Exclusive interview: Meet Dominic Sibley, England's new opening Test batsman with old-fashioned virtues

There is little chance that Dominic Sibley will be starstruck when he starts his England career this week. 

Sibley has joined the England squad for the Test series in New Zealand and is expected to make his debut next week in Mount Maunganui. He has never played with or against captain Joe Root and has had little contact with Ben Stokes or Jos Buttler. He has been whacked in the chest by a Jofra Archer bouncer playing second-team cricket so knows what he is capable of, but apart from his old Surrey mates in the England squad, Sibley will be trying to fit in with a new crowd.

He joins a long line of openers to have been picked by England since the break up of the Andrew Strauss-Alastair Cook partnership and the latest stab at recreating that successful combination will be Sibley and Rory Burns.

Sibley moved from Surrey to Warwickshire two years ago because of lack of first team opportunities, particularly opening the batting, at the Oval. He scored 1,324 runs last summer facing 3,587 deliveries, more than double the balls faced of any other player in county cricket, and his values of crease occupation, patience and dogged concentration are just what new coach Chris Silverwood is looking for in young batsmen.

He appears to be ahead of Zak Crawley, the other young opener picked for the Test squad, mainly because he is seen as more of a complete cricketer at this stage of his career, which is no surprise given the cricketing education Sibley has been lucky enough to experience.

He shared a dressing room at Surrey with Ricky Ponting, Graeme Smith, Hashim Amla and Kevin Pietersen. At Warwickshire he has played with Ian Bell and Jonathan Trott. All have left an impression and Sibley has absorbed information that has helped him develop his batting.

“I’ve played with some amazing names. Amla and Ponting. I was captained by Graeme Smith and was with KP for Twenty20 at Surrey,” he tells Telegraph Sport. “I had a massive chat with Amla during one game at Edgbaston (playing for Surrey against Warwickshire). He chatted about the mental side and how as a youngster when you start out it is about handling the pressure and putting out of your head making the big score. He was all about concentrating on one ball and keeping it simple.

“I remember having a net next to Ricky Ponting. I was facing Chris Tremlett, Jade Dernbach and Stuart Meaker. I was only 17 at the time. In between balls he (Ponting) was saying to me, ‘Well played mate, keep going. Get forward. If they bowl short get under it and take it on. Be clinical’. I was starstruck, thinking, ‘this is Ricky Ponting and he is helping me’. It was amazing. All of them were brilliant with me. I have been so lucky.

“When Graeme Smith walked into the dressing room he had an aura. He was a man-mountain. He looked so organised. I was someone with a bit of a quirky technique but when I chatted to him about batting he said, ‘Don’t worry about what people say. It is what you do and having belief in your technique that will stand you in good stead'.

“I have also learned from playing against Alastair Cook. I watched him when we played in the championship against Essex this summer and just studied how he goes about his business. I just tried to pick up bits of information. I had a chat with him once and it was about just making sure you have a checklist if things are going not well so that you can go back to it and tick things off to remind yourself about the good stuff. I noticed this summer how late he plays the ball and how well he left the ball. Also how clinical he was with the bad balls.”

A couple of days before his selection for the New Zealand Test squad, Ashley Giles, the England director of cricket who signed Sibley for Warwickshire, described him as a batting 'ugly duckling' due to a front-on technique and the way he grinds out his runs. But after an era of picking white-ball players to play red-ball Test cricket, Sibley has come along at the right time, especially as Steve Smith has made quirkiness fashionable. Then there is Burns himself, whose technique is a long way from the MCC coaching manual.

“In my eyes I think I play some nice shots,” Sibley said. “I am not too fussed. 'Burnsy' did well in the Ashes and he is quirky as well. It is not how you look, it is how many you get. For me it is just about trying to get through new ball. Get through the first opening spell. With each ball keep it real simple. Just try and bat session by session and it is about scoring hundreds, especially as an opener. If you can get past the new ball on the pitches we play on then it is about making it count and getting the big scores.

“I learned an early lesson from my cricket master at Whitgift School [former Surrey batsman David Ward]. I remember getting a hundred for the under-13s and I got out with 10 overs left. I was walking around and joking with my mates and the coach came up to me and said there were 10 overs left and I could have got 150 or 160. He said, ‘No-one really cares about hundreds. It is about the big hundreds’. That has stuck with me since a little lad so my approach has been to get big hundreds.”

Sibley struggled in 2018, his first season at Warwickshire. But linking up with batting coach Gary Palmer, who worked with Cook and Bell, led to him tinkering his stance. He now bats more front on and plays straighter down the ground.

His powers of concentration have been described as “monumental” by Warwickshire coach Jim Troughton, and with renewed confidence he has ground down bowlers in county cricket where tricky pitches encourage batsmen to take chances, rather play the longer game.

His strike rate of 41.92 in first-class cricket is slow by modern standards and the worry is against better bowling at Test level he might end up grinding to a standstill. Sibley, however, is unfazed.

“You can’t really prepare for it [Test cricket]. The only thing you can do is back yourself and what has been successful in county cricket and give it my best shot in Test cricket. Hopefully that is going to be good enough.

"Chatting to Burnsy, he said after the Ireland Test everyone was getting stuck into his technique but he showed great mental strength to stick to what he does. It is more played upstairs than technically. Batting long periods of time is a strength of mine. There has been chat about that sort of stuff being what England want. Maybe it is good timing.”