England opener Alex Lees growing in stature ahead of Headingley homecoming

Alex Lees, England’s improving opener, will be going home for the third Test against New Zealand. Headingley is where he grew up, and rapidly, matured beyond his years.

Lees captained the Yorkshire Academy and Second XI, and was propelled into leading Yorkshire’s 20-over and 50-over teams at the age of 22. It was a well-intentioned appointment by the head coach Jason Gillespie but, as everyone can now see, the white-ball game is not Lees’s strongest format and the appointment diverted his red-ball career off track.

But, rather like his England captain Ben Stokes, Lees has been through plenty of vicissitudes and has emerged on the other side, aged 29, much the stronger for it. And like Stokes, and Jonny Bairstow too, he is in a sense re-paying his late father, for Lees’s dad was a busy man who yet found time to give his young son all the batting practice he wanted in the garden of their home outside Halifax.

In the West Indies, in his debut series, amid all the uncertainties that had engulfed English cricket, Lees tended to be stiff, strokeless and statuesque: he survived, but little more than that, scoring 126 runs off 460 balls. At Trent Bridge, in only the fifth Test of his career, he began to bat with an authority that hinted at the monumental.

England’s historic run-chase was achieved in a hail-storm of boundaries, but the two most important fours were the ones that Lees drove off the first two balls of England’s second innings, which Tim Southee pitched up expectantly and swung into the left-hander. The Lees of his debut series would have poked at them; the Lees under the leadership of Stokes and Brendon McCullum crunched them through the covers in the most emphatic of statements: we are going for the runs, and after those two strokes we will always be up with the rate.

England hit 12 sixes in their magnificent run-chase and, again, the most important one was arguably not one of the seven slammed by Jonny Bairstow, or the four by Stokes, but the one by Lees. If New Zealand were going to bowl England out on a dry fifth-day pitch, their offspinner Michael Bracewell was the one to do it: so Lees sallied forth to drive him straight into the Radcliffe Road stands, confident of no recriminations if he failed in attempting what was best for the team.

Now Lees is securing his place, having scored 156 runs off 315 balls in this series, including his maiden 50, a question is being asked: why does he looks back at his bat as the bowler runs in? Paul Farbrace, who coached at Yorkshire when Lees was there and is now Warwickshire’s director of cricket, can supply the answer.

The tendency for someone of Lees’s physique, big and tall as he is for an opener, is for his head to fall towards the offside when he pushes on to his front foot. According to Farbrace, Lees evolved his method of standing up straight and looking at his bat to stop this happening, to help him stand tall. It is a simple solution to which he stubbornly adheres, stubbornness being the essential trait of an England Test opener. Add in a couple of tweaks to his footwork by England’s batting coach Marcus Trescothick, who was a left-handed opener of similar build, and Lees looks the part.

In Australia last winter Lees captained England Lions in their “A” Test against Australia. You can understand why he has been a captain for much of his career when he picks up a ladybird in his batting crease with his finger and transports it to safer pastures. How considerate. He failed as an opening batsman in that match, but in the nets at Brisbane he impressed James Anderson and Stuart Broad, who put his name forward as the candidate to succeed Rory Burns and Haseeb Hameed.

A second batsman who will be returning to Headingley as a home from home is New Zealand’s captain Kane Williamson, who has done fine service as a Yorkshire overseas player. He missed the second Test with Covid, and has been injured for most of the last year with a right elbow strain. New Zealand want Williamson back too because his replacement, Tom Latham, seems impeded by the captaincy rather than inspired by it.

Williamson needs a big score to strengthen his reputation, as well as New Zealand’s hold on the World Test Championship title, having gone 2-0 down in this series. In his seven Tests so far in England, he has averaged only 29; in four Tests in South Africa he has averaged 21 and, in another four in Sri Lanka, 26. To seal his status as New Zealand’s finest ever batsman, ahead of Martin Crowe, he requires a more rounded Test record.