Zak Crawley should be a perfect fit for this England but offers only high farce

And frankly, were we not entertained? There were times during Zak Crawley’s blustery, tempestuous second innings at Headingley when you wondered whether we were watching a kind of brilliant performance art, perhaps even a sort of interpretative dance in which a 24-year-old man attempts to express the full gamut of human emotion via edges alone.

Either way you could argue that there is no player in this all-singing England team fulfilling his brief more perfectly than Crawley.

Ben Stokes may have the star power. Jonny Bairstow may have the heroism and daring. But even they tend to play only one shot at a time. Crawley has them all and wants to play them all at once: a performer who seems to capture the unique complexity of Test batting while simultaneously persuading us that anybody could do it.

Crawley made 25 off 33 balls on Sunday evening. He scored six fours. Based on those numbers alone you can probably picture his innings without watching a second of it. But even by Crawley’s slapdash standards this was a masterclass in high farce: the innings of a man trying, and failing, and failing harder, and very possibly playing himself out of a Test career in the process.

England play India on Friday in the fifth Test of their delayed 2021 series. Had Crawley simply nicked off for a second-ball duck, his place would probably be safe. But this was the sort of innings that changes minds. He was dropped on 0. He was almost run out. He almost played on twice. He survived three lbw shouts ranging from hopeful to concerted. And of course, he actually did run out his opening partner, the Yorkshire-born Alex Lees playing a Test at Headingley for the first time.

All before he had played a single intentional scoring shot. And so