We have a general belief that a player’s first Test appearance is near-worthless in terms of evaluating his quality. It therefore seemed to make perfect sense for us to start documenting players’ debuts. This is the first of those pieces.
We said we had faint misgivings about James Vince ahead of his Test debut. It’s not that we don’t rate him, because we don’t know him. We had however heard that he was stylish and we always think that style is a strong indicator of a poor Test debutant.
Our reasoning is thus: stylish batsmen look good and have to do less to win people over, so all other things being equal they will be worse than shonky-looking batsmen who have to be way more effective to break into the Test team.
Batting-wise, Vince hit two fours and then edged to slip trying to hit a third. It was a shame that he himself wasn’t the fielder, because he also dropped a couple of catches – one of which was pretty straightforward.
So far so rubbish, but Vince’s match was completely salvaged by his magnificent bowling. He didn’t just bowl medium-pace. He bowled an over of medium-pace bouncers, one of which almost took a wicket. Short-pitched medium-pace is such a colossally contrary way of trying to dismiss Test batsmen that we feel sure it will reap great rewards.
On this evidence, James Vince is now our equal-favourite bowler in the world, along with Gary Ballance.
The what now? Come on, you remember: The Alternative Test Cricket World Championship. We did…
Bert writes... Regular readers of this website will be aware that I have a standing…
Players and commentators talk a lot about playing each ball on its merits, but actually…
It's almost time to start looking ahead to the Ashes again, but before we get…
The 2023 Ashes has sogged and then at the last moment unexpectedly fizzled to its…
It's a weird feature of cricket that you can go out in style but then…