At Edgbaston, Alex Lees (centre) had heated discussions with Virat Kohli (right) as the team went out for tea. Photo: Getty Images/Stu Forster
Alex Lees was almost 29 years old and had a decade of county play under his belt when he made his Test debut – a late age for adaptation. He also moved from Yorkshire to Durham, making life difficult for himself by playing on difficult surfaces in Chester-le-Street.
With more championships taking place in April than ever before, it has been a difficult time to open. His reticence about making his Test debut after working so hard to get there was understandable. But he accepted the change. He improved his performance in the home summer, scoring 50 off 100 balls against New Zealand, 83 in the one-off Test against India and 53 against a strong South African attack. Along with Crawley, he twice broke the record for the fastest opening stand in English history in a century: 19.5 overs against India at Edgbaston and 17.2 overs against South Africa at the Oval.
Edgbaston was his best Test, his 56 from 65 balls in the second innings – a display of strokeplay unimaginable in Barbados – that set England on course for a record chase of 378. But Lees would not have approached it so aggressively had it not been for the change teams. in a relationship. He even felt confident enough to say he was trying to emulate former Australian opener Matthew Hayden.
'I couldn't stand it when someone tried to intimidate'
Edgbaston can now be revealed as the place where the Fox clashed with Virat Kohli, the richest and most famous cricketer in the world, an Indian icon married to Bollywood superstar Anushka Sharma. Lees, pushing Durham, felt emboldened to fight back when Kohli bowled him at slip.
According to Lees, he “worked for quite a long time. Since I was an inexperienced national team player, he tried to use his weight. This was some pretty bad cricket talk. He was just acting the way he can sometimes. When he hit the ball, he irritated people on the field. I don't care about anyone's position in the game. We are all equal on the field. I just wasn't going to put up with someone trying to intimidate me. It was that simple. He's an incredible player, but I thought he was just an idiot.”
Fox finally had enough and told Kohli, “I’ve had two children since you last scored a century.” A detail he noticed in the media was that Kohli's previous international hundred in any format came in November 2019 during a Test against Bangladesh. (He failed to break his drought until September 2022, during an inconclusive T20 match against Afghanistan in the Asia Cup).
“There was a lot of buzz around it,” says Liz. “He's only human and I knew that must be going through his mind and that's probably what pissed him off the most. When I spoke to him he saw a bit of red mist, especially when we went out after tea. He's a competitor. He wants to win. I will never understand the burden of a billion people on my shoulders, but you can be competitive without losing your cool. I knew I had reached him. My biggest shame was turning 56 and then running out of money. Ultimately I could have scored an unbeaten hundred and won the game, but I didn't have that chance.”
However, Fox gave England's chase a boost. And despite Kohli's fury, a series that began a year earlier and finally ended in a 2-2 draw instead became another springboard into their brave new world. India flew home with their tail between their legs.
Lees was dropped after the Oval Test against South Africa, becoming the first regular member of the team to be dropped. It was devastating: “I was showing signs that I could play at this level, but I was missing the runs. When you look for good faith decisions, or 50/50 decisions and things don't go your way, you get disappointed. I don't think it was unfair. I have no doubts. Now I intend to get back to work and try again.”
England's top three players include Zak Crawley, Ollie Pope, Liz and Ben Duckett, all of whom have been shaped differently by the new management. Moeen Ali came in at number three in the second half of the Ashes, but only because England had to get creative after Pope dislocated his shoulder. A total of seven players have batted at number three in the Baseball era, including two night watchmen and two injury replacements: Harry Brooke at Headingley, then Stokes at the Oval. But while the personnel may have changed, the approach hasn't.
Consistency has not been Crawley's strong suit
Sent in to set the tone, a trio of three top regulars had to make themselves feel secure. They were asked to attack the new ball, which is risky and requires a certain amount of dedication.
Consistency is Crowley's mystery; During the Ashes, he scored 50 balls three times in the series for the first time, including his devastating 189 off 182 balls at Old Trafford. Just after his double century against Pakistan, former England captain Ted Dexter compared him to right-hander Graham Pollock, the South African batting legend. But his batting average in the Baseball era before heading to the Ashes was 27, and his one-century average was 122 in Rawalpindi.
After the New Zealand tour in February 2023, when he averaged 14, there was a buzz. His colleagues talk about how McCallum tried to lift him up after every setback, sitting next to him in the dressing room to encourage him and encourage him, sometimes with a cigar in hand.
Zak Crawley's nightmare slump with the bat continued in Wellington. Photo: Getty Images/Hagen Hopkins
Crowley says they “exaggerated” the details about the cigar, but McCallum “sits there and makes you feel good after a bad day.” He will say: “Don’t change anything, stay this way.” “He never thinks I have a problem, even when I feel like I'm in a difficult situation. He always comments on my contribution to the game, even if I only have 25. He praises you. He says, “I know you want grades, but don’t underestimate influence.” That's what we're all about – small impacts that contribute to team performance rather than chasing individual stats or raising averages and counting results. It's about how we can win the game.”
It is difficult to argue, at least before the Ashes, that Crawley was unlucky to remain in the team, but for the tours of Pakistan and New Zealand he was chosen over Lees because attacking came naturally to him. The fox always looked like he was going for it, like he was standing on tiptoe trying to reach the can of beans on the top shelf. At times he managed to understand this; in other cases it was simply out of reach.
