It. Would. Have. Been. Flair.

Jacob Bethell speaks his shiny new language

‘Can I have a Blue WKD?’… ‘We’ll see, son’

Wow, you think, for someone hand-picked as the future of English batting at the age of 21 with a top score of 25 (or maybe that’s his first class average, there are a lot of stats buzzing around at the moment) there’s really quite a bit of Andrew Strauss about the way Jacob Bethell first shapes up to the ball… And then you remember: ah yes, for Bethell and his crowd, born in the actual century that we’re living in now, Andrew Strauss is just this old bald guy who invented the Hundred or something, right? Used to see him around the ECB offices, but now not so much.

And if you needed another doomy glance into the generation gap that has suddenly seemed to open like a disaster movie crack in the earth’s crust, here’s Jacob Bethell talking to Ben Stokes immediately after being dismissed for 96 aiming a big drive at Tim Southee – who, incidentally, is another one of them ancient blokes who made his Test debut when Jacob Bethell was a swaggering four year old:

“It’s only four runs,” Stokes said to the lad, a fatherly hand no doubt hovering somewhere near his shoulder, gently backlit by the setting New Zealand sun.

“Yeah,” said Bethell, “but it would have been flair if I’d smacked him through the covers to bring it up.”

IT. WOULD. HAVE. BEEN. FLAIR.

I’m sorry, it would have been what? Flair? It would have been flair.

Yeah, because the language, like everything else, moves on. Once, had say, Ted Dexter done it, it would have been ‘appropriate’. Then what… ‘far out’? ‘groovy’? ‘rad’? ‘ace’? ‘nice’? ‘awesome’? ‘choice’? ‘boss’? ‘gnarly’? ‘wicked’? ‘fierce’?

Not any more, grandad. Now it would have been flair. And you know what, yes, it would have been, and after a few sessions on the FIFA or whatever it is, there’s a Test match coming up on Friday and he’ll get another crack at this life that is unrolling like a red carpet before him.

From what he has showed in his tiny sample size of Test match innings, Bethell has got ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is. Maybe it’s the fearlessness, the optimism, the youth that lets you feel that way, the same youth that lets you carry off a stupid hair cut and hold in your mind a vision of the perfect way to bring up your first century in any form of professional cricket.

The world may knock that out of Jacob Bethell in the way it does to all of us, we are all tempered by time, and often the better for it, and anyhow, when he gets to Joe Root’s age, he may have so many centuries that he’s bringing them up by reverse flicking the bowling over the wicketkeeper.

Some things time cannot change though, and of those things is that to survive as an international batter, you have to be able to play very fast, short pitched bowling. That’s the internal barrier that you can’t really jump until you get there. And you need to be able to counter punch, too. Ricky Ponting – and it’s really far too early in Jacob Bethell’s career to be raising that name, but here it comes anyway – Ricky Ponting said that the key to his batting was to have opposing shots, and what he meant was that because he’d grown up playing against much bigger kids he’d always been able to pull, but he needed to develop a stroke for the bowler’s response, which was usually to go fuller.

For that he found his crunching straight drive, and, once he had it, the area in which the opposition could safely land the ball was small, sometimes tiny.

Bethell already has the pull and the drive, and he has the compact and organised game that seems to enable him to stay in against the new ball on difficult pitches, which for England’s hit and miss top three already feels like some welcome solidity, even though it is ridiculously soon to say so.

But then Stokes, very happy to announce that he was “right” about Jacob Bethell, knew it from being around Bethell in the team environment. They said the same about Jamie Smith, who also narrowly missed out on a maiden Test hundred before battering one almost immediately afterwards. It gives them a problem in terms of what to do about Ollie Pope, who, with fifty Tests in the book and an average in the lower thirties now, may be feeling the words of some other old guy Jacob Bethell has probably never heard of:

‘Maybe we ain’t that young any more…’