Players and commentators talk a lot about playing each ball on its merits, but actually it’s not always that good an idea. Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley gave an illustration why in the 2023 Ashes.

It’s a mad but completely true fact that England haven’t had a settled opening partnership since Andrew Strauss retired in 2012. Let’s quickly run-through who’s had a stab at opening since then (excluding the other half of that partnership, Alastair Cook).

In chronological order (deep breath)…

1. Nick Compton
2. Joe Root
3. Mike Carberry
4. Sam Robson
5. Jonathan Trott
6. Adam Lyth
7. Moeen Ali
8. Jos Buttler
9. Alex Hales
10. Ben Duckett
11. Haseeb Hameed
12. Keaton Jennings
13. Mark Stoneman
14. Rory Burns
15. Jack Leach (twice)
16. Joe Denly
17. Jason Roy
18. Dom Sibley
19. Zak Crawley
20. Ben Stokes
21. Alex Lees

Three of those players averaged over 40: Joe Root, Jack Leach and, so far, Ben Duckett.

No-one else has averaged more than 31.33.

Only five others have averaged over 30: Nick Compton, Sam Robson, Rory Burns, Joe Denly and Zak Crawley.

The bar for being considered a viable England Test opener has dropped a touch.

Cook lite

It has been a bit of a production line – one for some reason calibrated to churn out mediocre products. The sameyness of the records is striking. We’ve seen a lot of batters averaging mid- to late-20s and pretty much all of them boast strike-rates in the region of 35 to 45 runs per 100 balls.

The average innings has been characterised by studious watchfulness before either getting out to a pretty good ball or ‘giving it away’ after running out of restraint.

That’s of course a generalisation – we’re talking about hundreds of innings here – but those strike-rates don’t lie. Whether knowingly or not, a lot of people tried to imitate Alastair Cook and it is a mark of Cook’s freakish psyche that he proved wholly inimitable.

But there have always been other ways of going about things.

Cook and Strauss averaged 40.96 as an opening partnership, but that was actually a sizeable step down from Strauss’s partnership with Marcus Trescothick, which averaged 52.35, and Trescothick’s with Michael Vaughan, which averaged 48.76.

It was good to bat with Marcus Trescothick. Marcus Trescothick hit the ball.

Ben Duckett

Before the Ashes began, an incredible statistic was doing the rounds that Ben Duckett had left only eight of the 605 deliveries he’d faced as a Test match opener. According to Andy Zaltzman. Test openers ordinarily leave about a quarter of the balls they face.

When the series got underway, Duckett continued in a similar vein, playing at the first 100 deliveries he faced before leaving two of the 134 balls he faced when making 98 at Lord’s.

He wasn’t happy about this.

“One of them should have been a wide and the other one was probably over my head, so I was gutted,” he said.

Duckett is comfortable with his approach, in large part because he has been given the green light by his coach and captain.

“If I think back to maybe three years ago, I was thinking that I could never be an opener in Test cricket because of how I play, and then actually last summer I was like, ‘why not?’” he told the Independent. “Why do I have to bat like Sir Alastair Cook or these great openers of the past?”

Why indeed? It’s not like it was working for anyone else. Other than the occasional, not-very-serious flirtation with an alternate approach, England spent literally years frustrated with square pegs for not going through round holes without ever seriously considering the hole’s part in this interaction.

More shots

One very obvious reason why the flirtations referenced in the previous paragraph never came to much is because playing more shots tends to mean playing more bad shots and if there’s one thing you can count on in this day and age, it’s that the bad shots of a losing side will take on colossal significance.

Why did the team lose? Why are they so terrible? Cue a montage of all the bad shots.

We’re as guilty of this as anyone, but in our defence, we don’t do it to be critical. We do it because it’s funny and maybe also as a bit of a coping mechanism.

Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have brought about basic everyday competence with the bat because they don’t care about bad shots. We’ve already written a whole thing about this and we don’t want to reproduce great tracts of it here. The jus of it is that they see the bigger picture, which is that 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.

And do you know what’s also true? Playing more shots probably means playing more good shots too and this brings benefits that extend beyond the mere runs you score.

Proactive batting

Before Cook and Strauss and before even Trescothick and Vaughan there was another England opening partnership that warrants a mention. Between 1990 and 1995, Graham Gooch and Mike Atherton averaged 56.84.

Those who only remember late-era Athers or only know him by reputation won’t really appreciate what he was like in his early-20s before back-knack began to diminish him. This was the best of Atherton – a period in which he averaged 45 and scampered frequent singles with age-defying fitness freak Gooch.

Because that was what their partnership was built on really: not leaves, but singles.

It was far from the helter-skelter scoring-rates we’re seeing right now, but at the start of an innings, when catchers were in position, Gooch and Atherton worked the gaps. They worked the gaps until they were filled, at which point the risk of dismissal reduced.

