England must mend misfiring middle order with no more room for error

The gambling man’s banker of the day sailed in not when Mark Wood’s dismissal confirmed England’s 434-run mauling in Rajkot on Sunday, but when Ben Stokes spoke soon afterwards.

“At 2-1 down in the series, we’ve still got two games left,” the beaten captain said. “So, we’ve got a great chance to come home with the trophy at 3-2.”

At two down in last summer’s Ashes, Stokes had offered something similarly optimistic, and almost prophetic, too, his team’s comeback scuppered by Manchester rain.

For England to have even a sniff of a turnaround this time, though, their middle-order engine must finally whirr into life. Coming into this series, there was a theory that it would be England’s top three that would go a long way to deciding whether the contest with a dominant home side was even competitive.

None had much of a record in India to fall back on: Ben Duckett a doomed tour in 2016, when a mid-series axing would not be reversed for six years; and Ollie Pope and Zak Crawley the 2021 edition, when the former’s best score was 34 and the latter averaged 17.

All three, though, have to some extent excelled — Pope and Duckett making two of the great touring hundreds by Englishmen and Crawley, if not quite matching those heights, then proving a consistent enough kick-starter.

Three Tests into the series, their combined average sits at 44. Leaving Heathrow last month, England would have shaken on that deal.

Factored into the bargain, though, would have been the assumption that their most experienced batters would also fire. Instead, Jonny Bairstow and Joe Root have barely made a run between them.

Root’s struggle is easily the most puzzling, his rancid dismissal reverse-scooping Jasprit Bumrah prompting the first-innings collapse that swung the Third Test and firing up a familiar debate over whether he might be the one player better off leaving the Kool-Aid alone.

Critics of ‘Bazball’ have no sharper ammunition than the fact that the player who carried a poor England team with his runs on the last tour of India is now averaging the least of any batter on its next.

When Root was out playing the same shot in the First Test against New Zealand a year ago, he recalculated and followed up with scores of 57, 153 not out and 95 across the rest of the series. England need the same upturn now.

Brendon McCullum, certainly, believes one is coming: “It’s Joe Root, crikey. I mean, seriously? The law of averages suggests he’ll fill his boots in the next two.”

Bairstow, meanwhile, has faltered from a sprightly enough start in Hyderabad, where he was bowled by an Axar Patel ripper, to scores of 0 and 4 in Rajkot, reverting to his woe of that 2021 tour, when he was dismissed without scoring three times in four innings.

Having surrendered the gloves to Ben Foakes at the start of this series, the hope was that Bairstow would rediscover his form of the 2022 home summer, when he launched the new era with a freakish run playing as a specialist No5. Instead, combined with Foakes’s excellence behind the stumps, a fresh rut has his place in the side back in doubt.

England are unlikely to make a change now, head coach McCullum backing Bairstow to win his 99th and 100th caps before the series is out.

“I don’t have concerns over him,” the New Zealander said. “I’m not blind, but he’s done so well for us and he’s had such an impactful career. We know that a top-quality Jonny Bairstow is as good as anyone in any conditions.”

Even so, with Harry Brook to return in the summer, there is no guarantee a 101st will immediately follow.

Is it coincidence that both Bairstow and Root were part of England’s brutal World Cup failure in India, while none of Duckett, Pope and Crawley collected the same scars?

Just beyond its halfway stage, that campaign was already beyond saving. This one remains alive, but with no more room for error.