matches and doesn’t look likely to add too many more. Gower played 448.

Now obviously Roy is only partway through his career and has of course played a great many T20 matches on top of that. But T20 batting is a very specific form of batting. It doesn’t give you that same ‘base’ of facing over after over from opposition bowlers.

Even if a batter makes only 30 or 40 runs in a first-class match, they’ll have spent an hour or more facing serious bowling with fielders all around. They’ll have thought about how the opposition were trying to get them out. They’ll have played a few balls and blocked a few balls in a lower pressure environment. All of that is helpful. It’s also important to emphasise that there is really no hugely significant cost to being exposed to more of it.

That kind of experience is a hard thing to replicate in the nets which means it’s a thing that batters like Roy don’t really get any more.

We’re just now getting to a whole new generation of batters who are learning to perform in T20s without these same foundations. Those who are most adept at maintaining form without long hours of batting will no doubt be the ones who thrive.

Even so, perhaps these players’ run-scoring would be more consistent if their approach was built on a greater weight of low octane match training. Or perhaps others who do get such opportunities will be able to effectively cash in that experience to achieve higher peaks. The logical thing to do then would be to retreat for another phase of first-class base-building as part of an annual training cycle.

Roy’s loss of form will have many contributory factors and has perhaps also been overstated, but it will be interesting to see whether he can get back to his best as his own first-class batting ‘base’ recedes ever further from view. Specificity is important, but perhaps, like Nils van der Poel, peak performances grew from deep roots that weren’t so immediately apparent.

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England v Australia, third Test, day two

For a proper explanation of why batsmen so often play mental shots when you want them to dig in, see this piece about the psychology of stonewalling.

But it’s Friday and you’ve no time for that right now, so here instead is our top three awful dismissals from England’s Ashes-losing 67 all out.

(And look on the bright side: at least you don’t have to spend an hour sitting indoors watching the Channel 5 highlights show on what is after all a beautiful sunny evening.)

Number 3: Jofra Archer’s periscope

This one was great because GET YOUR BAT OUT OF THE WAY.

Number 2: Ben Stokes’ stretchy waft

This one was great because HOW DID YOU EVEN REACH THAT?

Number 1: Jason Roy’s Jason Roy shot

This one was great because YES THAT WAS EXACTLY WHAT WE EXPECTED.

Unlike Archer and Stokes, Roy had laid the groundwork for his awful dismissal by getting out to pointless drives several times previously.

That meant that this awful dismissal wasn’t just annoying, it was predictably annoying, which is of course a higher echelon of annoying altogether.

Roy is now basically James Vince, only without 27 runs of preamble leading up to each dismissal.

Top work, Jason Roy.

2019 Cricket World Cup semi-final, Australia v England

Don’t know if you heard, but England hammerthrashed Australia in the World Cup semi-final today.

A World Cup semi-final is an emotional thing and a hammerthrashing like this is even more emotional still.

The most emotional moment came when England’s Jason Roy was given out. Many people were involved. Let’s try and work out who was most emotional about it?

The Australia players

When you get someone out, it’s almost always a very emotional thing. However, while this was a big wicket in a World Cup semi-final, Australia were already highly likely to lose by this point, so they didn’t feel as strongly about it as they otherwise might have done.

Jason Roy’s wicket wasn’t a thing that made the Australia players think, “This is match-turning.” It was more like a thing where if they subsequently took a bunch more wickets, they’d later think, “That wicket earlier on turned out to be match-turning with hindsight.” We’re sure you’ll agree, that kind of thought is unlikely to elicit quite the same emotional response.

The Australia players did have a secondary emotional response though. They also felt slightly irritated when Jason Roy didn’t want to walk off the pitch.

Emotion rating: 6/10

Jonny Bairstow

A little earlier in England’s innings, Jonny Bairstow had been given out. Even though he was very clearly completely out, he decided to use England’s one review because he apparently thought that through magic there was maybe some way he might not be out.

Turned out Jonny Bairstow was indeed completely out and England then had no more reviews to use because you don’t let people who review dismissals like Jonny Bairstow’s have more than one review because otherwise the game would take an eternity.

The TV coverage showed that Jason Roy was very definitely not out and Jason Roy made it very clear that he would very much like to have reviewed the decision. Jonny Bairstow may well have felt a certain amount of guilt about this and guilty is a very powerful emotion.

Emotion rating: 7/10

Jason Roy

Upon being given out, Jason Roy had what can only be described as a mega-strop. He made a disbelieving face at the umpires. He ‘remonstrated’. He said things. He swished his bat.

Jason Roy was a very, very unhappy man.

Not being unable to review what was pretty clearly a full-on wrong decision was very frustrating for Roy, but somewhere in the back of his mind a very small part of him may have acknowledged that he was right there when Jonny Bairstow had said, “Should I review this?” and he had utterly failed to say, “You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?”

Emotion rating: 9/10

Umpire Dharmasena

Have you ever done something moronically stupid that has massively upset someone? Let’s say you pulled out of a junction having somehow not seen an oncoming vehicle and the driver had to do an emergency stop.

They’re angry. They’re super-angry. They’re enraged and it’s completely justified. This incident was 100 per cent your fault and you’re a complete dick. All you can really do in this situation is just have them be angry at you until they run out of anger and eventually drive away again.

That is a horrible feeling; that feeling that someone is hugely, unnecessarily emotional and it’s wholly your fault. That is basically how umpire Dharmasena must have felt after seeing his dismissal finger rise in front of his face when Jason Roy hadn’t hit the ball.

