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Bruised skies, sun through clouds, dualism, life in death. Welcome to the bloom of another England Test Match summer, the summer, this time around, of Bethell and Bashir. But of Bethell first because he’s the easy bit.
The battle for Jacob Bethell is of course just beginning. Everyone wants a piece of England’s most thrillingly talented young cricketer. The broadcasters are frothing. The papers want to know whose shirts he wears. Actually the papers don’t really care. Maybe the Daily Telegraph wants to know this at a push. But Bethell is still kind of perfect right now, a future-bomb, all promise and new things, in a sport that is always desperate for these.
Even the words “Jacob Bethell” sound hopeful, the name of a wise young hobbit or a courtly medieval blacksmith. The look is good: Matt Dillon eyes, jaw, shoulders, bleach blond hair for the white ball months, but now puritanically dark for the Tests because he knows where his off stump is and Respects The Game.
This is the wider promise of Bethell. He seems to express some idea of order, a chance to make sense of a deeply confusing cricketing world, out there standing on a hill in Tatooine, twin suns sinking behind him, bringing balance to the force.
The fact Bethell is yet to score any kind of hundred is key to this. Ideally he will never score a hundred, because while this feels hot, progressive, titillating, it is also totally fine because of the shapes and the orthodox mechanics. Bethell has the modern sex-stuff, the slogs and the dinks. He also has check drives and a perfectly aligned defence. He left the ball a lot in New Zealand and people got husky and brave and pretended to have things in their throat.
In this context having Bethell in England’s Test match top five feels like a weapon of reactionary consensus. The logic goes: I like Jacob Bethell, and therefore I also understand and feel comfortable with modernity and new things.
You might worry that this image of Jacob Bethell is conjured out of need, a way of making rock and roll acceptable to the squares, like a record company has manufactured a fake punk band with a lead singer called Dave Dangerous, who actually do good old-fashioned tunes you can hum along to.
Of course you like Jacob Bethell grandad. But can you handle a jazzed-up 14-year-old who plays the kung fu uppercut to every ball? Can you handle an impact No 8 and left-arm filth-master called Yooskens Van De Wild (answer: no)? The point is, we have a golden hobbit with a high elbow. And maybe the world is still good.
There is no sense of blame here. No one should feel bad about being unable to navigate this state of format-confusion, because cricket is basically an insane landscape now, dying but furiously alive, stocked with talent but criss-crossed with illusory pathways.
Virat Kohli wins the IPL then rages about the primacy of Tests. People in England and Australia still prefer the dying stuff, no matter how hard the hard-sell. Even writing a newspaper column about Test cricket feels a bit subversive. Fine, but will anyone notice it on the internet? (Answer: yes but make sure you get Matt Dillon in high up for the SEO.)
And by now even the cross-format Player Of Hope is probably an illusion. The best versions, Kohli, AB de Villiers, David Warner, tended to come from that generation where you still had time to learn hard technique then expand from there. Whereas these days the world is a deeply confusing place for a talented young cricketer.
Jake Fraser-McGurk, for example, came grooving on to the scene looking like a hoverboard pilot, all shape, hands, mullet, talent, but averages 14 since last year’s IPL and has now taken a step back to try and remember what cricket actually is. The most recent Unity Player for England, Jofra Archer, was ruined by having to bowl 42 pointless overs in one innings in New Zealand and is now basically a collection of broken china wheeled out on to the field on a trolley every six months.
It seems likely Bethell will be able to exist across this world because he is just pure, fluid, fungible talent. For now it is probably more interesting to talk about Shoaib Bashir, who was also picked in England’s first Test squad this week, who is also 21 years old, and who is the exact opposite of Bethell, the opposite of the unity player, a mono-format, old-tech red-ball bowler, out there plonking away on his harpsichord and just hoping somebody wants to listen. Can he have a future too?
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There are plenty of cricket watchers who won’t approve of the Bashir selection. He hasn’t earned it on hard county numbers. It feels very Baz, very boys club. Bashir was picked initially off a social media clip, picked on release point, height, arms.
Do England even need a spinner? And is Bashir good enough if they do? Answering this must be balanced against lousy county figures, against 50 Test wickets, the fact at his best he gets both dip and rip, the fact Stokes actually seems to enjoy captaining him and understand how to do it.
But the idea he is some favoured princeling also doesn’t really stand up. Bashir ground his way up through the Surrey age groups, hard-working, totally focused, but basically out of of time because Surrey didn’t have any real interest in orthodox right-arm spin. He didn’t take the message, didn’t go away, took every trial he could.
And now he’s out there engaged in one of the strangest of Test careers, proving himself at England level to earn the step down to county cricket, with no parachute or pathway, just the current summer and if he’s lucky an Ashes gig where he might well end up a cautionary anecdote or a youtube clip with laughter emojis next to it.
There is a kind of category mistake here. Franchise cricket will tell you it’s the opposite of the old, safe grind. In reality that life is its own kind of treadmill, a blur of colour, noise, content, flown from one bubble to the next, a comfort zone of junk cricket, fireworks on top of fireworks.
Bethell can play in this world as long as he chooses now. Opportunities will thrust themselves into his hands. But Bashir is the real freelancer here, a cricketer struggling to bloom in a living, dying major sport, for whom every ball matters, every off-break this summer a referendum on his own future. It is by far the more perilous of these two paths. Do or die, in a thing that we’re told is dying. It feels like actual, high-jeopardy sport.
Either way the Test grounds will be full again in June and July. Jacob Bethell under bruised skies scratching his way to 17 in two hours against a rampant Jasprit Bumrah: this is basically the sporting summer, a perfect little square of light, a sense of old stuff working, like noticing that bees still exist.
But perhaps there might still be a place too for specialists, for twin codes, for an off-spinner who gives it a straight rip, who provides a note of quietly artful variation, who could no longer have a career once Stokes retires; but who is also doing something a little wild and brave out there, walking the finest of lines, and whose fate is in many ways the more gripping.
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