England confirmed the dropping of Kent’s Zak Crawley today when James Rew walked out to open the batting for Somerset. There are definitely more straightforward ways of announcing these things.

English cricket’s rune-readers have been broadly in agreement for a while now that Zak Crawley is no longer an England Test cricketer. No-one in a position to influence things has actually come out and said so. It’s just been impossible to envisage circumstances where the managing director of England men’s team, Rob Key, can concede that they’ve, “overvalued loyalty and overvalued having a settled team,” without then dropping him.

Sure, they could drop someone else instead, but that would rather rely on Crawley making an inarguable case for retention. With 12 hundreds in 143 first-class matches and an average of 31.67, that is not a thing he was ever going to do.

It’s time for some unsettling disloyalty: If England’s leaders aren’t being ejected then some of the players will be… but which ones?

The only thing Crawley really had in his favour was that the guy England most want to pick right now – James Rew – is a middle-order batter.

We get the impression Rew likes being a middle-order batter. Why wouldn’t he? He’s scored thousands of runs there. But the vacancy is elsewhere. England love players showing ambition. They’ll have had a word. Words like ‘opportunity’ and ‘adaptability’ will have been bandied about.

‘No pressure, James, it’s entirely up to you, but from our perspective we think you’re made of the right stuff and we like players who are willing to get out of their comfort zones. We’ve got a problem and we feel like you could solve it.’

Clamour model: Can’t James Rew just carry on breathing down people’s necks for a bit?

The flipside of that is of course that staying put and churning out middle-order runs would perhaps be viewed as being inflexible and cowardly.

So today James Rew walked out to open the batting for Somerset of his own volition and got bowled for 4 in the third over. Which doesn’t mean much. He made 7 and 0 batting in the middle order last week, after all.

But it does mean something for Zak Crawley because it tells us that England are so committed to finding a new opener, they’re willing to suggest to middle-order batters that they turn themselves into top order batters to plug the gap.

Our view is that this can work, but usually doesn’t – particularly in England where the new ball is so often a capricious bitch. It didn’t work for Dan Lawrence, for example.

Joe Root performed creditably enough when he was pushed into an opening role for similar reasons – but then Joe Root’s a genius. The fact he still only lasted six Tests there underlines that one way or another it was only ever an interim measure.

Further England squad news?

So that’s one bit of implicit England Test squad news. Is the fact that Ben Stokes opened the bowling today another?

Was this a Durham decision or an England decision? And given that two of the key decision-makers would have been the England Test captain and Marcus North, the new England chief selector, how would you even tell the difference?

We suspect and hope it was just a Durham thing. Given his clanking physiology, ‘Ben Stokes, opening bowler,’ would surely be even more of a stopgap move than Rew as opener.

Now that everyone’s played four matches, the 2026 County Championship is starting to take shape. The shape it is taking is that of the 2025 County Championship.

No, really.

The top five currently looks like this.

Which isn’t really so radically different to how things finished last year.

In fact if Sussex hadn’t been handed a 12-point deduction at the start of the season, they’d be in fourth and Warwickshire would be in fifth.

That’s in-same.

People always say that county cricket is resistant to change, but this isn’t ordinarily what they mean.

How did we get/remain here?

We’ve already covered Surrey’s drawsome exploits at the Oval, so let’s take a closer look at Nottinghamshire this week. Surrey did actually win their last game, but it was cut from similarly featureless cloth (nylon?). They made 622 and failed to bowl Sussex out in the first innings after Jack Carson and Ollie Robinson made hundreds batting at nine and ten.

Has Ollie Robinson uncovered a back way into the England Test team?

Nottinghamshire have been making runs too though. They actually have the top two run-scorers in the division: Joe Clarke and Ben Slater.

On top of that, Haseeb Hameed has made a hundred (we were hoping he’d make a handful and get back into the England team), while Ben Duckett has made three fifties in three matches, which has saved him the anguish of withdrawing from the IPL only to end up with neither the money nor any runs. He’d settle for that, we reckon, given the alternative.

