To expect consistent run scoring from Zak Crawley in county cricket to save his Test place was always a bit fanciful.
Whereas most England players go back to county cricket and look a class apart, Crawley is just as inconsistent for Kent as he is for England. His average in the championship is 31, exactly the same as his record in Test cricket. At least at Test level he can say he has faced the best attacks in the world and scored five, often memorable hundreds.
He has made one century for Kent in three years and is averaging 19 this summer with a highest score of 44 in nine innings. His strike rate is 55, 10 below his Test record. He is neither playing shots nor scoring runs. He was bowled for one against Gloucestershire on Saturday, chopping on a drive.
Now he is going to be the Ashes fall guy. While everyone else has kept their jobs – the management and all the backroom staff – Crawley will go when the Test squad is announced next week. Once he was undroppable, now, like Steven Finn, he is unselectable.
What next for him? While you can envisage the other Ashes discard Ollie Pope eventually taking over as captain at Surrey, scoring plenty of runs to win championships at the Oval and knock on England’s door, it is difficult to imagine Crawley enjoying the same career path.
Kent are struggling near the bottom of Division Two and Crawley has been a target for some members, who want him dropped for 19-year-old prospect Ben Dawkins, who scored 65 on Saturday. Head coach Adam Hollioake had comments on the club’s social media disabled to protect the players from criticism, a move some viewed as specifically for Crawley.
His county record is hardly going to persuade a bigger Division One club to poach him, and unless there is a radical shift in his fortunes, he is unlikely to score the championship runs to earn his England place back again.
At least as an opener that is. There are suggestions he could drop lower down, away from the new ball, but England are not short of middle-order players. Another option is white-ball cricket.
He was due to open for England in the ODI series against Sri Lanka earlier this year but he was injured and ended up playing only one game. He captained the side in two games against Ireland in 2023 and has the power and shot-playing for 50-over cricket. England are still searching for the right opening partnership to take them to the next World Cup in October 2027; Crawley could be an answer.
The franchise circuit is back up too but he hardly has a record that commands top dollar. Crawley’s problem has never been mental strength so he can pick himself up. But it will be hard to replicate the buzz of playing for England, batting in an Ashes, while travelling around in Division Two of the championship. He may feel it is a challenge too far. Could he then walk away from red-ball cricket?
He has led a curious, unique career as any England cricketer. No other has had so much backing from the management for 64 Test matches. He is easy on the eye when in form. He is a selfless player who has continued to attack for the team’s sake, following instructions to get the ball rolling despite his own numbers being poor. Others may have retreated into a trench and saved themselves.
Not Crawley, he kept going. Maybe because he does not have any other way. His defence is unpicked by good attacks pretty quickly and it would have been borderline cruel to pick him against New Zealand this summer after his torturing by Matt Henry in their last series. Henry dismissed him six times out of six as Crawley had one of his horrible series, averaging 8.66. When it goes wrong for him, it goes badly wrong: in three series of four innings Crawley averaged in single figures.
Maybe it will be a relief, because he has copped more flak than any other player in the Bazball years. To some, he exemplifies all that is wrong with Bazball. All style, no substance, a keen golfer (the best in the team) and one of Rob Key’s favourites.
But he was picked on merit in 2017 as a talented young batsman and found himself in the right place at the right time when Brendon McCullum took over as head coach and wanted to play a positive way. Now there is no way England can claim this is a new start and still pick Crawley. The standard-bearer for Bazball has become a burden.
Glamorgan debutant takes hat-trick as Stokes and Brook return
Meanwhile, the experiment to turn James Rew into an opener ended with a duck as he became a victim of an extraordinary hat-trick on first-class debut by teenage Glamorgan seamer Tom Norton.
Norton became the first player for 120 years to take a hat-trick on championship debut as Glamorgan fought back in a low-scoring game against Somerset at Cardiff.