There was a moment in South Africa last year when it looked like Jason Roy's place in England's T20 squad was in danger. With so many options to open the batting - and most of them open about his desire to do so - Roy seemed to be under serious pressure: teams were targeting him with left-arm spin and legspin, and By the end of the series, his highest score in his last 10 international innings was 24.
But if the England dressing room had any concerns about Roy's form, he never showed it in public. Instead, he recognized that he needed a longer rope: England's ultra-aggressive brand of limited-overs cricket meant that batsmen would fail more often than they would succeed, and Roy was clearly a fan of the bio-secure bubble. He was suffering from mental stress.
As a result, he gave him as many opportunities as he needed to get back to his form. In India, he finished the series as England's third-highest run-scorer despite rarely appearing settled at the crease, but this summer he has found his groove in style again.
The conditions in the series decider against Pakistan at Emirates Old Trafford did not suit Roy's strength. He scores much faster against fast bowlers than spinners, and prefers to deal with moving balls in the bat than turning the ball; On a slow, turning pitch that has seen more overs of spin in any other T20I among full members in the last seven years, Pakistan packed their attack with two legspinners and a slow left-arm bowler.
But Roy was never intimidated by the idea of teams targeting their weaknesses. After taking down Glamorgan spinners in a Vitality Blast match, he laughed off the idea that dominating the slower bowlers was nothing new to him, before taking a quantum jump to point from Marnus Labuschagne. "Someone has to get you out at some stage, right?" he said. "Sometimes it's in the form of a left-arm spinner. A leggie got me out tonight, right, so I'm sure someone will have something to write about."
Instead, Roy committed to his gameplan in Manchester - gaze a couple of times in the first over and then look to dominate the powerplay - and it paid off. Only Evin Lewis and Quinton de Kock among regular openers have scored faster in the powerplays in T20Is this year (Roy's strike rate in the first six overs is 151.49) and he rarely shows the desire to slow down: When should England bat so deep?
He took Shaheen Shah Afridi's first over for four boundaries - a square drive through the ring, pulls to either side of deep midwicket, and a wrist roll through fine leg to clip the hip - and then turned the spinners. As his best scoring option, he commits to the sweep shot.
Roy sweeps differently than other players. As Niall O'Brien, the former Ireland wicketkeeper, put it, he rotates his hips the most and tends to stay on the balls at his feet rather than going down quickly on one knee, giving him a bit more power and It helps him to place the ball on either side of the boundary-riders. He foiled five of his seven attempts at the shot in the night, and finished the series with a strike rate of exactly 200.
"I think I have a stronger gameplan and am more accurate with my shots," Roy said. "The issues have always been the way I open my innings against spin. Speaking with Liam, who has played a lot of cricket here, [he said] letting the bowler bowl to you can be to your detriment. And let them bowl the dots. You can negate you a little bit. So I was trying to be as active as possible, be it sweeping or reverse-sweeping, and making sure I put a lot of my shots into my shots. was accurate."
Undoubtedly, there will be those who question his decision to try another six off Usman Qadir while being well set up, but to do so misses the point of Roy's role in the England side. With such depth of batting as Liam Livingstone comes down to No. 7 when picking a team, there is no hope of Roy seeing an innings till his conclusion; England sees the balls chewed up and tries to take an innings as a high-risk option rather than finding boundaries. All told, Roy scored 64 off 36; The other eight England batsmen scored 89 of 82 runs between them.
Roy's innings stood in stark contrast to what cost England this decisive game, David Malan's 33-ball 31 in which he struggled badly against spin and scored only two boundaries as the rate climbed. Malan seems to be on borrowed time for this side, having managed to score 268 runs at a strike rate of 114.52 in T20Is as his slow start to an unbeaten 99 in South Africa in December went all the way to England's all-guns- Blazing outlook.
Of course, touch players or anchors still play a role in modern T20s, but chasing middle totals on difficult pitches is a position they have to trump. Instead, Malan was implicated to such an extent that Eoin Morgan tricked him for several tight singles to take him off the strike at the end of the innings.
England white-ball analyst Nathan Lemon has been described as "the world's most valuable T20 cricketer" in an interview last month as "the man who hits three sixes and gets out on the fourth ball every time he goes to the crease". described in. A player who makes an impact every innings. This was the innings that Livingstone attempted to play soon after Malan was dismissed, hitting a six off his first ball and caught deep in the second ball; Like Roy's innings, this seems to underline the fact that Malan is playing a different style of T20 cricket to the rest of this team.