With the innings of his life in another massive chase against India, Ben Duckett strengthened his claim as the best all-format batter in the world, writes Ben Gardner from Headingley.
Ben Duckett: The best all-format batter in the world. His name rarely features in future Fab Four conversations. He’s not a prodigy, always destined for the top. He’s not yet an IPL superstar. But he’s building a case that borders on the unanswerable.
The bare numbers do plenty of the work. After his match-winning, potentially career-defining 149 at Headingley, Duckett now averages 44 with the bat in Test cricket, striking at 86, 49 and 105 in ODIs, and 29 and 154 in T20Is. He’s yet to reach 35 games in any international format, but the sample sizes are still decent, and the figures all in the ‘very good’ to ‘great’ bracket.
Of the others in the conversation, Australia’s Travis Head, the only other batter in the top 20 of the ICC rankings in every format, has tailed off somewhat in Tests over the last couple of years. Harry Brook is not far off, but is yet to master ODIs. Yashasvi Jaiswal has played just one ODI. Sri Lanka’s Pathum Nissanka doesn’t quite have the scoring rate of the best T20 players. Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan are similar, and are currently out of the Pakistan T20I side. For Rachin Ravindra, consistency rather than scoring rate is the issue in the shortest format. That there are few realistic contenders for the crown only makes Duckett’s triple-threat all the more impressive, as the formats have diverged and the schedule has intensified.
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That Duckett has been able to master all three formats is in part down to the simplicity of his technique and gameplan. He hasn’t so much mastered as eliminated batting’s hardest art: that of choosing which shot to play when. Against pace, he trusts his eye, his hands and his timing to middle any and every delivery, and to send it racing away for runs as often as not. Against spin, he reverse sweeps, delicately, hard and flat, or, as once here today, in the air in front of square for six.
As much as it was vital England neutered Jasprit Bumrah, this was the key battle. Had Ravindra Jadeja been allowed to settle, to aim into the rough time and again, Shubman Gill could have rotated his quicks from the other end while allowing the left-armer to chip away, as happened after Duckett was dismissed. But he had neutralised the plan for long enough and done enough damage for England to edge home.
Duckett, dominating the strike as well as the scoring, swung 36 off 36 against Jadeja as he wheeled through his first 10 overs wicketless. England’s other batters couldn’t even score at half that rate when facing him, and the one wicket he managed doesn’t reflect the chances and half-chances he produced.
The mastery of the reverse-sweep is a product of Duckett’s upbringing and willingness to do things differently. “I’d seen better technical ability at that age but he hit the ball very hard and had already begun reverse-sweeping, which he took from hockey,” his school coach James Knott told The Times. “We worked on orthodox sweeping and laps and midway through his time at Stowe the school acquired a Merlyn spin-bowling machine. In one match, against Brighton College from Australia, Ben went from 100 to 150 entirely through reverse-sweeps.”
Duckett isn’t exactly a late bloomer, but there’s no doubt he’s learned some lessons along his circuitous route to the top of the world game. Boom or bust in his early days at Northamptonshire, he was ‘boom’ enough in the 2016 summer, crossing 180 on four occasions, to earn a Test debut in Asia that winter. Then he was a sitting duck against R Ashwin. He has now bloomed into England’s finest player of spin, Joe Root apart. A move to Nottinghamshire brought consistency if fewer massive scores, Duckett learning the art of cashing in when he could at Trent Bridge, where a ball with your name on it is never far away. He was almost hidden in plain sight as county cricket’s best player, consistently missing out on a recall to whichever player had had the season of their lives. When the comeback did come, he knew his own game inside-out, and it just so happened to mesh perfectly with what England needed, not just because of his tempo, but because of how well he and Zak Crawley complement each other, their differing handedness and heights making them a nightmare for an opening bowler who wants to land on the same spot repeatedly.
There is perhaps a lesson here for England, so often searching for the next generational talent, rarely returning to the known quantity who might have improved with age. Jacob Bethell is their new shiny toy, and you can see why. But a bit of time spent learning the craft won’t be time wasted.
For now, as Crawley and Ollie Pope battle to prove their worth, and as Joe Root, Harry Brook and Ben Stokes revel in their present or imminent greatness, Duckett is doing his thing as a batter, right now, that few in the world game can match.
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