Alex Hales is destructive – and exactly what England’s T20 batting order requires

Of course, he was a world-class reserve. He has six ODI centuries and Jason Roy, with 180 against Australia in 2018, is the only Englishman to have made a higher score than Hales’s 171 against Pakistan in 2016. Had he remained in the squad, there might have been less angst during the tournament when Roy damaged a hamstring but a top six of Roy, Jonny Bairstow, Joe Root, Eoin Morgan, Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler was well-established and, indeed, performing very well.

The same cannot be said of the T20 international batting right now in a side that have been struggling, losing nine of 13 T20 matches since beating Sri Lanka in Sharjah at last year’s World Cup. And when England recently lost two openers in a day – Roy’s almost compassionate dropping after a horrid summer was being announced at about the time that his designated replacement, Bairstow, was injuring his leg on the golf course – it was a logical decision to summon the 33-year-old Hales, who was a fixture in the T20 side in 2019, from purdah.

England need him, despite the promise that Phil Salt has shown recently. Hales is one of the most experienced T20 players in the world – naming all the sides he has represented, particularly since he gave up red-ball cricket in 2018, is a pub quiz question that requires some encyclopaedic knowledge to answer – and he is also one of the most destructive hitters at the top of the order.

This year nobody has scored more than Hales’s 1,271 runs at 34.35 across the world of T20 cricket. They have come at a rattling lick of 161.70 too.

Despite his long international absence, only Morgan and Buttler have scored more runs in T20s for England. And only Buttler, Dawid Malan and Liam Livingstone have also scored international T20 centuries, with Hales’s unbeaten 116 against Sri Lanka, perhaps crucially in this conversation, coming in a T20 World Cup in 2014.

With Buttler in Pakistan for the seven-match T20 series but not yet fit, it may be that Hales and Salt open together. Salt looks set to take the wicketkeeping gloves too, which may raise the intriguing but ultimately unlikely possibility of his doing so when Buttler returns, as was the arrangement for Manchester Originals in The Hundred this season, reducing the time wasted this summer while the captain was making his way from his keeping spot to talk to his bowlers.

But it will surely not take too much evidence for Hales to be opening with Buttler at the World Cup in Australia next month. There is much to play for in the series, which begins in Karachi today (Tuesday), even if there are 20 players in Pakistan (11 of whom have played in the Pakistan Super League), with four of them – Will Jacks, Tom Helm, Luke Wood and Jordan Cox – uncapped, and another, Olly Stone, without a T20 cap. None of those five are in the World Cup squad.

Of those in that squad of 15, Stokes, Livingstone and Chris Jordan are absent from this series, while Chris Woakes and Mark Wood are returning from injuries and unlikely to play before the final three matches in Lahore. Reece Topley pulled out of the latter stages of The Hundred to ensure his fitness for this tour but is battling an ankle niggle.

The tall left-armer Topley had an excellent summer for England in white-ball cricket, taking 17 wickets at 17.17 in ten home matches (five ODIs and five T20s), and it will be fascinating to see how England’s strongest line-up of bowlers pans out, because, like the batsmen, as a group they laboured for form, particularly in the middle overs of an innings. With the leg-spinner Adil Rashid missing half of the summer’s matches because of his Hajj pilgrimage and then not finding his best form upon return, it showed how much England rely upon him.

Injuries were a problem, of course, with a bevy of seamers – Woakes, Mark Wood, Stone, Jofra Archer, Saqib Mahmood and Tom Curran – all missing the whole of England’s white-ball summer, while Tymal Mills (a travelling reserve for the World Cup, along with Richard Gleeson and Liam Dawson) missed part of it. In the first four matches of this series Gleeson, Stone, Helm and Luke Wood can push their claims for future recognition, while David Willey and Sam Curran can drive for places in the World Cup XI.

How much opportunity batsmen Jacks, Cox and Ben Duckett are afforded remains to be seen as England juggle the demands of the present, in terms of a hugely significant upcoming tournament, and the future. But they, along with Salt and Harry Brook, are all hugely talented players, evidence again of England’s deep white-ball resources.

It has been a feature of the Buttler and Matthew Mott regime that they have mostly preferred to balance their side with an extra bowler rather than another batter, which was the case under Morgan, and that may not bode well for Salt and Brook, who would surely be in line for that batting spot.

As it is, we can probably expect a top seven of Hales, Buttler, Malan, Stokes, Ali, Livingstone and Sam Curran when the World Cup arrives. Only four of them are available on Tuesday, and all have points to make, especially Ali, who is of Pakistani heritage.

His paternal grandfather came from the village of Dadyal in Azad Kashmir and to captain the side while Buttler watches on until fit, 17 years after England last visited Pakistan, will be truly memorable.

Ali has captained England in four previous T20 matches and won only one of them. He will be keen to improve his own fortunes, as well as those of a side that really should be much better than the results they have produced this year.

– The Times

Originally published as Alex Hales is destructive – and exactly what England’s T20 batting order requires