Matt Prior: Moving Ian Bell up to No3 could be the answer

Stepping up: Ian Bell could move up the order

21 July 2015

I would like to see Ian Bell take the No3 spot if England make changes for the third Ashes Test. Bell is a class act whose form will come right, but he has to take that responsibility.

Sometimes it has to be what is best for the balance of the team.

If Gary Ballance is left out of the XI at Edgbaston, people will call for Joe Root to replace him at No3 but I wouldn’t do that. The guy is playing brilliantly at No5 and if he is to move, it should be only one position in the order, to No4. That would leave room for another player, Jonny Bairstow or James Taylor, to step in at No5.

Belly has been through it before. He has played 112 Tests and when you look at how other teams did it in the past, they had an experienced batsman at No3. I look back to when Rahul Dravid did the job for India, and Ricky Ponting for Australia.

I’m definitely not a big one for wholesale changes because England played badly in one game, but England can’t be two or three wickets down quickly every time they bat.

When I had been in the field for a long time, I wanted to get into the dressing room, take my pads off, take my shoes off, and hope for no wickets in the first hour of the innings.

If the team can do that, the dressing room settles, everyone relaxes a bit and you get into your batting. But when a wicket falls, and then another, it just creates tension and nervousness. There is a mad dash, everyone is padding up. Anyone who has played cricket will have an idea of what that is like, and it’s what you’re trying to stay away from.

There are reasons the top three is the hardest place to bat. You’re facing the new ball, the bowlers are fresh, the close catchers are in place, and you will lose an early wicket from time to time. But what kills an innings is not losing one early wicket, but three — bang, bang, bang. That is happening too often. Nothing destroys you like losing wickets in clusters and the responsibility on the top three is to get a partnership going straightaway. It’s not even about posting 100 — just get to 10 as a pair. Even in that time, everything settles down again.

From an opposition point of view, when you go out to field and you know it’s a good batting wicket, you’re trying to win the first half-hour. If you get a wicket early, it gives you that energy. If you get another, it spurs you on even more. Trying to nullify that with the bat is a key element to starting the innings well.

I was involved in a couple of bad defeats by Australia, in Leeds in 2009 and in Perth a year later. We bounced back to win both the following Tests to ensure we held the Ashes. In 2009 we all stayed up in Leeds and had a long team meeting the next day. Andrew Strauss called that and said: “Right, we’re not just all going home. We need to sort this out.”

That was quite rare, because usually you want to take the emotion out of a situation before you meet again and reassess. But we got together the following day away from the ground, in a meeting room at the hotel.

A defeat like the one England suffered at Lord’s is a massive blow to confidence, so you need to ditch it, get rid of it, so you can focus fully on the next Test. You can’t go into the next game with any of those negative thoughts. That was why we held that meeting after Headingley, and we went on to regain the Ashes by winning the final Test at The Kia Oval.

The massive challenge is to stay logical and not allow too much emotion to come into decision-making, which is something England captain Alastair Cook is very good at. It’s very hard, because I’m sure he would have been dying to shout and scream and kick off, but that probably doesn’t help.

You can’t let it affect the next Test. He will have said to the guys: “That was terrible. Why was it? What happened? Was it poor preparation?” You need to know, and when you do, you can put it right. Once you’ve had that conversation, you can think about what you need to do to be ready for the next Test. Get away from it. Guys in the past have flown to Spain or Portugal for a few days to get out of the bubble of Ashes cricket, which is very hard to escape in England. If you go out for dinner, people will be asking you about it.

I used to play golf, stay at home — just do normal things. I found the worst thing I could do was have a net, or train. Do whatever you need to do and when you get to Edgbaston, make sure you’re well-recovered mentally and physically to put in a big performance.

Matt Prior is co-founder of professional cycling team ONE Pro Cycling. oneprocycling.com

Matt Prior: Moving Ian Bell up to No3 could be the answer

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