Of his nine Test hundreds, five have set up an England win, two have saved a match and one fell stoically short It has been a week to worry, just a bit, about England’s top order as the fall-out from the Great Slowness Incident during the victorious Headingley Test grudgingly recedes. This is something of a shame, if only because opening batsmen in particular deserve a little more slack. It is one of the more distinct and perilous positions in any sport, a role that requires not just bravery and skill, but also a certain kind of quiet theatricality
Of his nine Test hundreds, five have set up an England win, two have saved a match and one fell stoically short
It has been a week to worry, just a bit, about England’s top order as the fall-out from the Great Slowness Incident during the victorious Headingley Test grudgingly recedes. This is something of a shame, if only because opening batsmen in particular deserve a little more slack.
It is one of the more distinct and perilous positions in any sport, a role that requires not just bravery and skill, but also a certain kind of quiet theatricality. If a batting order – which is essentially a journey through the familiar human stages of hope and decay – can be broken down into its component parts then the openers represent a kind of coming out into the world, pristine and untainted like prim and virginal daughters, or perhaps bashfully stern in the mould of Alastair Cook, for whom every innings is like the emergence into stately young adulthood of a beautiful royal bride.
The middle order, on the other hand, represents something more muddied, the dawning gravity of adult life: out they come, these middle-order CEOs, swaggeringly entitled, smug as young parents.
After which things start to loosen up. No6 is a handsome bachelor, appearing at the wicket ideally as though just rushing back from the track or the roulette wheel. By the time we get to No7 we’re into rakish middle age. Matt Prior’s batting still brings to mind at times a raucous fourth marriage, all gin and tonics, swinging long weekends, the occasional heart attack. Whereas the lower order carries with it an agreeable sense of liver-spotted regret.
Graeme Swann’s batting is the novel you never actually did end up writing. Stuart Broad’s offside waft feels a bit like a final doomed attempt to understand the internet. Jimmy Anderson’s reverse sweep is the last erection you’ll ever have.
With this in mind it is easy to feel protective in particular towards Nick Compton, if only because it is impossible not to feel fondly supportive of any opening batsman in any team. At the same time it is perhaps the perfect moment to reconsider a little the wider perception of Jonathan Trott, whose batting at Headingley touched a level of slowness that to some seemed almost wilfully provocative.
For all his success, Trott remains a surprisingly divisive figure. Perhaps it even takes a Compton – a batsman who is strategically slow, self-consciously pursuing the slow lifestyle – to emphasise Trott’s own unchanging merits. And perhaps with England’s monkish No3 more pivotal than ever in a depleted batting lineup, it is even time not just to value Trott’s runs, but to learn to love him a little.
The slowness issue can be put to one side at the start. When it comes to batting it seems some are born slow, some have slowness thrust upon them, while others simply pretend to be slow with eye-bogglingly uncomfortable results.
No doubt Compton, with his pointless biceps, his Porsche-in-the-garage range of attacking stokes – I have seen him hit consecutive sixes over cover – will allow his talent to breathe in time. But with Trott there has never been any sense of constriction. He is instead beautifully, naturally slow. The periods of passivity are simply an extension of his basic technique, that unflinching self-containment that demands the bowler come to him, straying ever closer to Trott’s counter-punching orbit, and opening up that range of minimalist drives, clips and nudges, the beautiful tension-free glide through covers, the surprisingly severe leg-side force.
And for all his slight dip in the last year Trott remains the still, quiet centre of this successful England batting lineup. It is like having something muted and quietly vast batting at No3: an AGA, or the colour blue, or the wheat fields of Ukraine.
This is why the occasional talk of selfishness is so wide of the mark. Trott’s personal statistics are unarguably fine: he is the only England batsman ever to average 50 in Tests and ODIs. But beyond this his team stats are also outstanding. Of his nine Test hundreds five have set up an England win, two have saved a match while one fell stoically short in defeat. And at his best it feels as though every innings is just a continuation of that 2009 Ashes-rescuing first hundred at The Oval, infused with a simple conviction that if he just keeps on batting, England will win. It works, too. If Trott succeeds against Australia, England will succeed.
And while it is in Trott’s nature not to notice how harshly his style (as much as his tempo: he’s not actually that slow) is judged beyond the boundary, perhaps it is time finally to funnel a little galvanising collective affection his way.
Personally, I’m already eagerly awaiting his gradual ascent into national-treasure status. He already has a wry, crinkly, likeable face. Wandering around in his endearingly baggy whites he resembles at times a very clever badger in a waistcoat who knows how to grow tomatoes.
I look forward to his increasingly eccentric and crankish late 30s, when perhaps he will dig out once again the devastatingly suave neckerchief he briefly took to batting in in Sri Lanka. I even feel a sense of affection for his digging and scratching at the crease, an endearing mini-phenomenon in itself that deserves to be marked and celebrated and perhaps even granted its own statistical entry in the sport’s records. If Trott re-marks his guard every 30 runs in Test cricket, and takes a minute and half on average doing it, that adds up so far to nearly three hours of combined scratching about, scuffing his foot, glancing around the field and generally infuriating opposition bowlers of all shades.
And really to linger on slowness, Trott’s or otherwise, is to miss the point. Even within the slow there is purposeful variation: the feistily slow; slow that contains at all times the lingering threat of fast, and slow that adds up in Trott’s case not just to a strike rate that is only marginally lower than average, but to a vast and concerted sense of high-grade endeavour.
This is not just the essence of Trott, it is the essence of cricket itself, which remains one of the last redoubts of the glacial, the unhurried, the meandering, and all the other familiar aspects of the batting-order-as-life dynamic. Never mind the demands for more and faster. Forget the graceless gripes about his early life in South Africa (he came to county cricket a British passport holder). Trott will be terribly missed when he goes. Until that happens long may he continue to straggle.