England’s long-time white-ball opener was hanging on to his place in the team before a spellbinding 113 in Bloemfontein
In the final Harry Potter book our eponymous hero was presented with a golden snitch – if you are unaware of what a snitch is, imagine a golden object of your choice – bequeathed to him by (spoiler alert) his recently deceased headmaster and mentor Albus Dumbledore. On it he discovered a riddle: “I open at the close.” For months he and his friends Ron and Hermione puzzled over the phrase, but to no avail: “No matter how often they repeated the words, with many different inflections, they were unable to wring any more meaning from them.”
These days any fan of English cricket would solve the puzzle in seconds: it’s obviously Jason Roy. England’s white-ball opener and one-time magician of the willow wand has been teetering towards the end of something for the best part of a year, a man on the verge of a statistical breakdown, a reputational abyss.
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