“I was just trying to take on the bowlers and at Edgbaston I was trying to make a big impact on the score and give some confidence in the chase,” he says. “It was the same thing at the Oval against South Africa. This was at the forefront of our thoughts. Looking back, I realized that in the first four or five games that summer I had the opportunity to make a big hundred. That's my only regret: I was good at hitting good wickets, but I didn't quite do it. That's the difference between county and Test cricket. If you failed in admissions, it's the difference between an average score of 25 and a score of 45 on the tests. In county cricket you still have a couple of chances to make it big.”
Duckett's new maturity
He could look at Duckett, who played four Tests in Bangladesh and India in 2016-17 and never lost hope – despite his off-field misdeeds. He moved from Northamptonshire to Nottinghamshire in a bid to attract the attention of bigger club selectors and averaged 56 in the 2020 Bob Willis Trophy (which replaced the championship for a year due to Covid). Through white-ball teams he began to work his way back into the England squad. He was also more mature, with a serious girlfriend and a settled life off the field. He knew that if he wanted to play Test cricket again, he would have to be more dedicated. When he was selected for the Twenty20 series in Pakistan in October 2022 and performed well on spin-friendly tracks, he was selected for the subsequent Test tour.
“Four years ago I probably wouldn’t have been selected because England weren’t playing like that. I think Stokesy and McCallum believed I could make it on the international stage, so the timing was perfect. Before the first Test in Pakistan, McCullum took me aside and said, “Don't worry too much about this game – you'll do well.” it was said. Every game I felt like I was fighting to stay on the team, every game.”
Ben Duckett scored against Pakistan last winter. Photo: Reuters/Akhtar Soomro
“Hearing those words really took the pressure off and allowed me to go out and enjoy playing for England, rather than being nervous and worried about putting in a performance that would keep me in the squad for the next one.” match,” Duckett began. fabulous. The pitch in Rawalpindi was set up for him to hit and hit, hit and pull, and the fast fielding in the outfield ensured he gave his all to his shots.”
A delivery of 107 off 110 balls after spending most of the night in the toilet due to a bug sweeping through the camp immediately vindicated his recall. And he played within himself: yes, aggressively, but not recklessly or uncontrollably.
“I would have to be incredibly sick to miss this event,” he says. “We had Keats [Lancashire opener Keaton Jennings] there. If I miss this first game, who knows, I might not be able to play any of the others. Now things could look completely different. I'll have to work hard to miss the England game. The whole day felt like a blur: everything about how I felt and how emotionally exhausted I was after I left. But I remember sitting in the dressing room at the end of the matchday and [assistant coach] Paul Collingwood reading out the list of about 25 records we had broken, and that was quite special. There was no plan to go out and do it all. It was more a case of, let's just ease our way into the series. But everything went to plan that day.”
That evening Crawley and Duckett wrote their names in felt-tip pen on the honors board at Pindy Stadium, two of the day's four centurions along with Pope and Brooke – another England record. At the press conference, the original members sat next to each other, with Duckett looking a little dazed and Crowley enjoying the moment.
If Duckett had butterflies, who could blame him? In his first England appearance, he scored a fifty in Dhaka before becoming the first of 10 wickets to fall in the session as England lost a Test to Bangladesh for the first time. Then came his nightmare at the hands of Ashwin. In his last Test innings for six years, he was told to go out and block a draw in Visakhapatnam. He lasted a quarter of an hour before making a mess and falling for a 16-ball duck.
The 'Buzzball' mantra suits Duckett perfectly
At that time there were mutual accusations of aggressive strikes. But under Stokes and McCallum there were no such problems. Duckett's desire to feel the bat on the ball is in keeping with Baseball's mantra, although it could leave him vulnerable in the fifth stump channel against the new ball.
He plays deliveries that other left-handers usually miss, and after scoring 182 against Ireland at Lord's in a one-off game before the 2023 Ashes, one statistic suggests he raised his arms on his shoulders only eight times in six tests. His strike rate under McCullum at that time stood at 97.
His penchant for playing in everything was not lost on the Australians. When he missed two at Lord's, Cummins jabbed him: “What about that percentage, mate?” Duckett continued to bowl in his own way, overall leaving just 3.5 per cent of the 321 balls he faced from the Australian seamers.
The Rawalpindi hundred was an instant confidence booster, but it was what happened next that stuck with Duckett. “In the second innings of this Test, I got the first ball – I made one slip straight into the second. I think most coaches would say to the first batter, “Yeah, you should keep this one or let one go.”
But Baz said: “You’re so unlucky there – a meter in both directions, and that’s four runs.” And I thought, I've never heard a coach say that to me before, to potentially poke the ball even harder on the fifth stump. I immediately thought that this environment was so different from anything I had ever been a part of. I had just hit the first ball and he told me that. There was one more point. In the second Test in New Zealand at Wellington he was hitting a lot of places with the new ball and I asked Baz what he would have done. He said: “I would hit the outside leg stump and run after every ball.”
Buzzball: The Inside Story of Cricket's Test Revolution by Lawrence Booth and Nick Holt will be published by Bloomsbury on October 26.
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