Few players know for certain when and where their Test debut will come. But for Jordan Cox, November 27 in Christchurch was inked into his diary for months.
Midway through a whirlwind winter which had already seen him travel to Pakistan and the Caribbean, Cox arrived in New Zealand seemingly safe in the knowledge he would receive his first England cap in whites as the only frontline keeper on the tour. The mountain of runs he scored for Essex in his debut season for the club had promoted him to ‘next one in’ status, and after consecutive Test series spent carrying the drinks, when Jamie Smith withdrew from selection to take paternity leave, Cox was ready and waiting.
“I knew Jamie Smith was having his kid,” Cox tells Wisden.com. “Baz said ‘you’re going to be keeping and playing all three Test matches’.”
Giving him the gloves was a serious show of faith in Cox, who hadn’t kept for a year after severely breaking his finger in the 2023 Hundred and isn’t the first-choice keeper for his county. It’s a mark of both the supreme self-assurance Cox possesses and the confidence a nod from Brendon McCullum instills that he was ready to do so.
But, three days out from a debut that was so certain his family and girlfriend’s flights were already booked, a seemingly innocuous ball in the nets brought his build-up to an abrupt halt.
“I was in the nets before the day’s training, probably at about eight o’clock, and it just reared up off a length and hit me straight on the thumb,” Cox says. “I broke my finger before in The Hundred quite badly and I thought, this is painful. I ended up walking back over to the pavilion and I nearly passed out, I got really really dizzy. That’s when I knew it was my body telling me, we’re in a bit of strife here. I had my scans and it came back with three pretty nasty breaks.
Jordan Cox was in line for a Test debut as England's wicketkeeper in the three-match series which begins in Christchurch on Wednesday.
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“To know two months before, to fly there, to have an incredible week in Queenstown playing golf and getting to know the group on a different level, to then getting injured three days before my Test debut, was something I wasn’t ready for… That was probably the hardest thing I’ve had to deal with for sure.”
While the devastation at having a certain debut taken away must have been crushing, another marker of Cox’s confidence is the immediate spin he puts on “the hardest phase of his life”.
“I had two-and-a-half months in Bondi,” he says, laughing off the setback. “I ended up staying out in Australia to see my family, which was a massive bonus for me. It was tough, it was really, really tough. But it’s all about getting back on that horse and trying to achieve what I could have potentially achieved in New Zealand with that debut - making my family proud.”
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Regardless of the bravado, that tour of New Zealand was the sweet-spot Cox was waiting for to break into the Test XI, filling a vacancy that no longer exists. Despite an emergency call put into Durham’s Ollie Robinson after Cox’s injury, Ollie Pope took the gloves for that match in Christchurch and the two after it, putting in a more than passable performance behind the stumps.
As England’s vice captain showed his skill with the gloves, Jacob Bethell showed his at No.3, scoring 260 runs across the series at an average north of 50. His success and Smith’s return leaves McCullum and Co. with a decision over which of three they leave out of their first Test match of the summer. Cox, at this stage, will not figure in their plans, and he knows it.
“I don’t think at this moment in time, if I was in their shoes I probably wouldn’t be that next person in,” he says. “Popey is probably going to bat three again and Bethell will be the next spare batter. But if I go out and score hundreds again next season I’ll be ready for that Test call-up if I get one. But my contract is with Essex, I play for Essex and my duty is to score as many runs as I can with Essex.
“England are at their best, there are people waiting to come in, and fighting for positions. Obviously I would like to be around that squad, but if I’m not then I’ll be fighting hard and scoring as many runs as I can for Essex.”
Scoring runs for Essex was how Cox forced his way into the conversation in the first place. Kent made clear they were “disappointed” at his decision to leave at the end of the 2023 season, and he rubbed salt into the wound by notching his first century at his new home with an 85-ball blitz against his boyhood club. A month later, he showed a previously less-seen side of his skillset, guiding Essex to an unlikely run chase at Edgbaston with an 192-ball 112. His double-hundred a week later at Canterbury gave him his third three-figure score in the first six weeks of the Championship. By the end of the season, Cox had an average of 65.57 in the Championship, and only David Bedingham had scored more runs at a higher average than him.
But while his performances in red-ball cricket are what got him noticed at the beginning of last summer, it’s perhaps more surprising that it wasn’t until the end of that season that a white-ball debut came.
The turnover following England’s T20 World Cup flop provided an opportunity on that front, Cox playing two T20Is against Australia in a side shorn of its biggest names. After biding his time with the red-ball squad against both Sri Lanka and Pakistan, he flew straight from Rawalpindi to the Caribbean, where there was a chance to crack the white-ball format ahead of flying to New Zealand.
However, the three ODIs he played against the West Indies saw his international hopes pegged back. With places up for grabs for England’s Champions Trophy campaign, the series was in effect an audition to be part of McCullum’s next generation of white-ball bankers. But Cox struggled against the short ball, and returned a high score of 17 off 31 from the series. When England named their squads to face India in January, his name was not on the list.
“I’ve still got a lot to work on,” says Cox of the Caribbean tour. “Unfortunately, at the time of the West Indies series and my ODI debut, I hadn’t been playing cricket for two and a half months. I hadn’t picked up bowlers running in, facing bowlers in a match situation, I’d just been having nets really. To then go to the West Indies and face it out playing high quality bowlers, I probably wasn’t as ready as I would have liked to have been.
“That’s why last year when I got picked for the Test squad to be a back-up batter against Sri Lanka, Baz said ‘I want you to be around the squad and get to know the lads’, and ‘I said I really want to go back and play for Essex and be game ready so if someone does get injured, I’m 100 per cent ready. I don’t want to be running drinks for two, three, four weeks and not get a chance. I would happily drive back down, play for Essex and then drive back’.”
Regardless of the reasons behind his failure in the Caribbean, at the start of the winter Cox was on the cusp of breaking into all three of England’s sides. At its end, he’s further away from all of them. But, what he has in his favour ahead of a packed summer – and following winter – of international cricket, is that the skills which made him such an attractive option last year are all still there. He just needs to show them off again.
“If you score a lot of runs it’s going to be difficult not to pick you,” says Cox. “I’m a decent fielder, I’m a decent keeper and obviously a decent batter. I’ve got more strings to my bow so if I do play in an England game and they need me to keep then I can keep, if they need me to bat higher up the order then I can do that.
“If I get a call, I get a call. I’m not going to think ‘this is going to be my chance,’ because then if you don’t get the call you’re going to be devastated. I’ll wait and see. It’s going to be an interesting next couple of months and I feel like Test and white-ball cricket overlap a lot this year so there will be opportunities around. But also there are some quality players around the circuit at the minute so I have to be scoring a lot of runs to take that opportunity.”
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