MORGAN'S RUM RUN

"'Jeeves,' I recollect saying, on returning to the apartment, 'who was the fellow who on looking at something felt like somebody looking at something? I learned the passage at school but it has escaped me.'

'I fancy the individual you have in mind, sir, is the poet Keats, who compared his emotions on first reading Chapman's Homer to those of stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific.' 'The Pacific, eh?' 'Yes, sir. And all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.' 'Of course. It all comes back to me. Well, that's how I felt this afternoon on being introduced to Miss Pauline Stoker.'"

PG Wodehouse must have liked that joke. He used it again when reviewing one of George MacDonald Frazer's Flashman novels: "Now I understand what that 'when a new planet swims into his ken' excitement is all about," he wrote, quoting Keats again. It is being recycled here for three reasons. The first two are quite sound; the third, and sadly the most important, is rather more tenuous. Firstly, it's filled up a chunk of this onerously empty page. Secondly, there is obviously no better way to ease into a grey winter Tuesday than by savouring a slice of Wodehouse's whimsy. And finally, Wodehouse was a renowned cricket fan – Jeeves was named after Percy Jeeves, the Warwickshire all-rounder – and Bertie Wooster's sentiments on first seeing Pauline Stoker were, I suspect, akin to those of most English cricket fans the first time they saw Eoin Morgan bat.

To put the same thing a different way, "it was like seeing the future and realising it worked", as Stephen Brenkley wrote of the 19-year-old Ben Hollioake in 1997 when he became England's youngest Test debutant for 48 years. That line is pithier, but not wittier, and crucially, would have eaten up less of my word count.

Morgan swam into my ken when, aged 22, he made 161 off 136 balls against Kent in an FP Trophy match at Canterbury. The press was there to watch Phillip Hughes, another unorthodox young lefty who was busy making a name for himself as a bright young thing. Hughes was clean bowled, in the most embarrassing fashion by Wayne Parnell for 12. In the press box, heads slumped.

They picked up again when Morgan, who had, somewhat surprisingly, just been named in England's provisional 30-man squad for the 2009 World Twenty20, came in and unfurled a series of spectacular sweep shots. One in particular, a kind of reverse-drive played off a delivery from Rob Ferley that drifted down the leg-side, had never been seen before or since. We scurried down to talk to him after the match, and he blithely dismissed the shot as something he "does all the time in the nets".

Over the course of the next two years, while Hughes faded from view, Morgan played a string of brilliant innings for England's limited overs teams. In 39 ODIs in that time, he scored 50 or more in a match England went on to win eight times, and did the same thing twice more in the space of 16 T20 matches. "He looks a solid player and he can control the pace of the innings quite nicely," said Sachin Tendulkar of Morgan. "I've not seen much of him in the longer version of the game but from what I have seen in T20 and one-day matches he knows how to control the game. It's all about confidence and all about positive energy flowing through your body."

And this is the same man who is, they say, about to be dropped for the third Test against Pakistan. Some commentators are even speculating that, after, 15 matches, Morgan's Test career might be over, though these have been the first Tests he has played overseas. After their abject batting performances against Pakistan, the only change England can make is to bring in Ravi Bopara and allow him a run in the team for the tour to Sri Lanka. The last time they did that – in 2007, when Bopara was picked ahead of Owais Shah on England's last tour to that country – he made 42 runs in five innings, including three consecutive ducks. Both Bopara and Morgan are dogged by a lingering scepticism that they are not quite right for England's No6 slot. Neither is blessed with the watertight defensive technique that Paul Collingwood used so well when England were in similarly tight spots in years gone by. At No6 Collingwood was a firefighter, at its best Morgan's game makes him more of a firestarter.

In his first innings in Dubai, Morgan arrived at the wicket with England 42 for four; three balls later they were 43 for five, Saeed Ajmal having just dismissed Ian Bell and Kevin Pietersen in the same over. Morgan took guard against Ajmal, and, off his third ball played a premeditated sweep for two runs. The fact he played it so early in his innings showed just how keen and comfortable he is using that shot, which was, after all, the one which first made his name when he scored that 161. He played it twice more in that innings of 24, and on the third occasion it got him out when he was done by a ball that skidded straight on.

The stats show that Morgan has not tried to play a single sweep in this series since. It is almost as though he has been ordered, or decided himself, to pack up and put away one of his key scoring shots. Instead, for a total of 66 deliveries in three innings, he has looked lost as he tries to develop a game he imagines – or has been instructed – is more appropriate for Test cricket. It has left him looking unsure and unsteady as a landlubber caught at sea in the roaring forties. He pokes and prods around his off-stump, and has been caught behind twice, and bowled once. All that "confidence and all about positive energy" has vanished. He is not in control of himself, never mind the game.

The sweep may not be, as Mike Selvey astutely writes, a shot used by the best players of spin, but Morgan is too imaginative and creative a player to be hidebound by such orthodoxies. He is a man who needs to play his natural game, and that involves playing the sweep, as risky as the shot might be. It is not by accident that he earned a reputation as one of the team's best players of spin bowling. Like Pietersen, Morgan seems to have become obsessed with thinking about how he should play, rather than thinking about how he does play.

Right now the disparity between Morgan's performances in limited-overs and Test cricket is so great that it feels as though he is shaping up to be the next Michael Bevan, a brilliant one-day player whose flaws mean he in incapable of mastering Test cricket. With Bevan though, the suspicion was that his problems were technical – he could not find a method to cope with short-pitched bowling. Morgan's troubles seem to be in his head, as he struggles to find a way to adapt his game to the demands of Test cricket. England fans will have to hope it ain't necessarily so, because he is too talented for his Test career to be over already.

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