That is proactive batting.

In 2013, we described Kevin Pietersen as the only upper order England batter prone to trying to set his own field. All the others at that time played according to what they were presented with. A good few people misread this as a call for more six-hitting and reverse sweeping. That wasn’t at all what we meant, so we tried to clarify.

Our gripe was that while playing the ball on its merits is almost universally regarded to be ‘a good thing,’ that kind of passive, reactive batting can leave the player pretty much helpless against the best bowling. If every ball merits either a leave or an honest, respectful defensive stroke, you don’t go anywhere, you stagnate, and eventually you get out.

Graham Thorpe was the player we eventually alighted on as a less emotionally loaded example of a proactive batter. Like Pietersen, or Atherton with Gooch, Thorpe would actively seek out scoring areas and exploit them in a bid to force the fielding captain’s hand. Hard-running was a big part of this (although boundaries are always more persuasive).

Pretty persuasion

England have an almost entirely proactive batting line-up these days. There are plenty of unignorable manifestations of this, but a few subtler ones too, such as the tendency to advance down the pitch to quicker bowlers that Jarrod Kimber has written and done a video about.

The openers start as everyone else means to go on.

The early parts of Zak Crawley’s 189 at Old Trafford brought a good few reminders that he is the most gifted inside-edger in world cricket, but his and Duckett’s inclination to lay bat on ball undeniably has an impact.

Bowlers always feel in with a chance against them, but with their opposite-handedness and a difference of 25cm in height, they’re a bloody nightmare for settling on a line and length. Singles often ensue. Throw in the fact that both of them will definitely – definitely – try and smash every bad ball to the boundary and it can be hard to retain an attacking field for long.

Crucially, there are growing signs that the two of them are content to adapt to these resultant field settings rather than being seduced by their own boundary hitting. This is actually when they start looking good.

After eight fours in the first five overs of their second innings at the Oval, Duckett and Crawley nurdled. It didn’t last that long – only 10 overs or so – but nurdling can be positively murderous when the bad balls are also being put away. With men on the boundary and few catchers, England’s openers were cruising – yet the alternative for Australia felt worse.

This is the point at which you can start playing the ball on its merits – once you’ve earned it.

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It was only one innings, but two Zak Crawleys batted at Old Trafford last week. The first was what we call in these parts “a jousey bastard” who cemented his reputation as the most gifted inside-edger in world cricket. The second was an almighty destroyer of worlds who flickered into existence and displaced the other guy completely from about 70 runs onwards, laying waste to the Australia “attack” in frighteningly untroubled fashion. That second chunk of innings was really quite something and it was followed by a similar assault from Jonny Bairstow – but given the match ended in a draw, do these innings actually matter?

Before we get to that, it’s worth pointing out that Australia didn’t retain the Ashes by being very much on the receiving end of a bruising, rain-affected draw. This was just the particular match when England ran out of time to catch up with them.

Because really both teams did a hell of a lot to mitigate the impact of bad weather in the fourth Test. England winkled Australia out for an underwhelming score in the first innings and then batted with almost unprecedented haste. Australia, however, were even further ahead, having very cannily won the first two Tests of the series. (Smart move, Australia.)

The 2-1 scoreline of course means that the Ashes are ‘retained’ even if the series can still be drawn. Given that England gave the Australia bowlers the kind of runaround they’ve rarely if ever had to endure before in this Test, all of that action begs a question: What’s important here? The Ashes, the scoreline or the memories?

The Ashes, the scoreline or the memories?

It’s the first one really, but the other elements do have the potential to massively enhance or massive diminish what winning (or retaining) the Ashes actually means.

In short, it’s not just about winning. It’s how you win and who you beat.

As just a quick example, compare and contrast the 2005 Ashes with the 2009 Ashes.

The former was a 2-1 England win over an incredible collection of all-time greats who’d contributed to Australia winning eight series in a row. The latter was a 2-1 England win in which Ben Hilfenhaus was the top wicket-taker.

That’s a little reductive because the 2009 series certainly had its moments (why not have a listen to the Ridiculous Ashes and revisit some of them). We do feel it reflects a fundamental truth though: Not all Ashes series are equal. Not all 2-1 victories are equal. The things that make them unequal are important too.

So while the 2023 Ashes are no longer up for grabs, we’d argue that the far more significant prize of ‘bragging rights’ remains unclaimed.

As such, Zak Crawley’s 189 off 182 balls and Jonny Bairstow’s 99 not out off 81 balls do matter because they are eminently bragworthy. We can’t remember Australia ever looking quite so fast-medium in the field as they did for much of this match.

2-1, 3-1 or 2-2?

But yeah, the Ashes cannot be won. That is kind of important. And England will feel frustrated as it has felt like Australia have been slowly cracking, only to hold out just long enough thanks to the British weather.

