There is an old story about a Somerset team meeting sometime in the 1980s, when they were struggling to come up with plans for how to bowl to the other side’s batsmen. “Easy,” Ian Botham said about the first opener, “I’ll bounce him out.” As for the second: “I’ll bounce him too.” It was the same for the No 3. And the No 4. And so on right through the order. “Bounce him”, “bounce him”, “bounce him”. It can be a simple game when you’re that good at it. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Andrew Flintoff last year. “Let’s be honest,” Flintoff said, “everything in English cricket feels better when the Test team are winning.”
This is the Flintoff prescription. He’s right. If England beat, or even just play well against New Zealand, India and South Africa this summer, everything in English cricket will begin to seem a little less desperate and the rows about the structure of the County Championship and the role of the Hundred will become a little less pressing. This is the job Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes have taken on, and according to McCullum they’ve got a similarly uncomplicated formula for doing it, too: “We’re going to try and take wickets with the ball, absorb pressure with the bat and identify times to put pressure back on the opposition, and chase every ball to the boundary.”
