England have rarely picked a specialist wicketkeeper over the last 30 years, but in a superb day’s work Jos Buttler’s stand-in showed what they’ve been missing
God grant England’s batsmen the confidence of the man who wrote the MCC’s Cricket Coaching Book. “It can therefore be laid down as an absolute principle in team selection,” he notes, “that the best wicketkeeper, irrespective of all other considerations, must always be chosen …” That was written in 1952, and, though you would never have guessed it from the tone, the idea was open to debate even then.
Within a decade, England had dropped the peerless Keith Andrew (“a silvery, smooth, slinky shadow behind the stumps,” said his teammate Mickey Stewart) because he wasn’t scoring enough runs and chose the No 6 batsman Jim Parks to take over the wicketkeeping.
Written by Andy Bull
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/feb/15/ben-foakes-stands-up-to-give-keepers-union-something-to-shout-about under the title “
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