How high is Josh Hull’s ceiling? These are the sort of questions that keep the 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 ride-on lawn mower? Never mind averages and strike rates, this is the good stuff.
But anyway – just 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 picked for a surprise Test debut a couple of weeks ago. If he’s that tall, you’re probably thinking, then he needs a high ceiling. Quite likely a “massive” one, as his captain, Ollie Pope, put it in the build-up to his first England appearance.
Does it have any nice cornicing, though? And what about the paintwork? Presumably an ornate light fitting is out of the question, with headspace at such a premium.
You might be wondering what this has to do with Hull’s potential as a Test cricketer – let’s just have a look at his numbers and decide whether he’s any good. But this isn’t how the game works in England anymore, not under Brendon McCullum’s Holistic Cricket Wellbeing Programme (Golf Module optional). Selection is now about attributes and moments. Zak Crawley is our guy to open – manifest it, brother! Shoaib Bashir is a tall spinner with huge hands – get him on a plane to India!
Now we have Hull, who had taken two wickets at 182.5 for his county this season, but has size 15 feet and a massive ceiling. And to be fair to Rob Key, McCullum and Co, this Jedi mind-trick stuff seems to be working out: Hull now averages 30.33 in Test cricket, compared to 84.54 in the County Championship.
So what’s next? It turns out that, despite his enormous ceiling (as previously mentioned), Hull’s release point is slightly lower than Stuart Broad’s was – somewhere around the level you would hang a nice portrait in your hallway. England do like their raw data, so this will have doubtless been spotted. A plan may already be in place, involving yoga and visualisation techniques. Or maybe some time in the nets. You know, whatever works.
And then it’s onwards and upwards, hopefully accompanied by statistics that go through the roof in the right way. Because only in the fullness of time will we come to know whether Josh Hull has the fixtures and fittings to accompany his truly stratospheric ceiling.
Of course, despite all the attributes and moments, not to mention scintillating entertainment for Joe Public when Pope opted to bowl spin for a bit when the light was bad, England lost the Oval Test to Sri Lanka. Afterwards, Joe Root explained the team’s failure in the following terms: “Coldplay can’t be No. 1 every week.” Which seems to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how the music industry works, as well as provide an interesting insight into Root’s musical tastes (are such bedwetters even allowed on the Baz boombox?) And, as far as analogies go, it also fails to explain why England have spent exactly zero weeks at No. 1 (on either the ICC rankings or the World Test Championship table) since McCullum took control of the playlist two years ago.
Elsewhere on the charts, meanwhile, Pakistan are still playing the old hits: dysfunction, hubris and farce. Barely a year on from Mickey Arthur minting “The Pakistan Way”, his replacement, Jason Gillespie, is discovering that the only way is down, as a 2-0 home defeat to Bangladesh extended their losing streak under Shan Masood’s captaincy to five Tests in a row. Afterwards, Masood attempted to put his team’s struggles into a context everyone can understand. “You can’t prepare for science and then sit a maths exam,” he said. “If you’re being tested for maths, you study maths. To play red-ball cricket, you must play red-ball cricket.” The PCB’s response, meanwhile, has been to come up with an entirely new curriculum in the form of the Champions Cup – proving themselves once again to be top of the class in shambling ineptitude.
