Opener takes the slow but steady route on another dour day for batting in Manchester
Andrew Miller16-Jul-2020On a day when England really could have done with some ripsnorting cricket to bury some very awkward news, they had instead to settle for grimy footslogging that was as monochrome as the Manchester skies above. If Jofra Archer, banished to his room for five days of isolation, had been hoping for something more entertaining to lure him away from his Xbox, it was not an auspicious opening gambit.But at least it turned out to be a good-news grimy day for England, a day filled with the sort of diligence that they had been unable to produce in similarly inhospitable circumstances at the Ageas Bowl last week. And by the end of it all, thanks to Dom Sibley and Ben Stokes, they’d given themselves a chance to patch up their burst bubble, and re-inflate those sagging series prospects.As for the tempo, it was – how can we put it? – familiar. On the day after England had finally deigned to pitch their pilot, Joe Denly – the man who had “helped show our identity as a side and the way we want to play”, as Joe Root had generously phrased it – they walked off at the close with a total of 207 runs from 492 balls, at a run-rate of 2.52 that – believe it or not – was an exact tribute to Denly’s own career figure.And in one grimly predictable moment in the immediate aftermath of lunch, it seemed England might yet have to come to rue the absence of a man who had refused to fail as surely as he had failed to succeed. One delivery into Zak Crawley’s first appearance in England’s dreaded No. 3 berth. One flick to leg slip, and one desultory trudge back to the pavilion. And suddenly, at a very pre-Denly scoreline of 29 for 2 in the second hour of the match, the value of a roadblock at first-drop seemed rather more clear.But Sibley, as he has already demonstrated in his short-but-assured Test career, is not a man easily fazed by circumstance. In fact, to judge by Chris Silverwood’s assessment of his role – “someone to bolster the top-order so that the middle order can come in when the bowlers are a bit tireder” – he’s already well acquainted with the identity he’s been prescribed.At 86 not out overnight, Sibley stands on the verge of graduating into a notable new echelon among England openers, and in just his 13th innings. Since the retirement of Andrew Strauss in 2012, all manner of hopefuls have been trialled at the top, but only three men besides the ubiquitous Alastair Cook have managed as many as two centuries in that role. One of them, Rory Burns, joined the club in the Ashes last summer, but hasn’t yet added to that tally. Nick Compton and the pigeon-holed Keaton Jennings complete the set.There will, in the fullness of time, be value in Sibley developing an extra gear to his game. He’s never yet advanced at a strike-rate in excess of 50 – only Compton has been slower over a sustained period of time – while his one-run-in-three effort here included a few hairy moments against the non-spinning spin of Roston Chase, in particular a pair of clumsy reverse-sweeps late in the day that hardly screamed of his 360-degree potential.ALSO READ: Roach strives and sweats but remains wicketlessBut Sibley is still at the stage of his development where cutting out bad habits is every bit as important as cultivating new good ones. There’s an obvious segue into his 12kg weight loss to be made there, but of even greater importance to his immediate future as a Test cricketer is his determination to avoid cricket-based temptation on the hips.Instead of flinging his gloves at lifters down the leg side, as he did to his cost in last week’s first Test, Sibley this time resolved to wear his blows and fight another day. Perhaps, had Shannon Gabriel not been struggling with rhythm and niggles, he might have been tested more often in that area, with a more regular leg slip in place. But in the end, it was a low edge to slip on 68, spilled by Jason Holder, that was his only genuine life of the day.At some stage, England as a whole will need to work on something more than just attrition in their brave new world of Test batting. Stokes was admirable once again as he helped to compile England’s first century stand of the series, and their first for the fourth wicket in 25 innings. But his tempo barely changed from the dry grind that he produced in the first innings at Southampton, and while the conditions were a major factor in that, it was another sure sign that he hasn’t quite learned to trust the men around him.But that can and will change if Sibley’s solidity becomes a standard feature of England’s top order. Already he is one of only three England openers since 2010 to average in excess of 40 – and given that one of those (of course) is Cook and the other is Joe Root, he’s at least keeping the right calibre of company.Maybe just as significantly, the next best candidate, at an average of 33.31 after 17 Tests, is Sibley’s current partner Burns, whose form hasn’t quite come together since his ankle injury, but whose prospects of pushing on will surely be enhanced if there’s a sense that England, at last, have hit upon a solid opening partnership.But there is still a difference between solid and stodgy, and in the past decade, only Zimbabwe and Ireland’s openers have chugged along at a slower tempo than England’s mark of 44.37.Some day in the near future – when the weather clears, when the bowlers tire, and when the somewhat put-upon mood in England’s camp returns to more normal levels – it might be time to start rectifying those numbers. But for now, Sibley is doing all that’s being asked of him. And that is more than enough.
