The case for Compton

By the start of next season, there will be at least 13 men* - probably more - playing county cricket who have opened the batting for England in Tests. If you're trying to picture who they are, they can be recognised from the knowing looks they exchange with former Leeds managers as they pass on the road of broken dreams.

It now seems inevitable that, when Alastair Cook walks out to bat at Durban on Boxing Day, he will do so with his eighth opening partner since he last faced South Africa in Test cricket just over three years ago.

It is a statistic that symbolises the lack of progress England have made in the last few months. At the start of the year, we thought that England had discovered a new No. 3 in Gary Ballance. And we thought - maybe hoped is a better word - that Jos Buttler would develop into a Test-quality wicketkeeper batsman. Now both are gone, for how long it is hard to say, and the rebuilding process has returned to the foundation stage. England do not have a settled opener, a settled No. 3, a settled keeper or a spin option of which they are entirely confident.

If that sounds a harsh assessment of the admirable determination they showed in the UAE, it is worth reflecting on who most impressed during the series. We knew Cook was a Test-class opener. We knew Joe Root was a fine young batsman. And we knew that, in Stuart Broad and James Anderson, England's new-ball attack was in safe hands. We have seen enough of Ben Stokes to know he is worth extended investment in the middle order.

Of the less established players, the players whose careers are in development, we saw some promising signs - most notably from James Taylor and Mark Wood - but not enough for any positions to be cemented for the longer term. In red-ball cricket, at least, it is hard to see progress from the start of the Trevor Bayliss era.

While some issues with the Test side - particularly the spin-bowling problem - may require a cultural change within English cricket to correct, some can be improved quite quickly. If, for example, England could find a reliable opening partner for Cook, many of the problems they have experienced with a middle-order too often exposed to the new ball and fresh bowlers could be resolved.

A recurring problem in England's recent cricket has been the loss of early wickets. At one stage during the Ashes, England had lost their third wicket with the score on 52 or fewer in eight of their previous 14 innings. They have been overly reliant on Root's excellence and their lower middle-order for too long. It is not a quicker start they require, but a more secure start.

Bayliss has said that there is "there's no one out there who's putting their hands up and saying, 'I'm definitely the player to pick'" as opener and it is true that, in the short term, that is a fair summary. Five top three batsmen from Division One passed 1000 runs in the Championship last summer - a decent effort bearing in mind the surfaces prevalent in county cricket at present - but none of them made more than three centuries.

Over the longer term, though, one man's statistics stand out quite sharply. Over the last five years, Nick Compton has averaged in excess of 50 batting in the top three in Division One of the County Championship. He has passed 1000 runs in four of those campaigns and missed it by 39 on the other occasion. Of all the realistic candidates (Ed Joyce and Chris Rogers are included in the table below as reference), his average in that period is somewhere between 10 and 12 higher. Compton is putting his hand up, all right, but it seems the selectors don't want to see him.

There are always caveats to raw statistics. Compton has, it might be argued, played much of his cricket at Taunton which, if not the batting paradise it once was, remains a good deal easier than Chester-le-Street (where Compton scored an unbeaten century in 2014), for example. Equally, it might be argued that Compton has performed admirably to retain his performance level despite his palpable disappointment at his inability to fight his way back into Test contention. When batting takes as much out of you as it does Compton, the motivation offered by the possibility of higher honours is valuable. At times in the last couple of years, Compton has felt he is banging his head against a brick wall.

It is probably worth recounting the circumstances that led to Compton's dropping in 2013. Having taken a blow in the nets during the 2013 Headingley Test against New Zealand, Compton was sent for a scan and, while chatting to a doctor, was informed that he probably had a cracked rib. When the scans were analysed, however, he was shown to have suffered nothing more than deep bruising and it was alleged by the team management that he had shirked his fielding duties as he did not want to put himself in the firing line. Compton was offended - ironically he had played the previous Test with an undiagnosed broken finger - words were exchanged and he has never been selected since.

There were other issues. He failed to reach 20 in any of his last six Test innings and his average of 31.93 is modest. At the time there was momentum behind the idea that Root would develop into a Test opener and some thought that Compton's sedate approach would not complement a top three that also included the obdurate pair of Cook and Jonathan Trott. He was not afforded the patience that one or two of his successors have enjoyed.

England's apparent desire to find an aggressive foil to Cook is puzzling. In Cook they appear to have a perfect example of what is required: determination, patience, denial. So why look for something different? Their problem is not scoring too slowly, but being bowled out too fast.

Perhaps it was relevant, too, that a couple of senior players felt that Compton's public profile had exceeded his level of achievement. Perhaps the clique that Kevin Pietersen mentioned in his book never accepted Compton as they might have done.

But now, two-and-a-half years later, the world has changed. Various other openers have been tried and found, at least for now, wanting. The opening stands Cook enjoyed with Compton were better than those achieved by any of his successors. The management of the team has changed and the atmosphere appears more accepting. There is no reason Compton, the only one of Cook's partner's since Strauss to record two centuries as a Test opener, could not return. He is 32. He could have his best years ahead of him.

Bayliss, who has not had time to watch much county cricket but met Compton for a chat at the end of the season, may be missing a trick if he looks primarily at how many hundreds an opening batsmen scores in a season. A key role of any opening batsman is to see off the new ball, tire the bowlers and protect the middle-order. And in this area, in particular, Compton can have a role to play for England.

Statistics suggest that only Michael Carberry (38%), another who can count himself unfortunate to have experienced such a brief and desperately difficult spell as Test opener, was dismissed for a score under 25 less often (as a percentage) than Compton (45%) among leading opening batsmen in the 2015 Championship campaign. Mark Stoneman (46%), who is oddly unheralded as a candidate despite his record on tricky pitches, also scores well by such a mark. Neither, however, have scored so consistently heavily over five years as Compton.

By contrast, Sam Robson was dismissed 21 times in 31 innings (68%) for a total under 25. The percentage is similar for Alex Hales, Adam Lyth and Varun Chopra.

If those stats look underwhelming, it should be accepted that even the best English opening batsmen fail almost half of the time. Of Geoff Boycott's 863 completed first-class innings, 401 (46%) were ended before he could reach 25; for Graham Gooch it was 413 out of 923 (45%) and Mike Atherton 277 out of 539 (51%). For Compton the career figure is 55%. He is no Boycott or Gooch but, to borrow a phrase from Moneyball, he gets off base more often than most. It is hard to think of anyone, Cook aside, who is better placed to see off the first assault from Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel et al.

Hales is the most likely candidate to replace Moeen Ali at the top of the order in South Africa and there is no doubt he is a hugely talented batsman. But Hales made two of his three Championship centuries in 2015 when coming in at No. 3 and still looks as if that would be his better position. It is asking a huge amount of him to start his Test career against one of the best new-ball attacks in the game.

England made a mistake discarding Compton too early. But the best thing to do if you're heading in the wrong direction is to turn around. In Compton they have a man well-suited to forcing bowlers into second and third spells, to taking the shine off the ball and to sheltering the middle-order from the attack at its most ferocious. If the squad to South Africa is selected entirely on merit, it is hard to ignore his claims for inclusion.

* Current players who have opened the batting in Test cricket for England: Alastair Cook, Rob Key, Marcus Trescothick, Ian Bell, Adam Lyth, Kevin Pietersen, Michael Carberry, Jonathan Trott, Nick Compton, Sam Robson, Moeen Ali, Joe Root, Jos Buttler