Whatever the eventual scoreline in this series, both teams have also been pitted against the schedule. Pat Cummins’ battery in particular looks like it’s being sustained by emergency five-minute charges during every break in play. This is hardly surprising. He’s just led his team through five Tests in six and a half weeks and bowled his oversized heart out in each and every one.

For their part, England knew none of their quick bowlers could make it through the whole series so they’ve chopped and changed and didn’t even get round to letting Mark Wood loose until they were already 2-0 down.

In short, the Test season has been condensed into one long, brutal, attritional ultramarathon. Some will gripe at The Hundred’s clear August window at this point, but this is basically the way they schedule Test series nowadays anyway.

It adds an interesting endurance dynamic to proceedings, but we do feel for the players shouldering the greatest physical and psychological burdens. The final Test starts on Thursday. Imagine the state of some of these guys if they hadn’t missed a day and a bit thanks to rain.

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The 2023 Ashes is almost here! And you’re not ready! You think you are, but you aren’t. You don’t know what to watch out for. But don’t worry, we’ve done the hard work for you and come up with this list. You need to watch out for these things…

1. Suggestions that this could be as good as the 2005 Ashes

Nope, wrong. Completely and utterly and unavoidably wrong. Even if the actual cricket is higher quality – which is entirely possible – there is simply no way to match the drama because even though you don’t realise it, the story of the 2023 Ashes is already well underway and it isn’t even close to the story of the 2005 Ashes.

No shame in that though. Doesn’t mean it won’t be an amazing Ashes.

2. Ollie Robinson’s wicket celebration

There are many variants of the Ollie Robinson wicket celebration, but the basic framework of it is a kind of upper cut finger point that is punctuated by a “Woo!”

While James Anderson may well be the greatest swing bowler there’s ever been and Stuart Broad routinely shapes Ashes series, Ollie Robinson might actually prove to be England’s most important bowler in the 2023 Ashes. We all talk about Mark Wood’s pace and when Jofra Archer might come back, but Robinson is the one who’s quietly been really very tremendously successful these last couple of years.

The bizarre trick that Robinson has managed to pull off is taking heaps of cheap wickets while simultaneously persuading everyone that his Test career is about to go up in flames at any moment. As just one example, during the last Ashes he struggled with his fitness and was at times reduced to bowling spin and yet still somehow averaged 25.54 across four Tests. Some would argue he sidestepped some punishment by being off the field at times, but quite honestly the evidence suggests the only thing he sidestepped was taking more wickets.

That series began a fitness run that went back spasm, more back spasms, tooth infection, food poisoning, another back thing and then Covid. Then he got back playing cricket a bit more regularly and just carried on taking wickets for next to nothing. He’s played New Zealand, India, Australia, South Africa and Pakistan and he averages 21.27.

3. David Warner being either rubbish or not rubbish at cricket

Do you know that David Warner is secretly rubbish at cricket? Yes, he is. Absolutely true.

At the same time he does always carry that latent threat of being not at all rubbish at cricket. It probably won’t happen, but it would be hugely awful if it did.

4. James Anderson’s opening spell

One day this ends, you know. One day James Anderson decides he doesn’t want to sling it down in a bobble hat in the Old Trafford nets in front of basically no-one any more. And as soon as he thinks that, he’ll pack it all in. Every last bit of it.

Where will that leave us? We’ll tell you where it’ll leave us. It’ll leave us with the long forgotten concept of England opening bowlers wasting the new ball.

It’s amazing to think that younger readers may not even know about wasting the new ball; may not even comprehend that ‘wasting the new ball’ is actually normality. Since the dawn of Test cricket, England opening bowlers have bowled too short or too wide or too short and wide. Some have spiced things up with a bit of legside filth, but short, wide, or short-and-wide are basically the options.

We don’t know how good we have had it these last however many years. He may have wasted the new ball in his youth, but our trust in Jimmy Anderson is complete and justified these days. No ball is truly wasted. Even the wide ones are an exercise in gathering information.

Not only that, but you know that if there is swing available, Anderson will find it. And you also know that if he finds swing, he will use it correctly and to the full. And when there isn’t swing, you can be sure that he will land his wobble ball on the spot. When it comes to bowling in England, Jimmy is the benchmark. That means you don’t ever need to mope about what someone else might have done had they been given the opportunity instead.

James Anderson has been so brilliant for so long that what he does now seems unremarkable. This is why we all need to redouble our efforts to appreciate what he does while we still can.

5. James Anderson losing his rag at something

The other great thing about Jimmy is that he is a quite majestically irritable cricketer. Even after all these years he still really, really, really gives a shit.

6. Travis Head’s head

Averages 47. Gives it a biff. Looks like he’s about to go and smoke some ribs on the grill out back after a long shift pumping gas at the truck stop.