The wickets have been shared around a bit more because Notts are one of those counties who have access to England bowlers you’ve forgotten about.

Ben Hutton and Liam Patterson-White are the staple carbs and then the county drops in all sorts of meaty goodness alongside them. Dillon Pennington is the young up-and-comer and Josh Tongue has turned up a couple of times. Fergus O’Neill is back over from Australia again as well and seemingly still unaffected by moss or verdigris (although he did suffer a rib injury in the game he played and being subbed out meant he couldn’t play the next one).

Then last week, Olly Stone took a five-for.

Olly Stone: remember him? He was in England’s Test team less than two years ago, but hasn’t been seen much since due to his wholehearted commitment to sustaining major injuries – the mark of a true fast bowler, we always think.

Stone has now played 11 matches in four seasons at Nottinghamshire, a not-entirely-surprising volume from a man who once missed near enough two years of cricket thanks to an injury sustained celebrating a wicket.

As a substance, stone has a reputation for resilience, but perhaps you want something that offers a little more give for fast bowling.

Ollie Robinson hasn’t always seemed fully aware of what he needs to do (or not do) if he wants to play for England again. Our favourite recent quote was about how he hasn’t played for the national side since the 2024 Ranchi Test: “Apparently I fell out with the England management in India – which I didn’t realise I had.”

This might be the purest expression of the very essence of Ollie Robinson: a man who can effortlessly fall out with people and not even know that it’s happened.

You’d think he’d have a clearer view of the performance requirements, but no, not really. Earlier this season he suggested that it was up to him, “to knock the door down by taking wickets and ripping up trees.”

Well which, Ollie? It’s got to be one or the other because ripping up trees ain’t gonna do anything for the wicket-taking ability of a man with your spinal history.  

Ollie Robinson has been given a golden opportunity to develop a new ailment

Robinson has knackered his back bowling any number of times. Sometimes even the mere thought that it might be involved in some bowling later in the day has been enough for it to go. It also went during that Ranchi Test while he was batting.

This is not a body part you want to overburden. Honestly, give tree uprooting a miss, son.

Batting, of course, is rather harder to avoid – so why not make the most of it?

With England currently considering picking opening batters who aren’t actually opening batters (James Rew, Zak Crawley – people like that), Tim recently suggested in the comments that they could instead go further and revisit their Nighthawk line of thinking. Why not pick a quasi-sacrificial opener who is primarily a frontline bowler? This would allow England to bat all the way down to eight, if not quite all the way up to one.

Peak Nighthawk? Let’s not be too hasty

Ollie Robinson would be an excellent choice. Today he walked out against Surrey with Sussex 167-8 and outscored the whole top seven combined.

Robinson could definitely score runs as a Test opener. And even if he didn’t, he’d still be annoying, which is surely a worthwhile goal in itself.

Four weeks into the County Championship and most teams have only played three times. It’s therefore no surprise that four-match Warwickshire find themselves top of the table. They have achieved this after notching one win – exactly the same number as Hampshire, who are bottom.

That isn’t to say that everyone’s off the mark. Surrey, for example, have managed only draws so far having laboured fruitlessly on home pitches that make you think the ground should be renamed The Completely Flat.

Six Surrey batters are averaging over 50 so far this season. Jamie Smith’s 80.20 only gets him to third in that list.

As we’ve said before, a spinner might help. The closest thing they’ve got, Dan Lawrence, is their second-highest wicket-taker with five wickets at 57.60. It’s hard to avoid concluding that a specialist might have achieved more. We have endless time for Dan Lawrence’s bowling, but that doesn’t make him a bowler.

The three best parts of Dan Lawrence’s bowling action in escalating order of greatness

Another Surrey “spin option” boasts their best bowling average though: Ralphie Albert – Jimmy White’s grandson – a young all-rounder who took 3-80 in the only game he’s played.

You don’t get many Ralphies, do you? The only one that immediately springs to mind is Ralphie Cifaretto, the transcendentally objectionable character from the Sopranos, played by Joe Pantoliano.

