England vs New Zealand: Zak Crawley’s dismissal on Day 4 at Leeds sums up his wretched run in series – Firstcricket News, Firstpost

The past decade has not been one to savour for English openers. Since the retirement of Andrew Strauss in 2012 England have auditioned 16 different men for the role of full-time opener without finding a long-term answer. And when Alastair Cook also left the international game, the problem just got twice as hard.

All 57 varieties of opener have been tried — from blockers to dashers, county run-toppers to out-of-the-box hunches – the results have ultimately remained more or less the same, with no permanent solution found.

Enter Zak Crawley — sitting in the English opener venn diagram somewhere between expansive stylist, promising young talent and middling First Class record — he currently finds himself battling hard to maintain his place in the side.

It is not hard to see just why Crawley has caught the eye of England selectors past and present, despite only six centuries and an average of just 30.54 in 138 First Class innings; he is an undeniably stylish batsman, who in full flow looks nothing short of world class The problem for him though has been how bad things have looked when he is out of touch.

There is undoubtedly talent where Crawley is concerned, you only have to have seen his sumptuous 267 against Pakistan in 2020 to know that – England’s tenth highest Test score of all time incidentally – yet repeating that feat with any sort of consistency has been a struggle.

These are undoubtedly lean times for the opener, the century in Antigua six Tests ago seems a long way away now and after 24 Tests he has the aforementioned two hundreds and just five half centuries — an average of 26.68, dropping to 22.64 purely as an opener, very much near the bottom of the list of all those tried since the retirements of Strauss and Cook.

Crawley is unfortunate that like a child star of old he is essentially having to grow up as an international cricketer in the public eye, and as history relates, that rarely ends well.

There is an irony that in England’s new ‘Bazball’ era, Crawley, at his best a free-flowing expansive top-order presence ideally suited to the Brendon McCullum Platonic ideal, is arguably the one man who hasn’t truly flourished under his new Test coach.

Crawley finishes the series averaging 14.50, less than both Stuart Broad and James Anderson, and the lowest figure of any recognised batsman on either side.

His dismissal on Day Four summed up a miserable three Tests for the 24-year-old, just as he was perhaps starting to find the merest semblance of some form, or at least the boundary with more fluency than he has managed for some time, he was suckered into the most basic of traps, holing out to Kane Williamson at cover off the bowling of Michael Bracewell — a bowler who has not exactly struck fear into the hearts of English batsmen for most of this series.

With England’s next Test of the summer beginning on Friday, the rearranged series finale with India jammed into an already crowded schedule, it seems likely that Crawley will have at least one more match to try and turn things around. Should he fail to perform in that, then it is hard to be optimistic for his longer term prospects in the side.

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