7. England’s openers

Ben Duckett’s had three good months, which makes him just about the most successful England opener since Alastair Cook first began auditioning for Andrew Strauss’s successor all the way back in 2012. Three good months does not a Test batter make however. We’d probably be talking about Duckett’s prospects an awful lot more if his weaknesses weren’t massively overshadowed by those of his opening partner, the Wobbleatron 9000.

Unlike many, we aren’t enraged by Zak Crawley’s continued presence in the England Test team. We aren’t delighted either. We’re just sort of ignorantly and excitedly watching it unfold in front of us, like that time we went to see Event Horizon in the cinema, entirely unaware it was a horror film. What’s happening? Where’s this going? What’s up with his eyes?

8. “Doctored pitches”

Check the series previews. Have England cheated yet? There is literally nothing in cricket funnier and more baffling than the very specific Australian notion of a “normal” pitch and the unshakeable belief that anything that remotely deviates from that must by definition have been tampered with somehow.

Australians will moan about Indian pitches favouring the spinners, but it’s funnier still when they object to English pitches because they’re essentially outraged at being asked to play sport on grass.

9. Ben Stokes’ bowling

Anyone who’s seen The Prestige will know that some tricks are performed at a cost. It feels like every time Ben Stokes bowls an over, another chunk of his cricket career dies.

Stokes is not averse to sacrifice and the Ashes will obviously be a period when he’s willing to erode his body in pursuit of wickets. At the same time he’ll want to get out of bowling whenever possible.

What’s interesting is that this is common knowledge. Both teams know the less bowling Stokes is obliged to do, the more comfortable England will feel continuing to play him as an all-rounder. It’s a bit of a paradox really: the less he’s called on to bowl, the more viable a bowler he remains.

Stokes’ aim, therefore, is to keep overs in the bank. Australia’s goal is for him to fritter them away before the series is out – that way they’ll only have his batting and his captaincy to deal with and England may struggle to balance their side.

Conversely, England’s other all-rounder, Moeen Ali, will want to get through some overs so that he can recover some rhythm after restricting himself to limited overs cricket in recent years.

Australia won’t want Moeen bowling and they will want Stokes bowling. You can see how this might play out.

10. Michael Neser

If you clicked through to the 2005 Ashes article earlier, you’ll know that the defining feature of that series was how Australia turned up quite reasonably assuming that they could demolish England however they chose, having done so in every series throughout the whole of the 1990s and beyond.

Those Aussie sides were able to transcend conditions, but that incredible run of Ashes success began in rather different fashion, in large part thanks to an accurate swing bowler who really made the most of being in the opposite hemisphere.

Terry Alderman took 41 wickets in the 1989 Ashes. There were six Tests, but still… 41 wickets! This wasn’t even his best effort. He’d taken 42 in the 1981 series.

If you’re touring England and you don’t have Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, you could do worse than turn to a bowler who can swing it like Terry Alderman. Based on his record in county cricket and the big booming arcs that brought him a hat trick against Yorkshire a few weeks back, Michael Neser could be such a man.

Failing that, more recent history suggests that Scott Boland landing it on just one corner of a postage stamp might be the way to go.

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Happy Ashes everyone, unless you’re Australian!

We put it to you that if Zak Crawley wants to make it as a Test batter, he should restrict himself to using only the inside edge of his bat. Because honestly, he’s absolutely nailed this underappreciated method of run-scoring.

Three times in two overs, Zak Crawley inside-edged a four against Ireland. It’s almost as if England’s put-upon opener is aware he has an issue with the outside edge of his bat and has therefore resolved to completely take it out of the equation.

This was the first one: an exquisite square-cut for four down to fine leg off Mark Adair.

This was the second one, two balls later: an exquisite cover drive for four down to fine leg, again off Mark Adair.

And this was the third one: an exquisite Kevin Pietersen style flamingo shot for four down to fine leg off Fionn Hand.

Three different shots, three inside-edges, stumps narrowly missed on each occasion and each stroke resulting in a boundary. It’s hard to avoid concluding that Crawley has been practising this.

Middle of the bat? Nah, mate. That’s dangerously close to the outside-edge. Far better to exploit that inviting gap at leg slip.

> Why it can be hard to get all fired up about Zak Crawley

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Zak Crawley is not a popular man in some quarters. If you want a measure of this, you could do worse than count how many times his name cropped up in this week’s discussion about wicketkeepers.

“And yet Zak Crawley still gets picked,” was a common reaction to the news that England had dropped “the best wicketkeeper in the world” for the Test against Ireland and presumably also the Ashes that follows.

A lot of people couldn’t help but set Ben Foakes’ strong recent Test performances alongside Crawley’s ongoing mediocrity to trigger paroxysms of befuddlement in themselves. “How can this be? HOW CAN THIS BE?”