Joe Pantoliano has apparently appeared in over 150 roles over the course of his career, so we presume he doesn’t always play a titanic wanker. Certainly feels that way though. (See also: The Matrix.)

Surrey host Sussex, who have been winning games, from Friday. It’s Warwickshire’s turn to take a breather this week.

England always say they want competition for places, but whenever they actually have it, everyone gets all impatient and demands that they hurry up and make the change right now. Somerset’s James Rew will wind up in England’s Test team eventually. Is there any harm in waiting for the right circumstances to unfold? We know it’s kind of gone out of fashion a bit lately, but you all remember waiting for things, right? 

The situation is this: It is increasingly obvious that James Rew is too good for county cricket, but he generally bats at number four or lower and those England places are all very filled right now. 

You’ve no doubt heard of Joe Root; and Ben Stokes is the captain; while Jamie Smith is the one person who’s scored more runs than Rew so far this season. Harry Brook lost some of his shine over the winter, but England don’t generally drop batters who average 55 in Test cricket. 

Those places are filled.

Jiggly guff

If you’ve already concluded Rew needs to be in the side and you’re hiking your way towards that destination, the awkward facts above propel you towards the timeless fallback of ‘jiggling things about a bit’.

England are going to drop a batter (Zak Crawley) and here is a batter they want to pick. This shouldn’t be a difficult equation.

But actually it is, because if you think about it for two seconds, you realise that one way or another, someone would have to take a Dan Lawrence style hit to accommodate him. 

Jacob Bethell has hit 100 per cent of his first-class hundreds batting at three for England. He had not previously been a number three, but they’ve decided he’s malleable enough to become one. You could argue that it wouldn’t be that big a difference to instead mould him into an opener, but why should he recommence the moulding process to accommodate someone else who isn’t a number three either? 

Jamie Smith could move up the order because he’s been batting at three for Surrey, but Smith doesn’t have to keep wicket for Surrey and also he was specifically picked for his ability to ramp things up when batting with the tail. 

Finally, Rew could open, but this is an unappealing option given he’s never done it before.

Clamour!

The BBC has said England have a “dilemma” here. But this isn’t a dilemma, is it? If a small Edison cap lightbulb blows and you have a bayonet bulb in the drawer, that’s not a dilemma. That’s having a spare of a different thing.

And it’s worth stating that having a spare is actually useful, because sooner or later every lightbulb blows. When the next bayonet pops, England will be delighted to have an immaculate, unsullied replacement ready to go, rather than something mangled and possibly broken because they previously tried to mash it into the wrong fitting like an impatient moron.

Conclusion

Nothing is spoiling here. James Rew is only getting better and England’s middle-order incumbents should also be driven forwards by his breath on their necks.

It’s always good to have something in the freezer.

A fortnight into the County Championship and it’s hard to weigh the performances of several England Test hopefuls. In many cases who they play for seems to have had almost as much influence on outcomes as how they’re playing.

Take, for example, Jamie Smith. This time last week we pointed out that he’d most likely already retained his Test spot with a hundred even though the worth of that hundred was tempered by being scored on a less than challenging pitch.

Skullwatch: Jamie Smith looks safe then

Last week’s featherbed now looks more like one of those thin, self-inflating camping mats after Surrey’s home game against Leicestershire, in which Smith’s first innings 166 and second innings 89 were scored either side of the visitors’ 691 all out. That’s quite a total. Perhaps Surrey might like to rethink their seasons-long spin policy of relying on either part-timers or short term imports on zero hours contracts?

The upshot is that even if Smith is the top scorer in Division 1, his average of 99 is surpassed by team-mate and theoretical rival, Ben Foakes, who is averaging 127.50 thanks to a couple of not outs. Ollie Pope’s record also has a healthy look about it with a hundred and a fifty and an average of 74. But what does any of this actually mean?

