There has been plenty of debate both before and during the men’s Ashes about who should be England’s Test wicketkeeper – Jonny Bairstow or Ben Foakes.
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Several arguments can be put for and against each player, and it’s not a discussion that depends on just them. The strengths, weaknesses, and ideal positions of Zak Crawley, Ben Stokes and others are at play. As is the respective wicketkeeping skills of both players. But none of that concerns us here.
What we’re going to delve into instead is Bairstow’s record both with and without the gloves. General cricketing orthodoxy, and basic common sense, suggest that doing hundreds of squats behind the stumps before facing up in front of them should be a burden on your batting, and for England, that would be a problem: Bairstow was the chief architect of the early stages of the Bazball revolution, carving out a five-innings streak to sit alongside anything in Test history. If that excellence were to be sacrificed, England would want to consider their position again.
Thankfully, however, Bairstow’s record with the gloves is good. In fact, it’s fractionally better than when he doesn’t don the gauntlets, with an average of 37.65 as a wicketkeeper and 36.62 without. Problem solved, then?
Not quite. Dive a bit further into Bairstow’s career, and the picture becomes murkier. First, let’s look at when he has scored runs with the gloves. When playing as England’s designated wicketkeeper, Bairstow averages 52.70 in the first innings of games, with all of his five hundreds as a gloveman coming in this innings. Otherwise, he averages 29.30, with eight fifties in 57 innings. This suggests that the burden of keeping wicket does take its toll, reducing him to half the player. Bairstow has never scored a Test hundred after having kept wicket – this coming from a sample size of 51 Tests.
Without the gloves, his record flips. Bairstow still averages more in the first innings (40.18), but an average of 52.72 in chases shows how he is able to contribute in the second half of matches as well as the first. Given England’s success has often relied on them chasing big totals, and given that big Bairstow runs have often been a part of that, that’s something of a concern.
Still, this isn’t enough to conclude one way or the other, because of how good Bairstow’s first-innings record is when he’s set to keep wicket later in the game. But this fact gets at another complication. It’s impossible to just pick two numbers, compare them, and say that the bigger one proves he’s better with the gloves, since so much else goes into it, including form and conditions.
Bairstow’s early years as a Test cricketer came largely as a specialist bat, when he was still making his way and not yet performing consistently. Between 2012 (the year of his debut) and 2015, he played 21 Tests, keeping wicket in just four of those. He averaged 28.96 without the gloves, and 26.50 with the gloves.
Towards the end of 2015, Jos Buttler was dropped from the Test side, clearing the way for Bairstow to establish himself as England’s keeper. And he delivered in style, with 2016 one of the greatest years any Test keeper has ever had. Bairstow creamed 1,470 runs at 58.80, a world record for a Test keeper in a calendar year, and made his first three Test hundreds. 2017 wasn’t quite on the same level, but an average of 34.31 was a solid return.
For some, this would be case closed. Bairstow only established himself for England when the gloves were his and his alone. But at this point, Bairstow had improved as a batter full stop. In the 2015 County Championship, the last before his elevation, he was unstoppable, averaging 92 with five hundreds, the best of his career to that point by a distance. So some improvement was to be expected. It’s still plausible, therefore, that his annus mirabilis in 2016 wasn’t a result of him taking the gloves, leaving the question open.
In 2018, things took a turn. There were some memorable moments, including a hundred in New Zealand and a 93 against India, but Bairstow averaged less than 30 with the gloves, and was left out of the side in Sri Lanka following the emergence of Ben Foakes. He also suffered two injuries, breaking a finger while keeping wicket and hurting a ligament playing football. After the first of these, he, perhaps unwisely, was retained as a specialist batter and made 0 and 1. After the second, he once again was picked as a specialist batter at No.3, and crashed a memorable hundred against Sri Lanka.
This failed to lead to a long-term resurgence, however, and over 2019 and 2021, when Bairstow’s struggles against straight bowling came to the fore, he had a poor record both with and without the gloves - though it was worse with than without.
By mid-2021, England seemed ready to stick largely with Bairstow as a specialist bat. There was a minor improvement that year, before, in 2022, came a year to outstrip even 2016. Now, in 2023, the gloves are back with him. He has batted in one Test and made 98 runs.
Summing that all up: while Bairstow’s overall numbers are better as a keeper than as a batter, his career numbers follow a more general pattern of his overall form and how well established he was in the side at any given time. When Bairstow switched between having the gloves and not, his numbers without the gloves are, only marginally, better. And when he has made runs with the gloves, it’s the first innings, before any impact can have been felt, that has seen his best work.
This summer may yet answer the question. Despite a few slips behind the stumps in the first Ashes Test, he is set to take the gloves for all five. Carve out a few match-winning scores, and he’ll feel settled in the role once more. But should Bairstow struggle to touch his 2022 levels, it’s a decision Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes may look back on with some regret.
