The highly talented England player is simply being used for when either the batting or bowling goes wrong
For anyone still curious about the exact role of Will Jacks in this England Test team, the key is probably to see him as a kind of a tell, a set of entrails, a weather vane on the state of the game.
The first rule of Jacks goes like this. If you can see Will Jacks on your TV screen, it’s bad. If Will Jacks is bowling when you wake up something has gone wrong. If Will Jacks is batting something has also probably gone wrong.
And yes, the flaw in this equation is the obvious fact that if you can’t see Will Jacks things have probably also gone wrong. But it is less certain. If you can’t see him, there is still a glimmer of hope, perhaps even the dream of the Zero Jacks day, where everyone else does their job, and nothing is seen of Will Jacks at all.
Not so much here, however, on the third day of this third Test in Adelaide, when a great deal was seen of England’s newly enthroned No 1 off-spin option. This was another day when Australia asserted their own first principles of high-skill, high-intensity Test cricket, the sporting equivalent of making everyone sit down and have a proper dinner together because it’s good for you; and in the process pushed the match and the series definitively out of England’s reach.
