Rory Burns and Dom Sibley appear to have solved a problem that has blighted the Test team since the playing retirement of the former ECB director of cricket
In the end it took England so long to find a new opening batsman that the man they were trying to replace ended up taking on the job of searching himself. So long, in fact, that he had to quit before he had finished.
In the eight years since Andrew Strauss retired in 2012, England have tried 18 different openers in 18 combinations. There was Alastair Cook, obviously, Nick Compton, Joe Root, and Michael Carberry, then Sam Robson, Jonathan Trott, Adam Lyth, and Moeen Ali, Alex Hales, Ben Duckett and Haseeb Hameed, Keaton Jennings and Mark Stoneman, Joe Denly, Jason Roy, Rory Burns, and, just lately Dom Sibley and Zak Crawley. Strauss had a hand in picking some of them, during his three-year stint as the ECB’s director of cricket. He is up at this Test, working for Sky, and running the Red For Ruth campaign to raise money for the foundation he set up in his wife’s name after she died in 2018.
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