Just put yourself in umpire Dharmasena’s position. As Jason Roy threshes around, his dreams of a megafun World Cup hundred lying in shards around him, you realise this shouldn’t have happened and that the only reason it has happened is because of you. Then you realise millions of people are watching and they think you’re a complete tool.

Jason’s not getting any less angry. The crowd aren’t happy. You can feel your stomach ferreting around for a way to get out of your body. And then you realise you have to carry on doing this decision-making-in-front-of-millions-of-people thing for a couple more hours yet.

Emotion rating: 10/10

2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 12, Bangladesh v England

When Jason Roy reached his hundred against Bangladesh, he celebrated by ploughing into umpire Joel Wilson and knocking him flat on his arse.

This bout of slapstick almost certainly constitutes the all-time greatest World Cup hundred celebration. We know this for one simple reason: it was quite funny and we can’t immediately think of any other funny hundred celebrations at the World Cup and funny things are better than unfunny things.

Here’s a bit more detail on why it was funny (and therefore great).

1. After knocking Wilson over, it briefly looked like Roy was doing a Mortal Kombat style ‘flawless victory’ pose over Wilson’s prone body

2. After that, Roy went in for the hug

3. After the hug, Roy apologised and Wilson did the finest ‘your apology is not really accepted’ face that we’ve ever seen

The last one’s our favourite.

So, yes, undeniably a very funny incident, but if you for some inexplicable reason take issue with our conclusion and claim it wasn’t actually all that funny an incident at all, we can instantly disprove that.

Just look what Jason Roy’s collision with Joel Wilson managed to do.

Jason Roy’s hundred celebration made Trevor Bayliss move his face!

Trevor Bayliss did a recognisable facial expression!

(Eoin Morgan, who is very much learning the art of facial immobility from Bayliss at the minute, also did a face. Or possibly a yawn.)

Jason Roy is originally from South Africa and he hits the ball very hard. The similarities with Kevin Pietersen don’t end there either – he also has the same shaped mouth.

There the similarities pretty much do end. The noteworthy ones anyway.

There are two versions of Jason Roy and England’s World Cup hopes to a great extent hinge on which one turns up.

Jason Roy 1 is a man who hits the ball back past the bowler and scores very quickly without any real effort.

Jason Roy 2 makes a great deal of effort to score quickly via all sorts of different shots, very few of them back past the bowler.

Jason Roy 2 generally gets out a lot.

Here is an incredible catch that Jason Roy once took off a truly filth delivery.

Let us tell you about the other members of England’s World Cup squad

2 minute read

Nick Hoult wrote the case study we couldn’t be bothered writing in The Telegraph yesterday.

The short version is that between now and England picking their first Test squad to face India in August, Jason Roy will have at most one first-class match in which to make his case for inclusion.

That is one more than most of us have, but significantly fewer than Roy realistically needs. So it isn’t going to happen. And maybe England don’t want it to happen anyway because they’d rather keep him confident and focused on limited overs cricket.

That set of circumstances pretty much sums up our point.

Another time, another place

By the end of 2011, Virat Kohli had eight one-day international hundreds to his name and zero Test hundreds. However, the Test path wasn’t coned off. He wasn’t asked to follow diversion signs taking him back down a more familiar road.

Kohli made his first fifty in his fourth Test and his first hundred in his eighth Test. He then made his first double hundred in his 42nd Test. That was July 2016 and he’s made five more since then.

In the ongoing second Test against South Africa, Kohli made 153 out of 307 in India’s first innings in a match where runs have had an appropriate value.

However things pan out, we don’t feel like you’ll think we’re from a parallel dimension if we suggest that he is now a decidedly handy Test batsman.

Are you seriously comparing Virat Kohli with Jason Roy?

No, we’re just comparing circumstances: the situation faced by Roy and other England white ball cricketers now against a snapshot in time where Virat Kohli was only two-dimensional.

We would quite like for every player to have the time and opportunity to make their case to play all formats of international cricket. You never know what you might be missing out on.

< 1 minute read

Just read last week’s Wisden piece again with this innings in mind.

Jason Roy played five first-class matches last season.

2 minute read

A real man of the match performance from AB de Villiers won England the first T20 international against South Africa. The greatest sportsman who ever lived ate up 58 balls in making an unbeaten 65.

If the innings hinted at a two-paced pitch, England’s batsmen only noticed one of them and weren’t unduly troubled by the other.

For all the adulation, it’s worth remembering that de Villiers isn’t actually all that good at T20, one of the two formats he still deigns to play. Nor has he done a right lot else in recent times.

De Villiers’ last Test hundred (do we mean ‘most recent’ or ‘final’) came in January 2015. His most recent one-day international hundred came in January 2016.

This isn’t to talk him down. He’s been an extraordinary batsman, but we’re starting to wonder whether he ever will be again. He’s supposedly fully focused on the 2019 World Cup, but in the Champions Trophy he looked like a man short of cricket. You wonder whether he might want to broaden out his tunnel vision a tad.

In this match he looked like a man playing with a hollow bat.

Jason Roy isn’t in great form either. His body is – as one stout over of straight-batted thonking proved – but his brain is not.

Refusing to stick to the methodology that had started to reap rich dividends, Roy for some reason backed himself to play someone else’s natural game and unfurled a suicidal reverse sweep.

Clearly Roy feels he has something to prove. That proof will probably only come once he feels differently.