England’s fascinating love-hate relationship with keepers
Last year, following the World Cup final win over New Zealand, England thanked all the gods possible for giving them two of the best limited-overs wicketkeepers in the entire world. England and Andrew Strauss’ seeds that saw Jos Buttler and Jonny Bairstow emerge bore them the plumpest of fruits.
However, that was 2019 and we have moved on since then to 2020, where everything has turned around from being all Humpty-dumpty to becoming deplorable and microscopic. The whole world has become more condemnatory, criticising everything in minuscule fashion. So England’s all-glory of churning out the best keepers naturally turned over its head and started becoming its Achilles heel. Jos Buttler and Jonny Bairstow, following their success in the 2019 World Cup, started turning into villains overnight, starting with the Ashes.
While they found success using the same pair in the limited-overs format, they have left them to tatter in the longest format! It isn’t, however, entirely ECB or the management’s fault as they were more or less hopeful that the talented 29-year-old from Taunton could wrap his head around playing in the longest format. Whilst he started pretty much on a positive note, behind the stumps, his batting has seen a declining slope.
It has been the point of criticism for England’s Test selection in the past but has always been overshadowed by the performance of the others above and below him. His selection has been rather one that has been built on his limited-overs success with the ECB taking a punt on him to follow it up in the longest format. That story did not end there, as a 27-year-old from Colchester, Benjamin Thomas Foakes, was roped in the squad as the backup wicketkeeper. However, COVID-19 had other ideas, as England’s Asian visit to Sri Lanka got postponed and when cricket resumed in the country, there was West Indies waiting for them at home.
Over the period of just a few months, even in the absence of cricket, Foakes has found himself carrying the drinks. This is the same wicketkeeper-batsman who averaged 36.70 in the 2018 season, scoring 624 runs with a high score of 90. He then went on to score a hundred in English colours the same season. But for the most bizarre of reasons (read: Jos Buttler), England decided to bench him over one year. Eventually, it had an effect on his form as his average fell down the 30s tunnel to 26.13 in the succeeding season. It was the same man, still as effective as he could be in the Championship amongst a list of successful keepers. But was he really the solution? Should he really be the one on the waiting list?
When the lines get muddy, the decisions start becoming more confused and as it turned out, one performance was enough to convince Ed Smith that Buttler is the first-choice behind the stumps. If this alone sounds confusing for you, imagine Ed Smith was the man behind England going all-guns-blazing with Jason Roy at the top of the order in whites and Ollie Pope behind the stumps and has transformed Moeen Ali into a mere spectator. At the same time, however, somehow Buttler was made to look like ‘larger than life’ amidst the other keepers, even throwing Bairstow out of the window. So was it surprising to see that Smith did another of his tricks in putting Foakes in a similar position?
"I also feel he has the potential, due to his character, technique and mastery, to go on and adapt to Test cricket and not just become a good player, but a really fine Test cricketer,” said Ed Smith. Does he really think that Buttler’s two-string approach, of both defending and attacking, has earned him a permanent place in the setup? Foakes isn’t a like-for-like replacement in any way to Buttler, he doesn’t have quite the right amount of shots in his armoury, but on the basis of glovework, it can be said, he is miles ahead of Buttler and has always been.
After the first Test, it has become very obvious that he isn’t half the keeper that he was hyped to be. In that real case, shouldn’t the selectors have gone and knocked hard at Sam Billings’ door at Pembury? He’s the Buttler-mould and, if anything, better at the moment with his purple-patch and has over tons of runs in the past season for Kent and in just four matches. If every English management goes and offers prayers to solve this wicketkeeper issue, even the god’s would suggest them to pick Sam Billings.
In the same county where they found relative success with Zak Crawley, they have another gem who they are yet to unearth in the game's longest format. Billings had a phenomenal 2019: his average last season was an otherworldly 61, with a high score of 138 against quality spin bowlers in the form of Ravichandran Ashwin while having faced 496 deliveries for his 366 runs.
Talk about having two gears, he does have it in him to score both a 100-ball 30 and a 60-ball 100, whichever is required of him. Buttler has struggled against spin in the past, where Sam Billings clearly excels at, and the Kent man has an uncanny team-spirit in him which suggests that he could very well be a front-runner contender. Be it an aggressive slant, be it a defensive approach, or be it a top-notch catch, he’s the man. It is not only the words from Kent but all over England who have seen him play in recent times. Billings doesn’t have an edge over Buttler or Bairstow in the shortest format yet he is likened by the selectors, keeping an eye on the 2023 Cricket World Cup.
Before that, in 2021, there is a Test assignment for the Three Lions against India away from home. Going by the instincts and on the back of Ed Smith’s previous decisions, the 29-year-old Kent star is not going to be in the squad. England’s love-hate relationship with keepers is an eternal tale and this is just a page from it.
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