It's crunch time for England... a stand-out Test summer is essential

JAMIE CRAWLEY: With the Ashes and World Cup both taking place in England next year, a successful summer of 2018, with five or more Test wins, would be the most effective band aid for the haemorrhaging goodwill that England fans have for the ECB

^{England captain Joe Root and his Pakistan counterpart Sarfraz Ahmed}

For England, the recovery has to start now.

After a harrowing winter in the Antipodes, followed shortly after by the announcement of the plans for The Hundred, English cricket fans’ patience is being severely tried. Nothing other than a statement of intent against Pakistan and India this summer can stop the rot.

Cricket fans in England have had to endure a lot over the last couple of years. Performances have been indifferent on the field, the behaviour of the players off it rather worse, and all the while, the ECB repeatedly act as if they’re begging fans to hate them.

The 4-0 Ashes humbling, post-scripted by defeat in New Zealand, brought to a head what has been a bloody ordinary few years for the Test team with Trevor Bayliss at the helm.

Even the most tolerable and philosophical among the English cricketing public must find their patience wearing thin now since the announcement of the new 100-ball format. The following supplicating explanations for its creation have not only insulted fans’ intelligence – attempting to have them believe it is for any other reason than to appease the BBC – but suggested that, as existing cricket fans, they are surplus to requirements anyway.

^{The England squad at Lord's}

The ECB has decided that prior to navigating English cricket through choppy waters, it will lighten the load by chucking all existing passengers overboard.

With the Ashes and World Cup both taking place in England next year, a successful summer of 2018, with five or more Test wins, would be the most effective band aid for the haemorrhaging goodwill that England fans have for the ECB.

The England team has been built with a greater and greater emphasis on winning at home, maximising ticket sales and capitalising on the increased media exposure that the games receive. While England’s home performances have been heartening, they have by no means completely validated this plan of attack.

England’s win ratio at home in the last three years is 62 per cent. Healthy, certainly, but hardly inspiring enough to compensate for their pig ugly 16.67 per cent (4 out of 24) win return away. In the same timeframe, Australia and India have both enjoyed home win percentages of 70. Both have also competed soundly on the road to the tune of nine wins apiece – Australia from 22 attempts, India from only 15.

So England have been a good, but not overwhelming, side at home, and an appalling one away. Compare this to Australia who have been scrappy away while being fairly dominant at home. India meanwhile have been pretty much lights out wherever they play.

^{Root and head coach Trevor Bayliss}

There are surely a good number of reasons for England’s mediocre showing – the work of the selectors in recent years has been at best curious for one – but if we are to focus on what Trevor Bayliss and company can control, we can point to the complete lack of accountability that seems to exists in the England dressing room.

Compared to the sometime intrusive micro-management of the Peter Moores regime, the hands-off approach that Bayliss favours has been credited as instrumental to England’s One-Day renaissance. This though at the expense of the Test side, which has been the collateral damage.  

Look at Joe Root’s horrible conversion rate of fifties to hundreds in the last three years (8 out of 40), look at the brainless ways the batsmen find of getting out, look at the collective failure of the batting order when confronted with any kind of scoreboard pressure. The unpleasant stories of booze and brawling off the field, most infamously the Ben Stokes melee in Bristol, seem to be a logical extension of the unaccountable culture that abounds on it.

While there are multiple layers to this, the buck must stop with the head coach. That’s what he’s there for.

Trevor Bayliss has already stated that he will not be continuing as England coach beyond 2019 when his contract expires. Without an assertive return to form for the Test team this summer, he will be lucky to last that long.

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