How to fix England: recall Dom Bess, drop Stuart Broad - and move Ollie Pope to No 3

Our experts offer their verdicts on the team England should pick for Thursday's decisive fourth Test, and what problems they have to fix.

Nick Hoult

There is still a Test series to be drawn in India, a notable achievement for a young England team building towards an Ashes tour at the end of the year.

Selection choices this week could have longer term repercussions and decide whether England have actually made any progress this winter as a batting unit, apart from confirming what we already knew in that Joe Root plays spin very well.

Conditions have been extreme for the past two weeks and it is hard to make any lasting judgements. Even dropping Rory Burns does not feel like a final call in the same way that leaving out Joe Denly did after the first Test of last summer.

There are enough problems in England’s top order to suggest Burns could come again and he had a good Ashes series in 2019, standing up bravely to Australian pace and improving his technique to cope with the short ball.

He will have to wait longer for a recall but for the final Test of the series England have to make some decisions. Moving Ollie Pope to three is one, and recalling Dom Bess feels inevitable and fair.

It is wrong to suggest Root is a better off-spinner than Bess. Last week was freakish and Root has enough to think about with captaincy and batting to add being a second spinner on a turning Asian pitch.

Remember how he was butchered in Port Elizabeth last year when he bowled himself for too long in a bid to take a fifth wicket. He was slogged for 28 in one over by tailender Keshav Majaraj. Root loves bowling, but perhaps he is not the best judge of when, and for how long, he should bowl himself.

Bess looked tired when he was dropped but he has had a good break now, and is a tough character who appears to have taken well the fact he was left out for two Tests. Chris Silverwood said Bess has “been great around the group” and not “too much” should be read into missing the third Test when he admitted Bess was back in contention this week.

Bess has worked extensively with Jeetan Patel, had time to improve and if Root can take five wickets in Ahmedabad what could Bess do given the chance and some first innings runs to play with. He should play for Stuart Broad, who really has contributed nothing in India, and would rebalance the side with two spinners.

James Anderson bowled only 13 overs in the match, his lowest workload in a single game (apart from when he was injured after bowling four overs in the opening Ashes Test of 2019) and should be able to go again, the same for Jofra Archer, who would then be given the new ball and added responsibility. It would arm Root with the attack that took 20 wickets to win the first Test.

Pope is the interesting call. He has never played at three for Surrey in first-class cricket and England have made the mistake of batting him too high before but he is a much more mature cricketer now and tipped by Ben Stokes a week ago to break all-time records.

Moving to three and swapping with Jonny Bairstow this week is a move that would give a look at a potential future. Pope is too good to spend years batting behind Root and Stokes. It is hard to see Bairstow at 31 as anything more than a stop gap. Will he even be available for the first series of the summer against New Zealand or will he be playing in the IPL?

A player who was picked apart by Australia’s pace in 2019 and left out of the side because of a problem caused by adapting his technique for one-day cricket is surely not a No 3 in Australia.

Instead it is time to look at Pope and challenge him to deliver on his enormous potential. One Test now and then the summer batting at three could solve a real problem for England before going to Australia. The plan was always to promote him up the order, now at least gives him a good run before the Ashes.

Bairstow’s angry hundred in Colombo in 2018 clouds his figures at three where he averages 33. He thrashed a fifty in Antigua too on a poor pitch but it was not a good innings. He looked to be finding form in Sri Lanka before going home, but pitching him in at three to face Ashwin and Axar with no match practice was an impossible challenge.

Bairstow has spent his career moving up and down the order. It feels like he has one more shot at a Test career and it is not at three. Bairstow can still be a dangerous player, a game changer at six, but No3 requires a batsman with the ability to play more than one hand and Pope has the talent. Like all players, he is struggling with Ashwin, but he has better footwork than Bairstow and promotion could give him the confidence to commit to his shots in a way that was missing in the third Test.