Elsewhere, Ollie Robinson’s 2026 campaign to distract England from the fact he’s a bit of a bell-end¹ by taking bucketloads of wickets appears to have got off to a solid start. His 10 wickets at 15.40 does however only put him third in Sussex’s averages behind the preposterously-named Fynn Hudson-Prentice (8 wickets at 15.25) and Henry Crocombe (13 wickets at 13.76).

These three have however helped Sussex pretty much entirely overhaul the 12-point penalty that was imposed this season after the county was forced to ask the ECB for a loan.

And finally, openers

What do you make of the situation here? Ben Duckett’s made 28 runs, while the man who was to our mind the best choice to replace Zak Crawley as his partner, Haseeb Hameed, has only made 62 runs in four innings, also for Nottinghamshire.

Crawley himself has made 60 runs in four innings in Division 2 – and really they were worth even less than that. Half of his knocks were on the same pitch where no Northamptonshire batter who came to the crease failed to reach three figures.

It’s time for some unsettling disloyalty: If England’s leaders aren’t being ejected then some of the players will be… but which ones?

Durham’s Ben McKinney was loitering in the vicinity during the Ashes and he made 244 last week. Even accounting for the reduced value of a second division run, that’s pretty handy.

One way or another, cases are being built. We’ll be able to weigh all this stuff a lot more accurately and hand down some verdicts in a few weeks time.

1. With Robinson currently out of the side and Ben Duckett having seemingly taken the hint to stop airing so much delusional madness, who is England’s current, official Bollocks-Talker In Chief? Is there a vacancy? ︎

If you’ve got a picture of an animal being conspicuously indifferent to cricket, please send it to king@kingcricket.co.uk.

Chess grandmaster and commentator, Peter Svidler, submitted this really quite magnificent photo of a black standard poodle being conspicuously indifferent to The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments, the cricket book we wrote with Dan Liebke.

It’s the demeanour that really makes this one for us, but the painting in the background adds a certain something too.

The dog in question is Joyce (who Peter explained is named after James, not Ed).

Joyce is in Russia, so this probably also qualifies for our other regular feature, Cricket Bats¹In Unusual Places.

1. And other cricket stuff. Quite rarely cricket bats, to be honest, but that’s the name of the feature now. What are we going to do? Change the URL? ︎

• Sign up for our email or its weekly counterpart
• Feed the site; back our Patreon
• Buy our book, the one pictured above: The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments

Jamie Smith earned himself a mention in our previous article about which England Test players might get the boot for the next Test. We had him down as someone who’d need to play very badly in early season to lose his place, so a match-saving 132 for Surrey presumably keeps him in the team.

Things didn’t look too great for Smith in Surrey’s first innings when he was dismissed for 9 and his team-mate and England predecessor Ben Foakes then made 128.

Even if Ben Foakes is “the best wicketkeeper in the world” he’s only worth so much to England

If your county thinks another guy is a better wicketkeeper than you, there’s extra pressure to score more runs than him.

Perhaps that’s why Smith was batting at three in this match: simply to look like a more serious batter. Another interpretation is that he might be hedging his bets a bit with top order England places at even greater risk. Or maybe it’s just a Surrey thing – they have a lot of players to accommodate, after all.

It worked out for him in the second innings anyway and Dan Lawrence – another cricketer who once got suckered into batting up the order – also made a hundred.

How harshly should we judge Dan Lawrence for his fairly terrible performance as a Test opener?

Surrey’s opponents, Warwickshire, made 544, so it clearly wasn’t the most challenging pitch. Those kinds of details will be washed away by the weak shower head of time however. Come England’s next selection meeting, all that will matter is that they were probably going to stick with Smith anyway, and look, he made a hundred.

An interesting footnote to all of this is that the bare stats of Foakes’ and Smith’s innings suggest both men made efforts to alter perceptions. The former rattled along at four an over and even deigned to wallop a six at one point, whereas Smith scored at three an over and didn’t clear the ropes once, thus obliging reporters to say that he batted ‘watchfully’.

For what it’s worth, we would guess that there was zero conscious effort to play differently from either man; that those outcomes were in fact merely products of circumstance and natural variation. Ours is a world of MAKING STATEMENTS though so let’s all just pretend it was that instead.

