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Old Trafford, July 2023. England were 2-1 down and on the brink of losing a home Ashes. Australia had scored 317 in the first innings. Crawley and Duckett walked out to bat. 56.5 overs later, Crawley was clean bowled by Cameron Green. 189 runs. 182 balls. Strike rate of 103.85. Before this innings, across 59 innings, his average stood at 29.2, well below where an established Test opener would want to be. Yet Crawley went out and played the type of innings that defines series. The match ended in a draw thanks to rain, but he had laid the marker and repaid the faith the management had shown in him.
The selection talk around Crawley had been running for a while. Picked early at 22, dropped, recalled under McCullum, and then given more rope than most England openers of the modern era. He had been told to “chase moments”. The recognition, made out loud, was that he was not picked in expectation of becoming a consistent run-scorer, and the management did not need him to be.
In May 2026, the lack of runs caught up to him. After a lean winter in Australia and a tough return to Kent’s top order in Division Two, a new selection panel headed by Marcus North made the decision to move on. England named their squad for the first Test against New Zealand without Crawley. It was the first time in the Bazball era that England had moved on.
What follows is about that bet, what England were buying, what it cost, and what the end of it tells us about how Test teams pick.
The numbers split open
Across his Test career, Crawley averaged 31. At home he averaged 37.6. Away from England, it was 26.5. There are a couple of things to pick out.
Against Australia at home he averaged 53.3, all during the 2023 Ashes. That’s the type of series that we’ve established England pick him for. The negatives, however, come in clusters. Against New Zealand at home: 10 innings, average 10.8. Away in New Zealand: 11 innings, average 10.09. Across two countries, four series, 21 innings, Crawley scored at the level of a tail-ender.
Part of the decision to keep picking him was based on Crawley’s height, and his suitability to Australian conditions for the 2025/26 Ashes. Crawley once again walked away with a middling average of 27.3, which sums up his career.
The bet
So why did England persist?
England persisted because the conviction camp wasn’t picking Crawley to score runs. They were picking him to seize moments.
Crawley’s first innings of the Bazball overseas era came at Rawalpindi in December 2022. He scored 122 off 111, putting on 233 with Duckett for the first wicket. Six months later, opening the 2023 Ashes at Edgbaston, the first ball of the series he crunched through the covers for four, a moment England fans remember vividly. A month after that, with the series 2-1 down and on the edge, came the 189 at Old Trafford.
Then England toured India in early 2024. Crawley came back with four fluent half-centuries on tracks that broke most touring batters. The opening partnership with Duckett had India on the back foot for stretches of a series England never quite won.
A career strike rate of 70 since 2022, against the mean strike rate of all Test openers since 2001 sitting at 51.08. That tempo gap is the Bazball offering in one number. Crawley played the role the management asked him to: not as a run-scorer but as a tone-setter. When the bet hit, it hit big. When it didn’t, England wore the cost in a way few other Test teams would have.
Selection across the eras
Crawley can be used as a reference point for selection ideologies across the eras.
The era we’ve just lived through, early Bazball, was one extreme of a pendulum that has been swinging for a hundred years. England’s stance on selection has changed massively over time. The current regime has settled, picking Emilio Gay based on his performances for Durham over the last few years. The reason Bazball exists was one of England’s worst stretches, under Chris Silverwood, which had county runs at the forefront of selection. It culminated in the 4-0 Ashes hounding in 2021/22. Ed Smith’s approach ran from 2018 to 2021 and was heavily systematic and data driven. He was determined to pick players with potential, Jos Buttler in 2018 being his most influential selection, which came with controversy. He believed in having positive intent and wrote openly about having “the courage of conviction” in selection, which you could perhaps see a rebrand of in early Bazball.
Before Smith, selection ran through committee. James Whitaker held the role from 2013 to 2018, Geoff Miller from 2008 to 2013. Both selected by panel, both leaning on county runs and seasoned judgement rather than declared ideology. Miller’s tenure saw England climb to number one in the Test rankings in 2011. Whitaker’s, less so. Neither would have picked a player on six first-class matches and a release point.
Go back fifty years from the start of Bazball and you arrive at a sport that wasn’t fully professional. The amateur status that had governed English cricket since the 1600s was only abolished in January 1963. Until then, Test sides were drawn from two pools: Gentlemen, who claimed expenses, and Players, who took wages. Captaincy was almost always reserved for amateurs. Len Hutton, in 1952, was the first professional to captain England in a Test in the twentieth century. He won the Ashes the following year, ending a nineteen-year drought. The selectors had picked him because no amateur was good enough. Conviction, in that era, looked like overruling the class system.
Pitches in this period were uncovered. Rain could ruin a wicket overnight; bowlers like Derek Underwood built careers on surfaces dried out by Saturday afternoon sun. County averages were not comparable. A batter’s record depended partly on which weekends it rained. Selection on numbers alone was impossible. Selectors picked on what they had seen and what they trusted.
Go back another fifty years, to the turn of the twentieth century, and selection was a club. Plum Warner played for the Gentlemen twenty-four times between 1897 and 1919, then became an England selector. The panels were drawn from MCC and reflected which counties held influence. Picks were made by men who had played with each other at Oxford or Cambridge twenty years earlier. Whether a player was selected often depended on whether he was known to the right people.
So when England picked Crawley in 2020, kept picking him through troughs, and let go in 2026, they were doing what every selection panel before them has done: weighing what the numbers said against what they believed. The weights have shifted across eras. The question has not.
The verdict
So what’s the verdict on the bet?
The conviction camp was right about Crawley’s ceiling. The 122 at Rawalpindi happened. The 189 at Old Trafford happened. The four fluent fifties in India happened. England picked him to play innings that bent Test matches, and across four years he played enough of them to justify the brief he was given.
The conviction camp was wrong about how often the ceiling would show. Across 117 innings, Crawley averaged 31. Against New Zealand, 21 innings at 10.43. The trough years outnumbered the peak ones, and the gap between them never narrowed. The bet didn’t fail because Crawley couldn’t play. It strained because most days, he didn’t.
The conviction camp was right to end the bet in 2026. Four years was the runway. At the end of it, the question had its answer. A new selection panel, with county form back at the centre, picked Emilio Gay. The pendulum moved.
None of this settles whether conviction selection is the right way to pick a Test side. It is one way. Every era has had to choose between trusting what it can measure and trusting what it can see. Crawley’s career is the longest, cleanest modern artefact of one of those choices. The bet ran its course. The pendulum will swing again.
What we’re honest about
A note on the numbers. Everything in this piece is descriptive: raw averages, raw splits, raw strike rates. Crawley’s career has been read here against the bet England placed on him, not against what a properly adjusted model would say. The adjusted version, opposition-strength, venue, the shrinkage that pulls small samples toward the mean, comes when Fine Margins v1 launches on August 12. The conclusions above sit in the small world of what the numbers plainly show. The large world question, whether the model would have flagged Crawley earlier and how loudly, is for another piece.