England’s opener Zak Crawley is the “luckiest cricketer” that he has seen, says Michael Vaughan. “in my time watching, playing for and covering England, he is the player luckiest to have won as many caps as he has. He has to count himself fortunate to have played 56 games, whilst scoring just five hundreds, and averaging 31,” Vaughan wrote in his Daily Telegraph column.
Vaughan also made crucial observations about Crawley’s changes from the first Test at Leeds to the second at Birmingham – and wondered the rationale behind those changes. Vaughan observed that Crawley was a lot upright in stance and his feet were inside the off stump in the first Test. But in the second, things changed.
“I would love to know why this week, with Bumrah not playing, he suddenly moved two inches outside off stump in his stance. If you do that, you should know that anything outside your eye-line can be left well alone. Instead, he got out in both innings driving with half a bat, with his left foot staying down the middle of the stumps,” Vaughan wrote.
Vaughan noted that Crawley worries about the straight ball at the stumps trapping him lbw. “That is a mindset issue; he is so concerned about the straight ball, and being lbw or bowled, that he has got out chasing wide balls in his last three innings. It’s bizarre because in Leeds, Crawley had shown what he can do, and that he can be disciplined … Crawley is so exasperating because he has the game. He plays some glorious shots, and at times makes batting look easy. But he has to score more runs at the top of the order. It cannot be that his job is to produce a wow-factor moment once a series.”
Moving beyond Crawley, Vaughan wrote that he was “worried” about this England team. “If we are honest, England have been absolutely hammered this week … It was a performance that worried me greatly. I fear they used the first match as absolute evidence of how to play Test cricket. They showed great skills in that win, but there was also a lot of fortune involved. They turned up here and thought they should do everything the same way, and it has backfired.”
