‘You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett famously observed. All summer long, England’s openers have been like skinny-dippers exposed.
From the last throes of Mark Stoneman’s Test career, to Keaton Jennings’s leaden-footedness and Alastair Cook’s newly acquired penchant for rash driving they been a continued source of exasperation. Yet it has been the same for Pakistan and India, the two tourists this summer.
Eight batsmen have opened in Test cricket in England this summer. They have made a solitary score above 50 – Alastair Cook’s 70 in the very first innings of the summer – between them. In 42 innings, they average a combined 23.44 – barely more than No 8’s average across Test cricket this year.
Not since 2000 – the summer of Courtney and Curtly, Gough and Caddick – have openers so floundered in England. This is a much broader story than openers’ individual failings. Opening in England is simply very, very hard – and it has got harder.
The steep decline in openers’ fortunes in the last two years – from averaging 29.82 since 2000, to only 24.73 last year, even allowing for Alastair Cook’s 243 against the West Indies – is testament to the chicanery of opening bowlers today.
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