Even when my luck’s right out; well, it turns out my luck’s also right in. On a lovely morning at Lord’s, one of those days where even the outfield seems to ripple under the hard flat London heat, the first day of the third Test dished up another instalment in the extraordinary cricketing life of Zak Crawley.
At times, entering The Crawley Zone, it can be hard not to feel a moment of double take. What is this thing? Why is it happening? Is there anything that might actually interrupt the progress of one of the most weirdly frictionless Test careers, an entire elite sporting existence that seems most of the time to be taking place at a mate’s picnic?
On the face of it this was just a so-so day for Crawley as England batted first on a slow and sometimes tricky pitch. But it was also a lucky day for Crawley; lucky because an hour into the morning session he was dismissed not by hack or a swipe, of which there were a few, but by an absolute beauty from Nitish Kumar Reddy.
The delivery was slanted in, right-arm over the wicket on a full length and activating a hard-wired defensive push. Crawley didn’t really come forward. He played with low hands, but saw the ball rear on an otherwise placid pitch, then straighten malevolently and zing through to Rishabh Pant off the outside edge.
Perhaps a really good defensive opening bat would have left it, or come closer to the ball. Crawley is not a really good defensive opening bat. He is instead a deeply strange one, brilliantly talented, with great shapes, levers, movements, but also with a 57-Test career that still seems to have been constructed out of cloud, silk, good wishes, birthday treats and a wind of endless favour.
Look at the numbers. Factor in the vibe, the weather, the positive energy around this team. Put it all together and Crawley is a fair candidate for the title of most cosseted England cricketer of all time. It is weirdly beautiful in its own way. Picture this, oh drawn and tortured opening batters of decades past.
Imagine a world where people just tell you you’re great. Where you’re urged to play only the shots you like and be damned. Where you get to bat on flat pitches. Where almost every other cricketer will be saddled with learning white ball skills, rushed between formats. But not you. Rest. Be ready. Do you.
We will back you endlessly. We will pay you half a million pounds a year to exist in this world. At the of end of which you’re going to average 30. And it’s all absolutely fine, with no obvious pressure to improve, where to criticise those numbers is a kind of cultural faux pas, old thinking, media bias, maybe even deserving of a stern legal letter.
At Lord’s Crawley walked off with 18 from 43 balls. It was an odd kind of innings. There were three parts to it. The first was a needlessly hectic 19 balls for one run. Akash Deep had been nipping the ball past Crawley’s edge and on to his thigh pad. The response was to take guard outside his crease, gallop forward, become formulaically unpredictable.
Then came stage two, a hot zone of 16 off eight balls, kicked off with a dreamy cover drive, all hands no feet, followed by a violent hockey-hack over slips. As Deep dropped shorter there was a gloriously balletic square drive, perfect contact, one of those moments where Crawley just seems to be drowning in honey out there. Finally it was stage three, back to skittish defence, leaping out like a cat startled by a sneeze, before the release of that Reddy leg-cutter.
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To be fair, nobody else really got the measure of a slow surface. And there is also logic to the Crawley project. The Stokes-McCullum bro-tocracy works on trust and stability. Crawley has succeeded in India and on flat home Ashes pitches. He looks set up to do well in Australia, to bosh the ball at the top of the bounce, hook and pull, and have a Peak Vaughan-style southern summer.
But Crawley also has the lowest average of any specialist batsman to play this many Tests for England, a record compiled from inside a glaze of cult-like approval. The only comparable modern figures are Graeme Hick and Mark Ramprakash, whose own numbers were cobbled together in a state of constant insecurity. Hick seemed to spend his entire Test career trudging off, stumps exploded behind him, head hung like a disgraced guardsman. With Ramprakash you just got the feeling he needed someone to tell him he was great. Fat chance.
Meanwhile Crawley needs another 10 Tests to sail past Jack Hobbs, Peter May and Ted Dexter. With a fair wind he’ll end up playing a hundred and averaging 29.7.
English cricket has always loved a clique, a circle, a hierarchy. In this era it comes with a performative rejection of the old ways, with talk of cultural fit, high ceilings, looking right, being different but somehow also the same.
