How high is Josh Hull’s ceiling? These are the kinds of questions that keep Light Roller up at night. And not just ones related to home improvement. Is Sam Billings an air-fryer convert? Does Ravi Bopara own a riding lawnmower? Never mind averages and strike rates, this is good.
But anyway – how high is Hull’s ceiling? It has been the talk of English cricket since Hull, a 6ft 7in left-arm seamer from Leicestershire, was selected for a surprise Test debut a couple of weeks ago. If he’s that tall, you’re probably thinking, then he needs high ceiling. Very likely a “massive” one, as his captain, Ollie Pope, put it in the run-up to his first England appearance.
But does it have a nice cornice? And what about the paint? Probably an ornate fixture is out of the question, with the headspace so high.
You might be wondering what this has to do with Hull’s potential as a Test cricketer – let’s just look at his numbers and decide if he’s any good. But that’s not how the game works in England anymore, not under Brendon McCullum’s Holistic Cricket Wellbeing Program (Golf Module optional). Selection is now about attributes and moments. Zak Crawley is our guy to open – manifest that, brother! Shoaib Bashir is a tall spinner with huge hands – get him on a pitch for India!
Now we have Hull, who had taken two wickets at 182.5 for his county this season, but has size 15ft and a huge ceiling. And in fairness to Rob Key, McCullum and Co, this Jedi trick seems to be working: Hull now average 30.33 in Test cricket, compared to 84.54 in the County Championship.
So what happens next? It turns out that, despite his huge ceiling (as mentioned earlier), Hull’s release point is slightly lower than Stuart Broad’s – somewhere around the level you’d hang a nice portrait in your hall. England like their raw data, so this will no doubt have been spotted. A plan may already be in place, involving yoga and visualization techniques. Or maybe a while in the nets. You know, whatever works.
And then it’s onward and upward, hopefully accompanied by statistics that go right through the roof. Because only in the fullness of time will we know if Josh Hull has the fixtures and fittings to accompany his truly stratospheric ceiling.
Of course, for all the attributes and moments, not to mention scintillating entertainment for Joe Public when Pope chose to bowl spin for a while when the light was poor, England lost the Oval Test against Sri Lanka. Afterwards, Joe Root explained the team’s failure in the following terms: “Coldplay can’t be number 1 every week.” Which seems to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how the music industry works, as well as providing an interesting insight into Root’s musical tastes (are such bedwetters even allowed on Baz’s boombox?) and, as far as analogies go, it also fails to explain. why England have spent exactly zero weeks at No.1 (in either the ICC rankings or the World Test Championship table) since McCullum took control of the roster two years ago.
Elsewhere on the charts, Pakistan is still playing the old hits: dysfunction, hubris and farce. Barely a year after Mickey Arthur kicked out ‘The Pakistan Way’, his replacement, Jason Gillespie, is finding the only way is down, as a 2-0 home loss to Bangladesh extended their losing streak under Shan Masood’s captaincy to five Tests in a row . Afterwards, Masood tried to put his team’s struggle into a context that everyone can understand. “You can’t prepare for science and then take a math test,” he said. “If you’re tested for maths, you study maths. To play red-ball cricket, you have to play red-ball cricket.” The PCB’s response, meanwhile, has been to come up with a whole new curriculum in the form of the Champions Cup – proving once again that they are at the top of the class when it comes to staggering ineptitude.
#4am #high #ceiling