Well, the short answer is that it can ‘be’ because they do different jobs. You can have whole flocks of truly exceptional milkmen vying for your business, but you wouldn’t hire one to toe and heel your bifold doors so that they open properly. You need a specialist for the latter job, even if that person does sometimes shatter glass panels and routinely forgets to fit the external gasket properly and still hasn’t actually got the doors working properly and, you know what, maybe you should just give one of the milkmen a go. How bad could it be? But no, that is a bad idea. The specialist might get there eventually and that’s probably your best bet right now.

The middle man and the top man

Jonny Bairstow may have batted in every position from three to eight in Test cricket, but he has never opened and England don’t want him to, regardless of his successes against the white ball. Quite understandably, England want Bairstow in their middle-order. So that’s what they’ve gone with even if the arrival of Harry Brook means he is now having to make a slightly different spot his own.

That’s tough on Foakes, who’s perhaps now tempted to ask Surrey if he can do a Bairstow and improve his odds of England selection by taking on another job. Maybe he could try his hand at opening the batting?

But therein lies the problem, because Surrey’s opening partnership is the aesthetically-challenging combo of Rory Burns and Dom Sibley – discarded England Test openers both. County cricket is awash with former England openers. (Surrey technically also have use of Jason Roy.)

This is the crux of things: There are more viable England Test wicketkeepers than there are openers. And there are more viable middle order batters than there are wicketkeepers. So of course a great wicketkeeper is going to miss out. And of course a so-so opener stands a decent chance of keeping his place.

Promise versus performance

Who would you pick instead of Crawley? The outstanding opener in the County Championship this season is Keaton Jennings. We don’t know if you remember Keaton Jennings playing for England, but in terms of public appreciation, it was pretty much exactly the same as Zak Crawley playing for England. We won’t risk a Venn diagram, but we suspect there was considerable overlap when it came to who was expressing dissatisfaction as well.

Crawley’s Test record is pretty meh, but he is keeping his place in large part because this is what he is being measured against. Jennings had 17 Tests and averaged 25.19. Crawley has had 33 Tests and averages 27.60. More pertinently, Jennings is 30 and Crawley is 25.

If you think even young players always get dropped with averages like Crawley’s, remember that Steve Waugh only averaged 30.52 after 26 Tests – and that was batting in the middle-order. At that point Waugh had never made a Test hundred, whereas Crawley has three to his name, including a double. Conversely, some players hover around this mark and keep getting opportunities without ever really coming good. Mark Ramprakash’s Test average of 27.32 was achieved over the course of 52 Tests. England will presumably argue their selection policy has more in common with 1980s Australia than 1990s England.

Someone else then

Of course there are always options. Our own preference right at this minute would probably still be Alex Lees, who always struck us as a skilful and resolute batter who wasn’t awed by top level cricket. But we’ll concede that Lees’ case is far from outstanding – just a couple of fifties and an average a clip under 40 in the second division so far this season.

That means we can’t get too worked up about Lees’ omission. And we can’t get too worked up about Jennings’ omission either. And we can’t get too worked up about Ben Stokes not setting the milk bottles aside to magically transform himself into an opener either.

We can’t get too worked up about any of the alternatives and so we also can’t get too worked up about the continued inclusion of Zak Crawley, a young opening batter who is capable of hitting Test hundreds.

Come on, he’s a natural.

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Starts are important. Starts set everyone’s mood and so shape everything that’s to come.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Abattoir Blues album starts with two bars that sound like the climax of an encore. Nick then forcefully instructs us to, ‘get ready for love,’ and by 12 seconds, there’s a full gospel choir and the Bad Seeds have everything turned up to 11.

Cave can go in two very different directions and this opening tells us this isn’t one of those albums where he’ll only be doing the ballads.

Or how about the opening shot of the original Star Wars?

The Star Wars saga has become a sprawling labyrinthine thing where people talk about what is and isn’t ‘canon,’ but really this single shot sets up the whole central premise.

An unimaginably big scary thing is pursuing a helpless smaller thing. We instinctively sympathise with the vulnerable party and so the tone is set.

Starts matter.

What does England’s top three tell us about England’s Test team?

England’s best top three of recent times – if it even counts as ‘recent times’ by this point – was Andrew Strauss, Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott. We’re not even going to bother saying anything about the way that trio set the tone because you’ve already thought it.

England’s current top three (at the time of writing) comprises Rory Burns and Dom Sibley – one of the all-time great aesthetically displeasing opening partnerships – plus Zak Crawley, a man whose last 15 Test innings feature 10 single-figure scores and one knock of 267.

They’re a weird mix, but also in other ways a samey mix. They’re three very different players who have all hit one Test six and who all average between 28.34 and 32.22.

