Dan Lawrence still has shots to play after missing his Test opening

Cliff Notes – Dan Lawrence still has shots to play after missing his Test opening

• Dan Lawrence’s brief stint as an opener for England resulted in a disappointing average of 20.00, leading to his exclusion from subsequent tours despite his prior success in the County Championship.
• Despite the challenges faced during his opening role, Lawrence remains optimistic about future opportunities, expressing a desire to contribute in both Test and white-ball formats for England.

Dan Lawrence still has shots to play after missing his Test opening

The England Test set-up under Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes have given plenty of new opportunities to players. But for Dan Lawrence, his three-match stint as an opener last summer might rank as their biggest hospital pass.

With Zak Crawley ruled out of the Sri Lanka series with a broken finger, England decided to insert Lawrence at the top of the order. He had been the spare batter for a while, at home and overseas. Including the tour of India at the start of 2024, when he was always one of the first to bat in the nets, before toiling away with his offspin for the rest of those sessions. This chance, it felt, to them – and him – was no less than he deserved for waiting this turn.

As a batter who made his name as a dynamic presence in the middle order for Essex and Surrey – and occasionally for England across 11 previous caps – whose opening history in first-class cricket was limited to five innings out of 177, it went about as well as expected. Lawrence finished a skittish series averaging 20.00 from six innings and was subsequently left out for the tours of Pakistan and New Zealand.

It was a tough way to go, particularly as spots opened up in England’s engine-room during the winter. Considering the plethora of openers churning out runs last summer in the domestic game, there were more suitable options out there. From the outside at least, it seemed as if the selectors were handing Lawrence an olive branch covered in thorns. Not that he sees it that way. Were it presented to him again, he would grasp it all the same.

“No, I disagree,” says Lawrence, without hesitation. “I think I would have felt hard done by had I not gone and opened the batting, having been around the team for that long.

“If someone says ‘do you want to go and open the batting for England?’ I don’t think it’s an unfair thing. It’s an honour and a really exciting thing to go and do. It didn’t pan out, but if it did, then who knows where I would be right now.

“I’ve said before that, if England asked me to bat number 11, I would. It’s everyone’s dream to play for England. Although it was a position that was a little bit alien to me, I got the chance to play and I would have been pretty silly to turn it down.”

Moonlighting in an unfamiliar role was not helped by a heavy diet of the shortest white-ball format heading into the first Sri Lanka Test at Emirates Old Trafford on August 21.

Dan Lawrence played an enterprising innings Getty Images

Lawrence had been in sound red-ball form, two centuries and three fifties among 584 runs (at 53.09) in the first nine matches of the County Championship into the start of July. From that point on, he was on London Spirit duty, captaining a tough campaign in the men’s Hundred on spicy Lord’s deck, eventually finishing bottom of the pile with just a single win.

It also did not help that, for the first time in Lawrence’s career, he approached the opening stint with a different mindset: an unfamiliar sense of doubt brought on by trying to adhere to traditional norms which were at odds with Lawrence’s wristy, renegade stylings.

“When I went into it, my nick wasn’t great. We had played on a few challenging surfaces in the Hundred. I didn’t have a lot of rhythm and no four-day cricket going into it. I’m not using that as an excuse. I didn’t feel quite myself and with only a three-game stretch to prove a point. Perhaps I was a little bit too desperate to do well.

“I weirdly felt quite calm. When we did the anthems, I knew had to go to bat in five minutes’ time, and I actually felt alright. What I struggled with was the balance of wanting to play a certain style, which is really aggressive, and the other part in my head saying ‘you’re an opener, you need to see off the new ball’. Not doing it as much as I would have liked, it’s something I wasn’t quite I used to. I battled with a few demons in my head wanting to be aggressive, then pulling back when I just wish I was really aggressive the whole way through.

“If I had just been free and played my shots, which I like doing – and when I’m playing my best and I do play with a free style – it might have been a different story.”

There is a lot to be said for that desperation. Lawrence played in Joe Root’s last series as captain in the Caribbean, putting on a fairly decent showing with 197 runs across the three matches against West Indies, albeit with just one statement innings of 91 in the second Test at Bridgetown.

Both Root and incoming captain Stokes left the tour praising Lawrence’s work, but he soon found himself back on the outside looking in. Understandably, FOMO took hold, not least because his natural rhythms are more in step with the current ethos compared to conservatism he came into when making his Test debut at the start of 2021.

Dan Lawrence steered Desert Vipers’ chase ILT20

“It was obviously frustrating to watch,” Lawrence admits of spending the first seasons of Bazball on the sidelines. “It was really exciting and a breath of fresh air for English cricket. Rightly or wrongly, we played the game in a more traditional fashion in the years that I started.

“My game was more suited to the more aggressive style of play and the style of cricket we were perhaps lacking when I was playing. It was frustrating, but I was happy for the lads that they were being really free and enjoying their time playing for England.

“Baz and Stokesy run a brilliant ship. It’s a brilliant balance of when you’re away from cricket enjoying and not thinking about cricket too much, then when you’re there, your business is your business. You get it done and have some fun along the way. It’s a great environment and, from the results they’ve got, something is working.”

Lawrence’s last Test innings came at the Kia Oval; a chaotic run-a-ball 35 (his highest score of the series) was governed, he says, by a “sod it” attitude to try and “give it a smack” after a month of hesitancy. He enjoyed it, though not the cavalier caught-behind dismissal that brought it all to an end. Despite the fact this era ascibes more to the view that players should be given time to work things out, he figured that knock would be it. “I thought ‘if it is my last innings, I want to go out on my own terms’.”

The journey to return to the international fold also starts at the Kia Oval as Lawrence embarks on his second year in Surrey colours. The county’s push for a fourth consecutive title will rely on him continuing in a clearly defined (and familiar) role with bat and ball, having contributed to 2024’s success with 617 runs and 15 wickets.

The time between summers has been productive. It began in the Abu Dhabi T10 for Chennai Braves Jaguars, before a holiday out in Perth, where his fiancé’s father, John Stephenson, had just taken a role as Western Australia’s chief executive officer.

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That break, interspersed with training, turned into a Big Bash League stint with Melbourne Stars after being drafted in by Peter Moores as a replacement for Lawrence’s Surrey teammate, Tom Curran. A full ILT20 campaign for eventual finalists Desert Vipers followed.

Indeed, the last six months highlight a pecularity in Lawrence’s CV. Despite his white-ball skills, he has only ever been involved in one England limited-overs squad – in 2021, as part of a replacement squad for the Pakistan ODI series after the first-team group were knocked out by a Covid-19 outbreak.

With the white-ball set-up entering a transitional period, and clear space for an off-spinning allrounder, Lawrence has a chance to state his case as part of the rejuvenation. Factor in big Test assignments to come against India and an Ashes tour of Australia this year, and other frontiers to tick off – he has yet to feature in the Indian Premier League – aged 27, there is plenty of scope to have it all. And he wants it all.

“I’ve still got aspirations to do a lot of things in the game. Play for England in white-ball, play in the IPL, get my Test spot back and prove to myself I’m a good enough Test player. It’s really exciting.

“When I first started the white-ball team was incredibly hard to get into, a brilliant side that was winning all the time. Now there’s an opportunity to put my name in the mix. There are some serious players, but no reason why I can’t be involved in that conversation.

“We’ve [also] got an exciting summer coming up this year against India, then a really exciting winter with the Ashes. It’s been building up for 18 months to these two big series. I’m still holding out hope that if I get the runs on the board and take a few wickets, maybe I can sneak my way on to the tour.”