England have unearthed a young gem as Zak Crawley runs riot

Zak Crawley recently had to inform a radio interviewer that, no, he was not the son of former England Test batsman John Crawley. After Saturday’s events at the Ageas Bowl, anonymity is no longer an option.

By taking 267 off a high-class Pakistan attack in the third and final Test, Crawley all but sealed England’s second series win of the summer and pointed the way ahead for their often fragile top order.

Just as remarkably, perhaps, he relegated Jos Buttler’s career-best 152 — in its own right a significant innings for the evolution of Joe Root’s team — to the status of a footnote. 

Zak Crawley scored an amazing 267 runs against Pakistan in England’s first innings

Crawley pictured with his mother Lisa, many years before going on to become a future star

And just in case we were not sure, his performance had the weight of history behind it: in more than 143 years of Test cricket, only Wally Hammond has scored more in a single innings for England from No3 — a pre-war triple-century in Auckland, when New Zealand’s bowlers were little better than cannon fodder.

Crawley began this game as the spare part who was getting a go because Ben Stokes was not available. He will finish it as a player England can build their top order around for years to come, finally allowing Root to settle in his preferred position at No4.

If Crawley is, to an extent, a product of privilege — he was educated at fee-paying Tonbridge School — then he also knows about hard work. He once took himself to India to improve his game against spin and pays regular visits to Perth to hone his technique with Neil Holder, whose pupils include Australian coach Justin Langer, Ian Bell and Crawley’s own mentor, Rob Key, whose Test-best 221 he passed on Saturday. 

Crawley has missed out on the team, but was given his chance when Ben Stokes withdrew

It is a work ethic he believes he inherited from his father, Terry, the son of a docker who, in the 1980s, is said to have turned himself from a south London carpet fitter on £100 a week to a high-flyer in the City, earning enough to penetrate the Sunday Times rich list. They called him ‘Terry the Till’.

He inherited something else too (though not Terry’s love of Millwall FC: Zak supports Charlton). Terry was a scratch golfer and evidently passed on the gift of hand-eye coordination. Zak plays off scratch too and wanted to become a professional golfer, before plumping for cricket.

An eye has always remained on the prize. Taking a leaf out of the book of Dutch football legend Johan Cruyff, who once lived near Ajax’s ground, Crawley found a flat overlooking Kent’s St Lawrence Ground in Canterbury.

There, shacked up with his county colleague Grant Stewart, he could use the club’s facilities whenever he liked. There have been staging posts along the way: 62 on first-class debut in 2017 for Kent against the touring West Indians; 168 against Glamorgan in 2018; a century as an England tourist against a New Zealand XI at Whangarei last November; 66 against South Africa at Johannesburg in January; then another warm-up century, against a Board President’s XI in Colombo in March, before the tour of Sri Lanka fell foul of the coronavirus. 

Crawley has inherited his work ethic, and some sporting ability, from his father Terry

Yet the sense remains that Crawley was chosen for Test cricket in spite of his record rather than because of it. On the day he received a phone call from national selector Ed Smith, he had been dismissed for a duck by Hampshire’s Kyle Abbott.

By the time he made his Test debut, against New Zealand at Hamilton following an injury to Buttler, Crawley’s first-class average was below 32. He was being picked on trust, with Smith and fellow selector James Taylor concluding he was the kind of player whose game improved according to the quality of the bowling.

A fluent 76 in the first Test against West Indies in Southampton did nothing to contradict their judgment. But in the second in Manchester, Crawley had his first chance at No3 after the axing of Joe Denly and promptly turned his first ball from off-spinner Roston Chase to leg slip. In the second innings, obliged to hit out in search of quick runs, he was bowled by Kemar Roach for 11. Progress seemed to have stalled.

Crawley pictured with the New Beacon Colts rugby team (third left in the back row) in 2009

Then Stokes picked up a thigh injury, which meant he could operate in the third Test as a batsman only. With the balance of the side disrupted, Crawley missed out. But when Stokes withdrew from the Pakistan series after one game for family reasons, Crawley was back. He began with a half-century on the final evening of the second Test in Southampton, an innings which allowed him to size up the bowlers. Then came his magnum opus.

Trapped leg-before by Mohammad Abbas in the second Test, he stood out of his crease in this game, eventually forcing wicketkeeper Mohammad Rizwan up to the stumps. And he has used his 6ft 5in frame to get forward to the leg-spin of Yasir Shah.

Now, at 22 years 201 days, he is in the record books: only Don Bradman, Len Hutton, Garry Sobers and Graeme Smith have scored a Test 250 at a younger age.