How can you, as an England fan, possibly tolerate this world without skulls?

Why not buy this excellent book? Click it and do so!

We are absolutely adamant that England cannot possibly withstand public and media appetite for change in the wake of the Ashes drubbing. (Does 4-1 actually qualify as a drubbing given the three previous scorelines Down Under were all worse than that?) One way or another, rightly or wrongly, action must be seen to be taken and if the captain, coach and managing director of men’s cricket are all keeping their jobs then other heads will have to roll instead – players’ heads.

This is the way it has to work. If people want skulls and you explain that, “actually, sorry, no skulls – we’re just going to do things slightly differently instead,” then you absolutely cannot just carry on much as you were doing previously. England have to demonstrate how they’ve changed. They have to put forward clear, visible differences.

In short, there still have to be skulls.

“We’ve overvalued loyalty and overvalued having a settled team” 

That’s what Rob Key apparently concluded recently.

“We thought what we wanted to do is make sure we have a team that is settled out there. But what that does is it creates an environment where there’s not enough consequence. We need to be more ruthless with our selection.”

It’s time to unsettle everyone with disloyalty, basically. So who’s in the firing line?

Zak Crawley – OUT

Honestly? We think he’s out. After all these years of Teflon mediocrity, there are visible holes in Crawley’s protective coating now. If the loyalty threshold truly has moved then he surely now finds himself on the wrong side of it as an exemplary victim.

Unless he makes a million runs in the early weeks of the County Championship – which unfortunately for him is a thing he’s never before been able to do – then Crawley will surely become a warning to all of the England players that actually, you know what, we’ve decided there should be consequences.

This would be quite a peculiar development given the batter’s been such a fixture of the side and it could also prove terminal for his Test career. While he is still young for a Test opener – during the Ashes we pointed out that Mike Carberry, Nick Compton, Mark Stoneman, Jason Roy, Rory Burns and Alex Lees were all older than he is now when they made their debuts – it’s quite hard to go back on dropping someone who has already amassed such a sizeable body of so-so work.

See, told you Zak Crawley was the very best batter in the whole wide world

Crawley has been given a great many opportunities to prove himself – enough, you could argue, that he has already done precisely that. For years and years, he has generally done just enough to maintain the idea of Zak Crawley, without ever really managing to move things beyond that.

Crawley’s upcoming task is therefore not really to prove himself, but to disprove himself.

Ollie Pope – STILL OUT

Technically, Pope’s been dropped already, which is just one of several reasons why it’s probably a little unfair that he’s so often lumped in with Crawley as a batter who deserves to face sterner judgement.

While the two men have played the same number of Tests and roughly the same number of first-class matches, Pope has hit nine Test hundreds to Crawley’s five and also averages almost 50 per cent more than him in first-class cricket with twice as many three-figure scores.

He is, in short, a far better batter and could probably do okay if someone could prevent him falling victim to some of the more broad brush team messaging that doesn’t really benefit him.

Jamie Smith – NOT OUT

Jamie Smith played the worst shot of the winter, but the brain of many an otherwise excellent cricketer has momentarily melted in the Ashes environment before now and Smith had also been shouldering a sizeable workload in the field.

The 5 best/worst aspects of Jamie Smith’s gruesome and deplorable dismissal to Marnus Labuschagne’s abject filth

His first Ashes went wrong, but that alone shouldn’t see him ejected from the side, should it? He might need to find a bit of early season form, but England want to do well in five-Test series and in the one before the Ashes, less than a year ago, Smith made 184 not out against India as well as several other useful scores.

Will Jacks – OUT

If anything Will Jacks’ fantastic T20 World Cup performances served only to better highlight the utter pointlessness of his presence in England’s Test team.

Did you see… Steve Smith backed into a corner by the legendary finger spin of Will Jacks?

With the red ball, he is not a spin bowler, but a cricketer who sometimes bowls spin. This would be a lot more useful to England if he also happened to be a Test batter, but unfortunately, as things stand, he is not.

