England master art of falling apart but batting collapses are a global trend
Mirpur, 2016, England need 273 to beat Bangladesh. Alastair Cook and his new young opening partner Ben Duckett have been batting for 90 minutes and their hundred partnership has just come up. First ball after tea, Duckett’s done, bowled by a quicker, straighter delivery from the off-spinner Mehidy Hasan. Then Joe Root goes, lbw, and Gary Ballance slaps a long hop to midoff. Moeen Ali lasts four balls. Then Cook falls, caught at silly point. An hour later, it’s all over, England have lost all 10 wickets for 64 runs in the space of 134 balls. Cook explains later that he thinks the problem was his team didn’t have enough experience in the conditions. “There’s a lot to work on.”
Auckland, 2018. The first morning of the series, New Zealand have won the toss and put the tourists in. The pitch is green, but the skies are clear. England reach six for none before Trent Boult has Cook caught at second slip. In Boult’s next over he bowls Root through the gap between bat and pad, and in the over after that he has Dawid Malan caught behind. Cook has another new opening partner, Mark Stoneman, and he’s out the same way. Then Ben Stokes is bowled too. In an hour-anda-half of batting, England lose all 10, again, for 52 runs from 124 balls. Trevor Bayliss says it is a contagious technical problem. “We made a lot of mistakes today with our footwork”.
Trent Bridge, 2018. The second day of the Test. Cook is batting again. He has got another new partner in Keaton Jennings, and just after lunch they bring up their 50 partnership. Then Cook is caught behind off Ishant Sharma. Jennings falls to the next ball, poking at something he shouldn’t have played. Sharma gets England’s new kid, Ollie Pope, soon after. India bring on their medium pacer Hardik Pandya, and Joe Root slices a catch to slip. Pandya has never taken a five-for in a Test match before. That changes in the next 30 balls. When he’s done, England are too. Their 10 wickets fall in 158 balls, for 107 runs. This time Jos Buttler didn’t even try to explain it. “There’s no magic answer.”
In 78 years of Test cricket, from 1938 onwards, through 743 games, England lost in every which way you can imagine but weren’t once bowled out in a single session. Now it has happened three times in three years.
There have been other collapses around it, of course, ones that aren’t so neatly compartmentalised. Six for 43 and 10 for 83 and five for 51 and six for 15 and 10 for 104 in their away series against India in 2016. Nine for 94 and seven for 62 against South Africa in 2017. Six for 56 and seven for 64 and six for 35 and six for 85 and seven for
87 in Australia. Five for 16 and six for 35 at home against Pakistan. Anyone who has been following England for long knows they’ve always been partial to a batting collapse, but these days they seem predisposed to them. It happens so often their new tour rider requires a chaise longue and a crate of sal volatile ready in the dressing room.
The last came in Barbados last week, from 23 for none to 77 all out, 10 wickets for 54 runs in 129 balls, including nine in the space of a session, undone, this time, by four West Indian quicks on a fast pitch. Which means that England have been spun out in Bangladesh and swung out in New Zealand, seamed out in England and blasted out in the West Indies. There’s no pattern to it. It’s happened in the first, second, third, and fourth innings, in the first, second, third, fourth and fifth Test of a series, whether they’ve played warm-up games or not, on every type of pitch against every stripe of bowler.
Which suggests that there’s a bigger problem here, something more complicated than Bayliss’s suggestion that the batsmen weren’t moving their feet, or Cook’s argument that they hadn’t spent enough hours playing on spinning wickets. Some will say it’s the coaches. And it is true that, between them, Trevor Bayliss and Mark Ramprakash have overseen more collapses than a couple of catering college instructors running the beginner’s class in souffle cookery. But there’s always a question about exactly how much influence coaches have over players. And besides, England’s problems seem to be part of a bigger trend in the game.
Since the start of 2010, the world’s eight best teams (if we strip out Bangladesh, who had such a rough time of it in the 2000s, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and Ireland) have been bowled out for 100 or less 28 times in 391 Tests. In the 2000s it was 25 in 456. In the 1990s it was 15 in 347. It’s a crude measure, but it suggests collapses are becoming more common. Indeed, of the 70 shortest completed innings in Test history, 17 of them, just under a quarter, were played in the past decade. Which is why this feels like an epochal shift.
This is a generation of batsmen who feel they need to succeed in Twenty20 if they are going to have fulfilling careers. They have to juggle the demands, the schedules, strategies and tactics of all three formats. It’s not easy. Root’s response has been to allow England’s white-ball style to bleed over into Test cricket. He’s still talking now about how he wants the team to be “bold” and “aggressive” in their batting. Which is why they play such entertaining cricket. And on balance, it’s working for them, too, since they have won eight out of their last 10 Tests. Only, don’t expect those batting collapses to stop any time soon.
Of the 70 shortest completed innings in Test history, 17 of them, just under a quarter, were played in the past decade