If you were a batting coach, there aren’t many players you would want to work with more than Jordan Cox.In many ways, the 25-year-old is the prototypical modern cricketer: an all-format, high-backlift franchise batter, one of the faces of The Hundred and an Indian Premier League (IPL) winner with Royal Challengers Bengaluru, never far from a firework or a player mic.Equally, Cox is something of a throwback. His Test ascension comes after a weight of domestic red-ball runs and a series of career decisions made with this format in mind. Leaving Kent, his childhood county, and moving to Essex has seen him play for three years in Division One of the County Championship, during which he has averaged a touch below 70 — comparable output to some of the very best the County Championship has seen in its storied history.The most pronounced element of Cox’s technique — across all formats — is the extent to which he hangs deep in the crease, his hands high with his bat pointed towards the sky. It affords him, and his enviable hand-eye coordination, as long as possible to respond to the delivery and to drop his bat down to the ball’s path. It’s a style also adopted by Harry Brook and, to an extent, Jamie Smith.It was a component of his play that was very obvious on the second day at Headingley, as Cox put on a partnership of 150 with Joe Root, cementing the advantage England had gained with the ball in hand.Across his innings against pace, Cox’s interception point — the average position where he made contact with the ball — was 1.46 metres from his stumps. That is playing the ball very, very late. Since Brendon McCullum’s first Test as head coach in June 2022, there have been almost 200 innings where an England batter has faced 50-plus deliveries of pace bowling, and Cox’s interception point in Leeds was the latest of the lot. The contrast with Root, shown below, is stark.A young batter operating at the extremes in this way is neither good nor bad. What is perhaps most interesting is that this English engine room, Root-apart, all seem to do their best work away from orthodoxy. They are all, in short, a bit weird.