In the longest format, Jacks is a buyer of wickets and a scorer of meaningless consolation runs. England need more than that.

Brydon Carse – PROBABLY NOT OUT

Brydon Carse had a terrible Ashes in which he was the second-highest wicket-taker. This combination of facts is still hard to make sense of. We feel we summed up the essence of his experience in the article linked below.

Someone tell Brydon Carse he’s getting tonked –  we’re not sure he’s noticed

If England can avoid giving him the new ball, we’d guess Carse is probably still in the team? Isn’t he? Maybe not. We have no idea.

Matt Potts – A BIT FURTHER OUT

Matt Potts is in that age-old position where he shouldn’t really be judged too harshly based on one hospital pass appearance at the arse end of a disastrous Ashes tour, but he also unavoidably will be.

England had worked their way down the pecking order when Potts played in Sydney but you feel they’ll have to get a little bit lower still before he gets to play again.

Jofra Archer and Mark Wood – NOT OUT, BUT ARE THEY EVER TRULY IN ANYWAY?

It seems faintly insane to suggest Jofra Archer or Mark Wood might be members of England’s first XI given the availability disclaimers inherent in such an assertion. In that respect, it’s business as usual really.

Wood is currently recovering from what he was told was “an explosion” in his knee during the Ashes. Archer is in the equally familiar position where he’s fit enough to bowl four overs but no-one seems much inclined to engineer a situation where he might prove himself capable of bowling a greater number.

Likely openings

So what are we looking for then? One opener and one spinner, plus maybe an opening bowler if they conclude that a Gus Atkinson, Brydon Carse and Josh Tongue attack is a bit too first-changey?

Support the realm!

• Get the email
• Join our Patreon
• Buy our book

“In terms of skulls… how many skulls? Do you think?”

There are plenty of England fans and a good few in the cricket press who have a Tom Wambsgans-esque appetite for skulls right now.

England lost the Ashes and no-one has been sacked. It’s an unusual scenario. 

The boring story without skulls

The more strategic layers of power at the ECB have tried to explain their reasoning this week. Chief executive Richard Gould said that Rob Key, Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes would all carry on but would do things slightly differently.

Well would you spend £1m to not have Brendon McCullum as England coach?

“We have seen that there are ways that we can do things in a different way and ensure that we’ve got more options,” he told Cricinfo. “We don’t want to be painted into a corner by being perceived that we can only do things in one particular way… There is the belief that we can adapt, and I think we’ve seen good evidence of that and we will continue to drive that forward.”

Visceral stuff, isn’t it? Who couldn’t get enthused about corporate strategy, reading abstract assertions like that? 

Key then came out to say that they’re going to change a few of the things that everyone has been telling them they need to change. 

The problem is that if you’re upset about something – as England fans are with the last Ashes – then reading that England broadly agree with some criticism and are going to make changes doesn’t really hit the spot the way the more traditional therapeutic phlebotomy does.

It also makes for quite boring articles and videos. Other than entertaining yourself with Status Quo references, it’s hard to get much out of grand announcements that nobody’s being dismissed. (Shockin’ All Over The World, In the Barmy Army Now, etc.)

Rip it up and start again hasn’t worked previously, but it’s undeniably clearer action than whatever this is. To hell with your learnings and evolution as leaders. Bring us some skulls!

The Frittening

So no skulls and nothing much to chew on. What we’re therefore left with is The Boneless – a large, constantly shifting blob of pale organic matter that induces a state of madness in all who gaze upon it. (Make your Rob Key jokes… NOW!)

If, like us, your are feeling a bit untethered from the game right now, the problem, perhaps, is not what is and isn’t being done in response to a crap Ashes, but that there’s not yet anything better to talk about. 

What we could do really with at this point is some cricket. You know, cricketers playing cricket against other cricketers – that thing. 

The County Championship starts next week.

Why didn’t Liam Livingstone get the message that “Who cares?” wins?

Sustain this realm…

• Get the email
• Join our Patreon
• Buy our book