Ian Chappell, writing for ESPN Cricinfo, this week said Pope was too tentative but picked him out as the one England batsman to use his feet rather than fall back on the sweep, reverse sweep to force a bowler off his length. Pope has class. Time to give him his wings.

Monty Panesar

This England team are now discovering just why touring India is one of the toughest appointments in cricket.

The days when England had reeled off six straight wins away from home, and delivered one of their greatest victories in Chennai, feels a long time ago: ever since the first session of the second Test, when Rohit Sharma batted beautifully, the momentum has leaked away from Joe Root’s team.

You can see the shift in the body language of the England side and Root more specifically. It was there in the second Test when he was bowling after tea, and seemed to be thinking to himself: “How have my spinners not bowled out India for under 250?”

Since then, his frustrations have been compounded by so many things - poor batting, umpiring decisions and, most recently, the pitch in Ahmedabad, when he must have felt duped by seeing the pink ball swing and seam around on the practice wicket, only for it to turn square from day one when the Test started.

It all goes to show how quickly momentum can shift in Test cricket, and in India in particular. Things have a habit of running away from a visiting captain there - wickets fall quickly, crowds get noisy (and the presence of a big one in Ahmedabad was definitely a factor in England’s frazzled thinking) and you start making bad decisions.

The question is, what can you do about it? First things first: please, Joe, pick two spinners for the fourth Test. The old saying “deceive me once, shame on you; deceive me twice, shame on me” holds true here. When it comes to the pitch, just think dust bowl, dust bowl, dust bowl - and pick Dom Bess alongside Jack Leach.

Second, England must fix their technical problems facing spin. At the moment too many players are getting caught on the crease, trapped lbw by balls that skid on. We faced a similar problem in Dubai in 2009, so Kevin Pietersen suggested - during practice - that all the batsmen should take off their pads and play spin with our bats.

I would send down ball after ball into the rough, and the batters would do just that. Maybe the current crop of players should do the same.

The third issue is psychological. This is a largely young, inexperienced team who need to show some aggression in the next Test. This could, after all, be a crucial moment in their careers. Ed Smith, the chairman of selectors, will not be observing their fitness grades - instead he will want to see if they can turn the tour in England’s favour with the strength of their performances.

It will not be easy. India are on top and things just feel like they are slipping away: just look at how Ollie Pope, so calm and composed when he was scoring big runs early in his Test career, now looks hurried, misplaced and disorganised.

But these young players - Pope, Dom Sibley, Zak Crawley - have to look at this game as a glorious opportunity, a chance to show the team are not wholly reliant on Root on these kinds of pitches and to show backbone in the face of an Indian team who are on a roll.

In terms of other selection issues, I believe Rory Burns being recalled would help with rotating the strike. The left hand-right hand combination disturbs the bowling’s length and line.

Yes, Burns is a left-hander and Ravi Ashwin has taken over 200 Test wickets against them - including Burns three times in this series. Burns was caught at slip in the second Test, with his bat angle going towards mid-wicket. He just needs his trigger to go towards the umpire and point his toe towards mid-off - this will allow his bat to go towards the line of the ball. England should give him another chance and prove to the selectors he can learn from his mistakes.

I would also give Olly Stone another chance. He was a revelation during the second Test, showing heart, skill and the passion to bowl fast. Jofra Archer is in the team to bowl fast but he is a rhythm bowler and if his timing isn’t great, his pace drops to 130-135 kph. I would rest Archer and give Stone another chance.

You always want your middle order batsmen to be attacking so I think Dan Lawrence is a perfect choice at No5. He batted beautifully in Sri Lanka there and is naturally confident. On a turning pitch in the second Test he was coming down the wicket to Axar Patel and lifting the ball over mid-wicket.

His natural approach is to attack against spin and I think batting at five, rather than three, gives him the freedom to express his talent. He hasn’t been successful batting at three for Essex. Can he develop a gameplan like Dom Sibley established in the second Test at Galle?