The least experienced (Crawley) has the lowest average and one hundred to his name; the next most experienced (Sibley) has the middle average and two Test hundreds to his name; while the most experienced (Burns) has the highest average and three Test hundreds to his name.

The two openers have really good first-class records and England want them to do the same in Tests. Crawley has a poor first-class record but England feel he has the potential to transcend that.

Crawley has often looked the best but is definitely the least reliable. Burns is the most reliable but has arguably displayed his mediocrity over the longest period. Sibley bats for longest but otherwise achieves very little.

What does all of this say to the opposition and also to the England batsmen who are still to come?

There’s almost a supplementary factor here too in that they are all being included together. To pick one relatively inexperienced batter who averages about 30 could be characterised as either a punt or an investment, but to pick three tells us something deeper.

Does it say the England Test team is desperate? Does it say the England Test team will settle for middling returns?

England’s top three is probably setting the correct tone.

King Cricket by email: take the easy option.

Graham Gooch’s 333 against India at Lord’s in 1990 was the first eye-wateringly big innings we can remember. The idea that one guy could score that many runs on his own in a Test match recalibrated what we thought was possible. There have only really been a handful of oversized surprises from England batsmen since then.

England batsmen have made 24 double hundreds since Gooch’s triple. None was predictable, but some were more likely than others.

Let’s talk surprises and let’s do it with reference to the Sopranos. (So maybe skip to the next subheading if you’re 20 years behind with your TV viewing.)

A lot of people get killed in The Sopranos. That doesn’t really qualify as a spoiler, but if we can now refer to something that perhaps is, the death of Richie Aprile was a bit of a shock.

It was not a surprise that Aprile was killed, because a large proportion of the second series was devoted to setting him up as a problem. His death was a surprise because of who killed him: Janice – seemingly out of nowhere. You just didn’t realise she had it in her. (It is hard to think of a better two seconds of television than Richie’s smug contempt immediately followed by the look of surprise as his chair keels over backwards.)

This is the kind of impact we’re looking for.

To bring this back to cricket, Alastair Cook, Jonathan Trott and Kevin Pietersen double hundreds weren’t generally that surprising. Because of who they were and how they played, you knew these players were capable of such feats. Joe Root is another batsman who is so good that passing 200 doesn’t often seem newsworthy.

Now that isn’t to say that these guys couldn’t surprise you. It just means they were operating with a bit of a handicap. They had to have it large in a more unlikely context to truly take your breath away.

Okay we can start now.

These have been the eight most surprising England double hundreds since Gooch’s triple…

Nasser Hussain 207 v Australia, Edgbaston 1997

Those who have listened to the first episode of The Ridiculous Ashes – the podcast we do with Dan Liebke – will already know our feelings about this particular innings.

This was the situation: England had lost every single Ashes in the 90s, Australia had just been rolled for 118 and England were now 50-3. At this point, Nasser Hussain and Graham Thorpe put on a 288-run partnership.

What was especially remarkable about this one was that it somehow remained surprising long after it had happened. Is it possible to repeatedly feel surprised about something you know full well has actually happened? Apparently it is.

Hussain’s second-highest Test score was 155 and England batsmen didn’t make another double hundred until the next one on our list, five years later. England also continued to get thrashed in Ashes series for quite a few years afterwards.

All of this meant that every time they flashed up Hussain’s highest score in a TV graphic and highlighted the fact that it was made in an Ashes Test, we’d all have to try and come to terms with the reality of it all over again.

Even now, getting on for 25 years later, it is a hard one to wrap your head around.

Graham Thorpe 200* v New Zealand, Christchurch 2002

This Graham Thorpe innings is often overlooked because it wasn’t even close to being the most remarkable double hundred in the match.

England batted first and lost two wickets in the first over. While they ultimately recovered to 228 all out, New Zealand could only manage 147 in reply. England’s second innings then subsided to first 85-4 and then 106-5. And then Graham Thorpe hit what was at the time the third fastest Test double hundred off 231 balls.

As we’ve just said, it had been five years since an England batsman passed 200 and while Thorpe was England’s best batsman of the era, his was a reputation largely forged on gritty fifties. To give a bit more information in support of that, despite finishing his Test career with an average of 44.66, his second-highest score was only 138.

It was a really, really, highly surprising innings. People would probably talk about it a lot more if Nathan Astle hadn’t then tried to chase 550 on his own in a session.

Rob Key 221 v West Indies, Lord’s 2004

If King Cricket is anything, it’s a website that knows how to share a Rob Key picture with the world. The fact that this was an event that needed to occur was in large part due to events at Lord’s in 2004.

