Media unfair to Trott

Despite an excellent start to his Test career, Jonathan Trott has not been given his due by the media, says Lawrence Booth in the Wisden Cricketer. Had he been a born-and-bred Englishman, he adds, the treatment could well have been different.

Trott is an atypical modern England batsman because he is happy to stay in second gear for an entire day and more. We prize stiff-upper-lipped captain/openers; middle-order stylists; and the very occasional destroyer (read Kevin Pietersen). But bubble-dwelling run-machines arouse our suspicion. If they happen to have been born elsewhere, so much the worse.

Trott has already been quietly dropped from the Twenty20 and ODI teams, but English cricket should be careful what it wishes for. It can’t welcome a player who fulfils the qualification criteria, then get snotty when he fails to drag us to the edge of our seats while expertly doing his job.