As for Bess, his honeymoon period is over after he was dropped following an erratic display in the second innings of the first Test. As a country, we tend to treat spinners poorly - think of how quickly the likes of Scott Borthwick and Mason Crane were ditched in the recent past.

Bess should be thinking tactically how to get Indian batsmen out. When he worked with Rangana Herath before the South African Test series, he had a beautiful stock delivery bowled with purpose and he attacked the crease. There was clarity in his mind. He should watch footage of himself bowling during that Test series or even speak to Herath, who made him a better bowler.

Tim Wigmore

It all feels a bit Sydney 2014, so it almost comes as a surprise to realise that the series is still alive: 2-2 would be an exceptional result for England.

For all the focus upon misreading the pitch and picking the wrong team in the third Test, the unsalutary truth is that India are a far superior side to England in these conditions. And Joe Root, remember, won the toss in Ahmedabad. For England to have a chance of putting pressure on India, he must surely do so again.

So what can England do differently? The most pressing need is to stop being 10-2: England’s number threes this series, Dan Lawrence and Jonny Bairstow, have a combined 54 runs at nine apiece. To that end I would recall Rory Burns - his own international career hanging by a thread but the possessor of a fine temperament and another left-hander - and move Zak Crawley down to No 3.

Given how porous England’s lower order has been, I would reluctantly drop Ben Foakes and give the gloves to Jonny Bairstow, who might be reinvigorated by the shift. Forget expediency and potential awkward decisions later; there is a Test match series to save. And while Foakes has shown a doughty defence in his two Tests, the lack of any sense of permanence to England’s tail means there is a need for an aggressor at number seven.

Through no fault of his own, Foakes’ batting has been undermined by the feebleness of the lower order; if Bairstow faces 86 balls in a Test at seven, he will surely score more than the 20 Foakes mustered in the third Test.

Recalling Dom Bess would also have the handy effect of improving the lower order. Yet if there are doubts about his suitability to return to the fray, I would consider handing Amar Virdi, who is officially part of the reserves, a Test debut.

The timing certainly would not be ideal, but - though he would do nothing to improve England’s tail - Virdi is a sharper turner of the ball than Bess, has 45 County Championship wickets at 22.7 apiece since the start of 2019 and has spent the whole tour learning about the demands of Test cricket. And the argument about protecting Virdi can just as easily be extended to Bess: at 22, Virdi is only a year younger.

Scyld Berry

Assuming another turner, but not quite so extreme as the third Test pitch, England have little scope for change left in their batting - Dan Lawrence the lone reserve - but they can rectify the imbalance in their attack. Copious grass before the game, and the pink ball, lured England into playing three seamers - and, in effect, a team of 10 or even nine players.

Let us also assume that Dom Bess’s confidence has been rebuilt so the 23-year-old off-spinner can resume his place. Otherwise England’s spin-bowling coach Jeetan Patel would not have been made a full-time appointment earlier this week.

Another point in favour of Bess’s return is that he would be one of three spinners, alongside Jack Leach and Joe Root. Being the sole spinner on a turner in India, with the Test series there to be levelled, might heap too much stress on Bess in his comeback.

Root this winter has taken eight Test wickets for only 108 runs, so it would be no slight on Bess if Root came on earlier - and hopefully Bess will copy Root in bowling round (not over) the wicket against right-handers much more.

Stuart Broad did not take a wicket in the third Test, having only six overs, but he did not take a wicket in the second Test either when he had plenty of time. It was odd that he and James Anderson were reunited in Ahmedabad rather than alternated. England will surely not make the same mistake again.

Olly Stone, threatening in his pace with the new ball and in his reverse-swing with the old, should not have been dropped after the second Test - certainly not in favour of two bowlers, Broad and Jofra Archer, who do not overtly appear to share his enthusiasm for this contest in the most adverse conditions.

Mark Wood is another contender but has seldom used a new ball while Stone showed fine control with it. And if the pitch is even more under-prepared? Lawrence in, and only one seamer.