Key was a batsman who earned a modicum of Australian respect and a niche UK fanbase off the back of a couple of small but phlegmatic innings during the 2002/03 Ashes series. He only made one fifty in eight innings – plus what Wisden admiringly referred to as “a stout, mostly passive knock” in Perth after Nasser Hussain, Michael Vaughan and Alec Stewart had all been dismissed on the first morning – but it was the way he made those runs that won many of us over.

“He doesn’t give a shit about much and is real relaxed,” said Steve Waugh. “I like that in a bloke; it stops him getting overawed.”

In an era when England batsmen tended to default to quaking in Ashes matches, these were highly desirable characteristics. ‘If only he could make a few more runs,’ you thought to yourself.

Recalled to the side for the first Test against the Windies in 2004, Key still had only that one Test fifty to his name. We monitored the scorecard from a warehouse in North-West England, desperately hoping he’d make another.

He did. And then he turned it into a hundred. And then he turned it into a double hundred.

It was all rather satisfying.

Paul Collingwood 206 v Australia, Adelaide 2006

Like Thorpe’s, Paul Collingwood’s is a double hundred that doesn’t get talked about much – but for very different reasons. This is a shame because it was quite the moment.

One Australian newspaper had called Collingwood England’s worst-ever number four ahead of the Adelaide Test. This was not an isolated thing; it was symptomatic of sneering that extended to – in fact originated in – the UK.

There was a general sense that even though he was at that point averaging 41.77 in Test cricket, Collingwood wasn’t a proper batsman. A lot of people felt that he was actually just a rather fortunate utility cricketer who’d benefited from his willingness to carry drinks on tour.

So that was where Collingwood was. Now consider the state of the series.

Despite winning at home in 2005, England hadn’t won an Ashes in Australia since 1987. They hadn’t even competed really and after conceding a 445-run first innings deficit in the first Test, things didn’t exactly feel rosy ahead of the second.

At the end of day one, England’s worst-ever number four was on 98 not out. We stayed up to watch him make his hundred the next day and then we carried on staying up and watched him make 200. It was the first double hundred by an Englishman in Australia for 78 years.

We don’t ordinarily much care for landmarks, but there was an awful lot wrapped up in this one. The match famously didn’t pan out all that brilliantly for England in the end, but it was such a perfect moment that it almost lives in isolation.

The innings as a whole was so emphatic, and then the shot to reach 200 and the immediate reaction to it so perfect and pure, that we still feel all of the joy that we did at the time, garnished with all of that hugely misplaced optimism about what was to come.

Paul Collingwood was a cricketer you could invest in. This was one of the pay-offs.

Alastair Cook 235* v Australia, Brisbane 2010

It was 2010 and England still hadn’t won another Ashes Down Under because that previous one had ended up 5-0.

Day one of the first Test at the Gabba. Andrew Strauss was out in the first over and then Peter Siddle took a frigging hat trick. On his birthday.

England were out for 260. Australia made 481. Same old, same old. We’d seen this one before.

But then suddenly, out of nowhere, England batted… and batted… and batted.

Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook put on 188 for the first wicket, then Jonathan Trott came to the crease, and then… no further wickets fell.

The match ended with the tourists 517-1. Five hundred and seventeen for one!

Strauss’s 110 was the worst innings. Jonathan Trott finished on 135 not out, Cook on 235 not and the Earth was no longer on its axis.

Kevin Pietersen 227 v Australia, Adelaide 2010

One of the features of this list is that mostly there are quite large gaps between entries… mostly.

Kevin Pietersen’s surprising double hundred came in the very next England innings after Alastair Cook’s surprising double hundred.

As we said at the time, England tours to Australia aren’t so much cricket as visits to a lab where a range of experiments are carried out to help the visitors identify every last one of their flaws. 2010/11 was the one recent exception and Pietersen’s double was when we started to comprehend that this might prove to be the case.

The 517-1 innings was so transcendentally weird it could only have been a complete outlier; a freak event that would never be repeated. So to then see another England double hundred exactly one innings later was almost as surprising.

Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen. ‘Creatures of their time’ we called them. Flat track bullies of entirely contrasting approaches.

The match panned out like this. James Anderson knocked out Australia’s top order and then Mike Hussey and Brad Haddin hustled the home side to 245. Testing pitch maybe? England made 620-5.

Cook made 148 and Pietersen – who hadn’t reached three figures in 18 months – made 227 in that particular and memorable way in which he made big hundreds.

Then Graeme Swann took a five-for and England had an innings victory. In Australia. The first of three in that series as it turned out.

Every time England reached 300 in this series, they also reached 500.

Bonkers.

Ben Stokes 258 v South Africa, Cape Town 2016

England made 312 runs in 38.5 overs while Ben Stokes was at the crease for this innings. No matter what you’ve seen from Stokes before or since, that surely counts as a surprising event. Writing at the time, we suggested that he had actually distorted time.

