Brook's shot selection under scrutiny as counterattack goes awry

First the sublime, then the ridiculous. Harry Brook had Lord's purring with wonder as he scooped Akash Deep over fine leg for consecutive fours, then dumped him over long-off for six as England counter-attacked before lunch. When he lost his middle stump two overs later, bowled around his legs trying to sweep an 86mph half-volley, the response was stunned silence.

It was an extraordinary passage of play, one which summed up Brook's series. He is England's second highest run-scorer, averaging 52.33, and played outrageous, dominant innings at Headingley (99) and Edgbaston (158). It was enough for him to leapfrog Joe Root, his team-mate and fellow Yorkshireman, to go top of the ICC's Test batting rankings this week.

But Brook has also been infuriating. Before he had scored a run in the series, he pulled Jasprit Bumrah to short midwicket in the final over of the day, only to be reprieved by a front-foot no-ball. On 99 at Headingley, he pulled a short ball straight to long leg and threw his head back in frustration. At Lord's, Kumar Sangakkara described his shot selection as "arrogant".

Fundamentally, Brook's batting philosophy is as simple as it gets: "I like to hit the ball where the fielders aren't," he has explained. It was that mantra that informed his shot selection: after twice scooping the ball into a vacant fine-leg region, he saw Shubman Gill move a fielder there and lined up the fresh gap at square leg instead.

If there was some logic to it, the shot was always fraught with danger: playing cross-batted left him with less margin for error in the event of variable bounce, and vulnerable to a ball as full - and fast - as the one Deep delivered. Brook was late on the ball, beaten on the bottom edge, and left down on his haunches as Deep celebrated with multiple fist-pumps.

The most frustrating part of Brook's dismissal was that he had worked a near-identical ball through wide mid-on for an effortless, low-risk boundary in between Deep's two overs. Facing Nitish Kumar Reddy, he played with a straight bat to flick a similar straight half-volley into the leg side with a simple roll of the wrists; it was proof that there was another way.

"It was a poor option, as if [to say], 'I can just do what I want,'" Alastair Cook said on the BBC's Test Match Special "People will say, 'He was playing the ramps and you were applauding him,' but I liked those shots because there was an element of control to it… He's a brilliant player; I think he got the shot wrong today."

Much of England's recent success stems from encouraging batters to play with freedom, so it was notable that Marcus Trescothick, their batting coach, said he had addressed Brook's shot selection with him: "We've already discussed it. You could see that the ball was moving around… He chose that [as] the best way to try and counteract what was going to happen.

"When you scoop the two for four and then hit the next one for six, we were all sitting back and really enjoying it," Trescothick said. "Sometimes, you've got to take the rough with the smooth and you're going to get it wrong; you're going to get it right. It is what it is. Obviously you missed the ball today, and it was bang on target."

It is fitting that when Brook was growing up, his favourite England batter to watch was Kevin Pietersen. Both of them face a similar problem of plenty: they are so richly talented, so blessed with brilliant hand-eye co-ordination, that they have countless shots available to them for any given ball. They are so brilliant at their best that they are exasperating when they fall short of it.

And it is worth dwelling on just how good Brook has proved himself to be. At 26, he has already scored nine Test hundreds - one every 5.2 innings - and his average of 57.67 slots him neatly in between Wally Hammond and Jack Hobbs in England's all-time list. He has done all of that while scoring at a strike rate of 87: nobody has scored as many runs so quickly in Test history.

But his dismissal on Sunday was a stark reminder of the fact that Brook is still learning his trade, and that his attacking style will demand a thick skin across his England career. It is largely unfair, but there remains a perception that he is yet to prove himself in tough conditions: this was a wasted opportunity for him to demonstrate that he is so much more than a flat-track bully.