Eighty per cent of success, Woody Allen advised, is showing up. The proportion may also apply in cricket. A team is not merely the sum of its talents. Ability walks but availability talks.
These thoughts recur in evaluating the team that England named last week in quest of the Ashes this southern summer. Man for man, there is much to recommend the line-up. It has a strong phalanx of batting; it has pace to burn; ten of the sixteen are in their twenties, making their hosts look positively senescent. Circumstances have spared them what would have been the selection howlers of choosing Chris Woakes and Jamie Overton.
Yet they must still be ready in good time - flying, as it were, in formation. They still depend heavily, for leadership, batting, bowling and balance, on Ben Stokes, whose body is officially thirty-four years old but you can’t help thinking rather older on the inside - a strange mix of the seemingly superhuman then the suddenly very much not.
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