Vince’s vicissitudes
Way back when Duncan Fletcher had a column in the Guardian, I used to do his ghostwriting. It was an education in how a coach thinks, parcelled up into a 30-minute conversation about whoever was in the headlines that week. And as we went on, I learned there were a handful of players who would always exercise Fletcher, touch him off as surely as if you were tapping his kneecap with a reflex hammer. James Vince was one of them. Fletcher’s gruff voice would turn into something more like a purr on the odd occasion Vince’s name came up. He had seen him batting in the nets down at Hampshire and been seriously impressed.
That was the better part of a decade ago. If Fletcher’s first impression of Vince has become so well known that it features in almost every other piece that’s written about him, it’s because (hard truth this) Vince hasn’t earned any higher praise since. Fletcher, who has a good eye for a batsman, was beguiled by that cover drive, as handsome as Sean Connery, as smooth as Roger Moore. It’s a shot he plays with such sweet timing, such power and grace, that he makes grown men sigh. Writing on his blog the Old Batsman, Jon Hotten recently described it as batting’s Rorschach Test.
Fletcher wasn’t the only one who saw a seductive promise in it. Vince came up through the age-groups with England, at U17 and U19 level, and some of the men who played with him then still have a lingering admiration for his talent. When Ben Stokes was first called up to the England performance programme he said the only reason he’d been picked ahead of Vince was because he’d happened to score a century in a county match that was on TV. “If James Vince had scored 161 on television it would have been him instead of me. I’m convinced of that.”
The trouble is that these days, when quicks look at Vince, they tend to see a ready wicket, as Mike Selvey, who has a bowler’s soul, put it when England were playing Pakistan last year: “The seamers have taken on the persona of fishermen, baiting their hooks and casting them out in the knowledge that there is a shoal out there that will bite sooner rather than later. Time after time Vince has nibbled and nicked: all too easy.” It’s a simple trick, and it didn’t take Australia long to figure it out. Since his 83 in the first innings at Brisbane, Vince has been caught behind for two, caught behind for two, and caught behind for 15.
Altogether, Vince has been out caught by ‘keeper or slips nine times in 15 Test innings now, and eight in his last 10. Lured, hooked, and reeled in by a succession of quicks: Shaminda Eranga, Wahab Riaz, Rahat Ali, Mohammad Amir, Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc. Trouble is, as Cricinfo’s statisticians have pointed out, Vince also scores over a third of his runs through the covers. So he can hardly cut the shot out. His strength is also his weakness. And unless he can master the problem, he’s damned if he does play the drive, and damned if he doesn’t.
These aren’t qualities you’d necessarily look for in your No3. England’s conundrum, though, is that they’ve no ready replacement. So many of the other batsmen they have around their Test squad have their own glaring flaws. Gary Ballance has that habit of moving both feet back and playing from deep inside his crease, which leaves him vulnerable to the full ball that moves away from him, especially from a left-handed bowler. Easy to forget, now, that Ballance averaged 62 in his first 15 Test innings. Then he was bowled, for the very first time in Test cricket, and since that match, he’s averaged 19 in 25 Test innings, and been bowled eight more times.
It’s not just Ballance and Vince. Keaton Jennings struggled as the summer wore on, seemed so stiff and upright that Graeme Smith said he looked like he was playing with a pole up his back. He became so unsure of his defence on the back foot that he was caught behind off a back-of-a-length ball five times in seven innings. Ben Duckett’s defence was unpicked by India’s off-spinners last winter, and Tom Westley’s way of playing wonky straight drives was figured out by the West Indian quicks. He was out driving five times in seven Tests.
Which, you could argue, is the nature of Test cricket. New players are subjected to a merciless degree of scrutiny. It’s up to them to adapt and overcome. And it’s sure a lot easier to say this stuff than to live it. But it is beginning to feel as though there is a deeper problem here. It could be that modern coaching has moved too far away from the orthodoxies, as if the methods honed over decades of play, passed down in MCC manuals, don’t have a place in the modern game. There is, after all, a lot of talk about encouraging players to express themselves and play their natural way. But when five batsmen with such obvious flaws fail in such a short space of time, that looks less like a coincidence, and more like a pattern.
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