Hull pick a sign of shifting sands but Root a reassuring constant

For so long, selection for the England Test team was based on, and seen as a reward for, performances in county cricket. No longer: the view from those who matter currently is that the requirements for Test and County Championship cricket are completely different and therefore performances in the second, while not irrelevant, are less important than they used to be.
As a result, England’s selectors are looking beyond those whose numbers are best-in-class in county cricket. Instead, they work from the Test team backwards, asking themselves what the balance of the side needs, what type of player is required, what the conditions demand, and then scout for those with high potential to fit those needs, regardless of what the numbers, especially for bowlers, say.
Josh Hull is the latest selection based on those principles, as were Shoaib Bashir, Tom Hartley, Rehan Ahmed and Josh Tongue before him. Hull is very young — just 20 years old — and very tall — 6ft 7in. He’s pacey enough right now — close to 85 mph already, with room to improve, and has played a minimal amount of cricket. His numbers look very ordinary: he has played only nine first-class matches and averages 58 — with the ball that is, not the bat. For his county Leicestershire, the numbers are even more striking: he has taken eleven first-class wickets for them at an average of 84.54.
But, as with Bashir and Ahmed, the selectors have seen something they like and reckon his ceiling to be high. So far, their intuition has proved to be more right than wrong. The combination of pace, height and angle, if harnessed properly, could be a potent one. In an interview earlier in the year, Hull referenced Mitchell Starc as someone he would like to emulate. England would quite like that, too: this country has never, remarkably, produced a left-arm quick bowler who has taken more than 100 Test wickets.
With Bashir ensconced as the No 1 spinner, a left-armer would be an advantage, providing foot marks for the off-spinner to bowl into. The different angle a left-armer offers is useful, too, when the pitches go flat, as they invariably will in Pakistan, say, this winter and Australia in the following winter. With his height and pace, Hull is more likely to trouble good batsmen than, say, Sam Curran, who offers a similar angle. Hull is a good chance for the Ashes as England continue to marshal their resources with that tour in mind.
He has been on England’s radar for about a year, following an impressive performance in the One-Day Cup final for Leicestershire last summer. In an interview earlier in the year, Key referenced pace being a requirement for any prospective new ball bowler in Tests. So Hull was recently picked for the Lions team against Sri Lanka at Worcester, despite minimal first-class experience, and took five wickets in that game. He is raw but exciting.
The man he replaces in the squad, Mark Wood, is a poster boy for the trials, tribulations and sheer torment that fast bowlers can go through. Young fast bowlers, whose bones have not yet strengthened fully, can suffer all manner of injuries and set-backs and the balance with Hull will be to give him enough cricket to improve and strengthen, while protecting him from the grind.
Wood pulled his thigh during the Manchester Test and will miss the rest of the Sri Lanka series. Olly Stone will almost certainly replace him in the team at Lord’s — his figures in the first innings of this week’s County Championship match between Durham and Nottinghamshire were one for 109 off 20 overs. Hull will be in the squad as back-up and with the likes of James Anderson around to offer advice, there is a lot to gain.
Hull’s selection is also evidence of how quickly England’s Test team is changing. Gone are Stuart Broad and Anderson. It is unlikely that Jonny Bairstow, Ollie Robinson and Ben Foakes will come again. Jack Leach could play in Asia, but is unlikely to elsewhere. It meant that there were only two survivors in Manchester — Ollie Pope and Joe Root — from the team that played South Africa there in the first summer under Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum.
This is partly due to injuries, of course. Zak Crawley and Stokes are sure to return when fit again, but it is a measure of the smooth nature of the transition that the team has changed so profoundly with such little sense of upheaval, the victory at Old Trafford being the fourth in consecutive matches. With Pope captaining and Harry Brook leading when Pope left the field on occasion, it felt like the future had arrived in a rush.
There is only one ever-present player now during Bazball, and that is Root, whose fitness record is an underappreciated aspect of his game. Having not missed a match under Stokes, he missed only one game for the birth of a child during his own captaincy period and the only other match he has missed since his debut at Nagpur in December 2012 was when he was dropped at Sydney in 2014. That’s 144 Test matches he has played out of a possible 146.
England were grateful for his enduring excellence again in Manchester. Winning ugly has not been in vogue during the past two years. It’s been as much about style and effect as outcome, but it was a case of needs must during a bitingly cold match. A heavy outfield, slower than normal pitch and a tricky run-chase against competitive opponents meant England had to do it the hard way, the old school way, grinding rather than galloping to victory. It was a reminder, actually, of how Bazball started in the summer of 2022, with a nervy run-chase at Lord’s against New Zealand before the blood and thunder batting that followed. Root made a defining hundred in that first match under Stokes and McCullum, and anchored the innings again on Sunday, all composure and class. What a wonderful player he is, a reassuring constant in a rapidly changing team.