Crawley treats India to a thrilling dose of bravado, showing why he has been indispensable to England in Tests.
India get a thrilling dose of the Zak Crawley experience.
How would you describe a cricket player such as Zak Crawley? He is an anomaly, a player who keeps going against the grain. He is half of England’s most successful opening partnership for a decade, and his position has rarely been more solid. However, no man in Test history has opened the batting so frequently (93 innings) and averaged so little (31.06).
Crawley has averaged 34.50, which is a little higher than his lifetime average, and this series has been both exciting and frustrating. In eight innings, he has contributed three significant runs, but none of England’s top seven players have scored less. Despite his contradictory career, he continues to be England’s mystery.
In their opening innings at The Oval, Crawley was England’s leading scorer and exemplified their strategy by seizing the opportunity to outscore India’s seamers. Crawley had a strike rate well above 100 before being dismissed, hitting one out of every four balls he faced for four. Because he believed that attack was the best defence on a seaming wicket, he scored 56 of his 64 runs in boundaries.
Because he believes that he performs best when he is left to rely on his instincts and not think, Crawley has the odd quality of improving as the bowling becomes faster. He only averages 27.31 against balls below 84 mph/135 kph, while he averages 43.31 against balls at that speed or faster.
However, that explains why the management of England has kept him on for so long. Despite two lengthy slumps in form, he has only missed three of their 47 Test matches since Boxing Day 2021, and those were due to injury. The fact that he led them in scoring in two straight major series (India 2024 and Australia 2023) confirmed the belief that he is more capable than the others.
In this series, Crawley had only been removed once in 119 balls against Jasprit Bumrah, but twice in seven balls against Nitish Kumar Reddy. This sums him up perfectly. He faced three fast-medium bowlers at The Oval due to India’s rebalance; Crawley was possibly the only England batsman to show relief when Shardul Thakur was left out.
His combination with Ben Duckett was worth 92 runs in 12.5 overs, and their ultra-positive strategy was validated by the subsequent collapse. By racing down the pitch and, in Duckett’s case, playing conventional and reverse-scoops, they disrupted the lengths of India’s seamers and refused to let them settle. Defence proved to be the deciding factor on a green seamer.
Shubman Gill’s responses at third slip and, shortly after, mid-off made it clear that England’s openers put India under a lot of pressure. Gill found himself in a difficult situation after India collapsed for 224. He knew he needed to end the partnership as quickly as possible, but he had no runs to play with. A great comfort was Duckett’s fluffed reversal.
Playing against Crawley is obviously annoying, and not just because of his carefree batting style. Apparently unaware that he was England’s only specialist batsman without a century in the series, he was on the wind-up again last week in Manchester, where he delighted on his position as comic villain at Lord’s. He called the Indian batsmen’s determination to bat on for centuries “embarrassing.”
An anticlimactic dismissal was quite consistent with the Crawley experience, and his sliced pluck to square midwicket felt strangely appropriate. He has always been a player of style over substance. However, Crawley’s 64 was the highest score of the first innings for both teams, despite the fact that it appeared to be a lost opportunity to decide the game.
The Oval is a good fit for Crawley because it is the English ground where he has scored the most runs and one of just two places (together with the Utilita Bowl) where he has reached 50 in Test cricket three times. In the past four summers, England has averaged fewer runs per wicket at The Oval than at any other home ground; Crawley’s success there is completely consistent with his idiosyncrasies.