Wisden Cricket Monthly editor-in-chief, Phil Walker, on Jacob Bethell’s disjointed summer, his elevation to the captaincy, and what it could all mean for the 21-year-old’s Ashes hopes.
If you happen to have a spare 11 minutes and 47 seconds to hand, go and find the video of Jacob Bethell batting at Southampton earlier this month. I promise you it’ll be worth it. In the whole realm of online cricket highlights (and that’s a key distinction) I’d wager that it’s not possible to spend a more pleasurable 11 minutes and 47 seconds.
That 11 minutes and 47 seconds contains basically everything you should want to see. The class and touch are already a given – the absurdly early scudding pull shot against the definitely-not-slow left-armer Nandre Burger (01:56), the deft dab that runs straight off the bat face, just fine of deep third (03:10), the preeningly gorgeous checked six down the ground (0:59), the shot of a boy who’s too pretty by half, and who knows it.
There’s even a dash of jeopardy in there, worn lightly as England tumble merrily towards another record, totting up their second 400-plus score of the white-ball summer just days after embarrassing themselves at Leeds. And it comes of course from the fact that Jacob Bethell remains something of an experiment, a study in the nature and disposition of unalloyed potential, albeit one whose peer-reviewed results are almost in. The punched drive to bring up the milestone is just pure joy.
Famously, before this match against a supposedly in-form South Africa, Bethell had not made a professional hundred. His previous best was 96 at Christchurch, compiled last winter, aged 21, from the suitably implausible slot of No.3 in a Test match.
You’ll remember how it would have been “flair” if he’d nailed the cover drive to bring it up, but how it didn’t much matter, because there would be so many more to come. You don’t bat at No.3 in Test cricket unless you’ve made some hundreds, or your captain is Ben Stokes. Just as you don’t bat three in an away Ashes, unless… look, nothing makes sense any more.
After his first, the only question is how many more, and how quickly he can be allowed to go about making them. Bethell’s summer, or lack of it, has been a curious thing to witness. He’s been there but not there, the ephemeral spare part, starved of the chance to play. When eventually he was drafted, for the final Test of the summer, he’d briefly forgotten how to bat, and was undone by a rampant Indian seam attack. England get lots of things right. This wasn’t one of them.
Those white-ball matches effectively saved his season, and with England prioritising ‘pressure runs’ in high-intensity environments, that hundred and the flurries either side of it have thrust him back into the conversation.
Life comes at you fast, because no sooner had Bethell got back into form, he was captaining England for the end-of-season Ireland T20I tour – offering further evidence both of his rarefied standing and England’s iconoclastic streak.
And so, soon enough, will they face another big decision. Ollie Pope or Jacob Bethell for that precious slot at first drop. Stick with the incumbent – clubbable, popular, talented, and utterly unable to drag himself out of that mid-thirties average – or go with the prodigy.
When Brendon McCullum was asked about it, he swerved away from offering any endorsement, saying that they would assess things nearer the time. It was a reasonable response, and there is no need to read too much into it. And yet that qualification, on top of the sensible suggestion – not yet confirmed but heavily mooted – that Harry Brook will assume the vice-captaincy for the Ashes, does nothing to strengthen Pope’s position. A middling summer against India, averaging 34 on a series of flat tracks, doesn’t help either.
Moreover it is a slight misnomer that this regime stubbornly sticks to their people, come what may. Jack Leach was jettisoned, or at least sidelined. James Anderson was ruthlessly moved on. Neither Alex Lees nor Ben Foakes did much wrong. Matthew Potts has been put in storage. Sam Cook was given a week at Trent Bridge on a flat one and hasn’t been seen since.
Listen hard enough, and you’ll hear tantalising echoes of 2005. England have not held the Ashes in eight years. They’ve won one series down there in their last nine attempts. Since that strange anomaly of 2010/11, the score reads Australia 13 England 0. Filthy numbers, of the kind that makes you ask: If not now, when?
In 2005, Michael Vaughan concocted an audacious plan to go hard at the Australians, and even after it went wrong in the first Test at Lord’s, to go harder still. The idea was to tighten up the gulf in class between the two teams by backing talent and pushing it forward. Ring any bells?
You might recall that on the eve of that series, a rough-edged strokemaker was elevated ahead of the established man into the first team, essentially off the back of some outlandish white-ball knocks, and he went alright. It took Kevin Pietersen a single week at Lord’s to go from pretender to kingpin. I guess some players are just too good to be held back.
This article appears in issue 91 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, available to pre-order now.
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