Alex Lees epitomises what is different about England’s batting in new era

Mid-March, England were playing West Indies at Bridgetown, and Alex Lees was batting. Lees had made four and six on his debut the previous week and here his partner, Zak Crawley, had just been caught behind for a duck. Kemar Roach was bowling. Roach tried a wide one outside off, inviting Lees to drive. He left it. Roach followed with two more in the same sort of place, and again, Lees refused to play at them. So Roach switched around the wicket, tried bowling straighter, twice, and Lees blocked both deliveries, Roach tried to slide one across him, tempt him again, with a final wide ball, and Lees left it.

Lees ended up batting for three hours and 11 minutes in that innings, and made 30 runs. A week later in Grenada he batted for two hours and 25 minutes, and made 31, and then another three hours and 41 minutes on top of that, for 31 more, while the team collapsed to 120 all out around him. They ended up losing the game by 10 wickets. By the time he had finished his first Test tour, Lees had faced 460 balls, hit exactly 12 of them for four. It felt like an approximation of what he imagined, or had maybe even been told, was the right and proper way for a good Yorkshire-born opener to play.

Lees didn’t use to bat like that. When he was younger, his heroes were Marcus Trescothick and Matthew Hayden; “powerful left-handed batters who took the game to bowling attacks”. In his early years at Yorkshire he was so aggressive that his coach, Jason Gillespie, even gave him Hayden’s nickname, Haydos. In those days, Lees has said, he had one gear: “attack, attack, attack”. And it worked for him. By the time he was 21, he had been a key part of the team that won the county championship, become the youngest man ever to score a double