England opener Alex Lees growing in stature ahead of Headingley homecoming

Alex Lees, England’s improving opener, will be going home for the third Test against New Zealand. Headingley is where he grew up, and rapidly, being mature beyond his years.

Lees captained the Yorkshire Academy and Second XI, and was propelled into leading Yorkshire’s 20-over and 50-over teams at the age of 22. It was a well-intentioned appointment by the head coach Jason Gillespie but, as everyone can now see, the white-ball game is not Lees’s strongest format and the appointment diverted his red-ball career off track.

But, rather like his England captain Ben Stokes, Lees has been through plenty of vicissitudes and has emerged on the other side, aged 29, much the stronger for it. And like Stokes, and Jonny Bairstow too, he is in a sense repaying his late father, for Lees’s dad was a busy man who yet found time to give his young son all the batting practice he wanted in the garden of their home outside Halifax.

In the West Indies, in his debut series, amid all the uncertainties that had engulfed English cricket, Lees tended to be stiff, strokeless and statuesque: he survived, but little more than that, scoring 126 runs off 460 balls. At Trent Bridge, in only the fifth Test of his career, he began to bat with an authority that hinted at the monumental.

England’s historic run chase was achieved in a hailstorm of boundaries, but the two most important fours were the ones that Lees drove off the first two balls of England’s second innings, which Tim Southee pitched up expectantly and swung into the left-hander. The Lees of his debut series would have poked at them. The Lees under the leadership of Stokes and Brendon McCullum crunched them through the covers in the most emphatic of statements: we are going for the runs, and