Harry Brook’s innings on his home ground of Headingley on Sunday was absolutely box office – a spectacular exhibition of stroke play.
Brook is such a positive player, with all the shots, and one of his most profitable over recent years has been to run at seam bowlers.
It took people by surprise when he did this to India’s premier bowler Jasprit Bumrah at the start of the morning session and banged the ball away for four. Doing so, not in a chaotic, frenetic way, but in a controlled manner.
You have to show intent against whoever you face. You need to put good bowlers under pressure.
The issue for Brook, though, and Australia will be watching with their bigger grounds in mind, is the short ball.
Teams might try one set of tactics against him first up, but if he gets in what will he do if they bounce him? Is he taking it on? Or not?
How would he have been out on the second evening, if Bumrah hadn’t reprieved him by overstepping? Hooking. He’s got to work out going forward what he is going to do when challenged to play that shot, because there will be more coming.
That will be his challenge and if I was a coach, I would be asking: is the shot getting you runs? Is it one of your shots? Is it getting you out?
The charge down the pitch isn’t resulting in dismissals for him. Ask the same question to the hook shot, though, and it is not as clear cut. Is it getting him runs? Yes. Is it getting him out? Yes.
So, there is a risk-reward dilemma. As a batsman, are you going to put the shot away? Continue playing it? What are you going to do?
Brook will know it’s going to come now in this series, and that it will come in Australia. Previously, he’s tried to take that short ball on and hit it for six, but because he was on 99, I think he tried to almost keep it down. He may have been walking off wishing he’d tried to hit it all the way.
As a batsman you must have a plan. On the bigger grounds in Australia later this year, it will be high risk, and risk factor is something you are always weighing up.
As my old Essex captain Keith Fletcher once said to me, if you don’t play any shots, you don’t get any runs. Virtually every cricket shot has some kind of risk element. You can’t put them all away.
And the beauty of a five-match Test series is that patterns develop. Get out in a certain fashion and your opponents will try to repeat it.
In response, you’ve got to try to put it to bed somehow and the only way to do that is to work hard, think about your own game, and find the balance that’s right for you.
Take Jamie Smith here. If he hits the ball out of the ground, everyone goes ‘wow.’ But when there are four men out there, you find one. So, as we go through the series, we’re going to see that ploy to him quite a bit, I would imagine.
There were three soft dismissals in England’s innings: Joe Root, Ollie Pope and Ben Stokes all edging outside off stump.
That is why Stokes chucked his bat up in the air: he was cross with himself.
Stokes had actually been lining up very well. I liked his triggers, and it looked like he’d gone back to his old 2019 movements: composed, right in behind the ball, and then from nowhere, he just feathered one behind.
He now knows that Mohammad Siraj and Bumrah will be coming around the wicket to him, trying to get the ball going away, with a full slip cordon over these next few matches.
But, as I say, that is what makes a lengthy Test series so intriguing.
