It’s not worth writing about Zak Crawley from a distance, swapping notes over there with the bloodless. He’ll always be a first-person kind of player, all pure, fragile talent of the kind that draws you in so close that the peripheral stuff – the state of the game, who’s at the other end, what happens next – gets lost in the pistol crack of the moment. An hour in his company at the crease is never dull. He’s a weird mix of easy, fluid casualness and neurotic hyper-urgency, like a languid concert cellist forever on the verge of twanging a string. Even during the bad times, of which there were loads, he still failed compellingly. It was always, always a talking point. Crawley nick off again, did he? See that Crawley, last over before lunch? Yeah, yeah, but did you see that shot over mid-wicket?
Bundles of contradictions. Physically he owns his space like primetime Pietersen but any cockiness, such as it is, comes through in the more parochial form of KP’s alter ego, Ian Bell. Like Bell, Crawley ’s self-belief – and it’s in there, it must be in there – never presents as arrogance. To the oppo he’s a likeable and liked cricketer, appreciated as much for his gifts as his knack for underusing them. But beneath the surface of that public-school shrug, behind those gently reddening cheeks as another ball is airily mashed to the fence, something interesting has been taking place. Something surprisingly resilient and sturdy, and tantalising for what it could yet morph into.
Quickly then, to recap: between his first Test hundred (an outlier in an empty field, 267 versus Pakistan) and his second, 121 against West Indies on a flat one in Antigua, he averaged 16 [SIXTEEN] across 10 Tests. Then, just to ram it home, between