As one door opens, another slams shut.
And as Emilio Gay walks down the fabled steps of the Lord’s pavilion for the opening Test of the summer against New Zealand, Zak Crawley will be watching on, wondering if his international career is already over at the age of 28.
There will be plenty who will suggest he has been lucky to stretch it out this far.
At the conclusion of England’s Test series against India last summer, no opener in Test history (that’s over 148 years of matches) had opened the batting so often but averaged as few as Crawley’s 30.88.
Yes, stats can sometimes be misleading but, generally, 94 innings is enough to give you a pretty accurate picture of a player’s attributes and manifest faults.
