Pretty good tweet on the situation I think, if you're in the glass half full camp like me.
Still got to hope Root/Brook can put on a good partnership tomorrow though. But certainly feels like they won't
1. Crawley has not had a great time since the start of the summer, but he was our best batter against Australia and India so he deserves more leeway than Pope, who is lucky that there aren’t tons of top order alternatives
2. The spin cupboard is obviously quite bare, Bashir is obviously the one preferred for Tests in SENA nations, so I wouldn’t necessarily read too much into his struggles in Pakistan, but he is clearly a bit of a punt
3. Brook was decent in the last Ashes, he scored some crucial runs such as in the chase at Headingley (his dismissal was a bit silly but he got us most of the way after a sticky start and Woakes and Wood got the job done), but I’m not sure where his reputation as a good player of spin has come from. Albeit any team still preparing roads for England is clinically insane, but you can’t knock the importance of the innings he played at Pindi and Multan, particularly the speed in which he got those runs
4. Stokes has never been good in Asia, and he’s had injuries before, but it does make you think if this is a step too far. He is an area of concern, because he’s not going to be around forever, certainly not as an all-rounder, and as we saw when he couldn’t play against Sri Lanka, it leaves the batting a bit lighter than what we’d like, maybe Carse can do a job at #7, but like with Woakes these days, that seems a bit of a stretch at international level