The Ashes 2021/22 — Analyzing the Current State of English Test Batting
By: Shreyas Hosamane
Tags: Analytics, Sports, Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Cricket

Doubts continue to be raised about Joe Root’s future as England Test captain and understandably so but there is a deeper problem that needs to be addressed first.

The Problem

2–0 down in the Ashes and barring one of the greatest turnarounds in cricket history, the Urn will remain in Australia. England’s batting has been under the radar after recent batting collapses but data suggests that the decline started much earlier.

Here is a look at Joe Root’s Test batting average over time. To get a better understanding of how reliant England are on him, we compare his numbers with the other batsmen in the top 7 that he has batted with throughout his career.

As we can see, there isn’t too much of a difference early on. But since around the 20 Test matches mark, the orange line has pretty much been in constant decline and it is because of this that we say that the holes we see in their batting now are actually the culmination of what started quite a while ago.

Although to be fair to the other England batters, there are parts of this plot where Root’s own form was dipping as well (for example, in Tests between approximately 50 to 90). This could have been due to multiple reasons such as legends retiring leading to a period of transition, challenging conditions, difficult opposition who just happened to be in excellent form at the time, etc.

However, it is the 90 to 110 period that is more concerning and exactly why the batting issues appear to be very obvious to viewers now. Despite an upturn in Root’s own batting form, there has hardly been any evidence to suggest that the rest have managed to stop the downward spiral — the gap between the 2 lines in the plot is as high as it has ever been.

The Comparisons

For comparison purposes, we can also take a look at 2 other batsmen who have been a part of quite a few Ashes series during their Test careers: Steve Smith and Alastair Cook.

The first thing that we notice here is the extraordinary rise of Steve Smith, the batsman. The gap between him and the others is not dissimilar to what we saw with Joe Root and it might be one of the reasons why Root recently said that he does not believe that “Australia are that much better than England”. The orange lines in both cases are largely around the 35 mark and the gaps are around 20–25. Does he have a point then?

There are 2 important trends that suggest otherwise. Firstly, Australia’s other batsmen seem to have improved over the former half of Smith’s career and the line between 40 and 80 also seems to be mostly flat which indicates a good period of consistency, unlike the dropping line that we see with England.

Secondly, the rise of young batsmen like Marnus Labuschagne in recent times promises to potentially push the orange line even further up for Australia whereas it is hard to think of anyone in the current English batting order that could do something similar to what he has done so far.

Alastair Cook’s graph might give us an even better view of what is ailing England at the moment. There are 2 key things to notice here: one, the closeness of the 2 lines for large parts of his career (especially during the first half), and two, the orange line comfortably staying above 35 throughout and even hovering around 40 most of the time.

This is what England are missing at the moment. Cook could afford to have dips in form because he had the likes of Strauss, Pietersen, Collingwood, Bell, etc. to step up when he did not. The best example to see this is a little period between 40 to 60 where Cook was at his lowest point but the orange line shifts up to make up for his drop-off. The gap thereafter begins to widen slowly but this region largely coincides with the declining period we were discussing earlier.

The Bottomline

England need to start reversing their batting trend and fast, not just to save the Ashes series but also to re-establish themselves as one of the elite Test nations. At the moment, it looks like they are going to need more than 1 Joe Root to help them out, or at least, that is the level of quality that they are going to need in different parts of their batting order.

How are they going to manage to do that though? Perhaps they could start drawing up another 4-year plan — this time, for Test cricket?