Stokes started at a decent lick and then accelerated – increasingly defensive field settings failing to slow him because they were offset by a Private Hudson level of demoralisation from South Africa. Even with a good number of men on the fence, Stokes was able to move from 150 to 250 in 61 balls.

The innings was so unearthly it actually left Sky commentator Nasser Hussain sombre with admiration because his brain simply didn’t know how to react.

Asked how the England team would be feeling afterwards, Ian Botham said they would be, “literally circling the moon”.

Responding to England’s innings, Hashim Amla batted for almost 12 hours and still didn’t get within 50 runs of what Stokes had achieved in five and a half. Stokes bowled 28 overs.

Zak Crawley 267 v Pakistan, Southampton 2020

Zak Crawley went into this match with a Test average below 30 and a first-class only very marginally above it. He had made three red ball hundreds and none in Tests. He was up against a rather tidy Pakistan bowling attack.

Crawley promplty clipped his first ball for four and then made another 263 runs. He did this as England endured pace, swing, seam and wrist spin, having at one point subsided to 127-4.

The longer the innings went on, the less it felt like a surprise and the more it felt like everything Crawley had done previously was the surprise. At the time it seemed like a Westworld-esque journey inward, after which he’d realise who he really was. ‘Oh, right – turns out I’m the perfect top order batsman.’

Except it wasn’t that, because one dreamy fifty aside, it was followed by a run of complete failures, such that we’re probably now back to the double hundred being the surprise; a weird-arsed soaring peak from someone who can look for all the world like a natural, but who definitely isn’t.

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The notion of being a natural at something is a wonderful and seductive and funny and misleading thing.

Let’s say that you wanted to start playing an instrument again. You used to play the flute when you were at school but then subsequently neglected it and you haven’t picked the thing up in years or even decades.

Now if you fancy yourself as ‘a natural’ at music, the one instrument you definitely should not take up at this point in your life is the flute because this is the one instrument for which your natural talent has already been shown not to exist. If you’d been a natural at the flute, you’d have made rapid progress. People would have instantly spotted your ability. You’d have been if not a great and successful flautist, then at least a lost and mourned flautist.

So if you think you might be a natural at a musical instrument, you do not pick a flute. And you probably do not pick up any other blowing instrument either. Or maybe it was the twiddly finger bit that you didn’t immediately come to terms with. Maybe you should steer clear of twiddly finger instruments. Perhaps you’re a natural percussionist.

This extends to every sphere of life. Anything you currently do and pride yourself on being really quite good at – whether work, sport or creative endeavours – unless you’ve literally just taken it up five minutes ago, you’re not a natural. You’re striding down the wrong road. You’re investing effort in the wrong area.

Everything you’ve ever attempted where you haven’t exhibited instant and breath-taking aptitude is a waste of time. All the things you have ever done are the only activities in the world where you can be 100 per cent certain you are not a natural. If you want to be the absolute best, try something else.

Dom Sibley is not a natural. This much is obvious. With his awkward technique and predisposition towards not actually hitting the ball, he is clearly a man who has worked and worked to get the most out of himself. It does not look like the game comes easily to him.

Zak Crawley however. He’s a natural. You can see it in the speed at which he concludes, ‘oh yeah, that’s a driving ball’ or ‘oh yeah, that’s a leg glance for four ball’ and the ease with which his body acts on those thoughts.

Where Sibley punches the ball front of square, a Crawley drive is ‘unfurled’. Sibley’s movements are mechanical; Crawley’s moves are natural.

Zak Crawley was born after Dig Your Own Hole came out and he’s already learned how to flow into a 90mph in-swinger with no body part out of place. You can’t learn to do that, in that way, in that span of time, unless you’re a natural.

Except all Rob Key talks about on commentary is how Crawley has the greatest work ethic he’s ever known; how he’s always first in the nets and pleading for more throw-downs when moonlight starts to exceed sunlight. Apparently he actually moved to live next to the ground so he could do even more of this.

George Dobell says that when Crawley struggled against spin a couple of years ago, he paid to go on a spin camp in India and that he has repeatedly returned to Australian grade cricket to toughen himself up.

So maybe that’s the other route to being a natural. You pick a lane, you work, you practise. Sometimes you progress quickly, sometimes you progress slowly. Sometimes you go backwards and then when you go backwards you try and work out why. You get lucky. You make the most of things when they’re good and you don’t get disheartened when they’re bad.

You stick at it, you try and enjoy it and you just see where you end up.

The image above is Zak Crawley not-quite-catching Anrich Nortje a split second before catching Anrich Nortje.

It was a very fun moment because these kinds of parried catches always are. We’ve done a thing about them for Cricket 365. Please go and read it.

If you want proof of how exciting parried catches are, just look at Dom Sibley’s face.

Dom Sibley seems to have quite an expressive face.

We hope Dom Sibley’s face has a long and distinguished Test career.