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Excellent appraisal. My only concern is his slump in form back end of last season. Went about 10 innings without a scoreUnashamedly sharing a copy and paste job that I posted in the ‘Durham Friendlies’ thread when the topic of this man’s form and performances came up.
Ultimately, nothing would please me more than to see a return to form for the lad.
The case of Ollie Robinson is an intriguing one.
TRT is right when he points out that he’s been in a slump for a long long time now, but there are a few players who may welcome a drop to Division Two by way of rekindling a bit of form. Robinson is the main one I’m thinking of (Potts would be another) and I would love to see him get back to basics and find some form this year.
Having watched his batting closely for some time, I would compare him to Harry Brook in a lot of ways, his hand eye coordination is excellent and when he finds his groove he can play the ball to the entire 360 degrees of a field. He’s also incredibly impressive and assured playing both off the back foot and playing late to the spinners. The way he can essentially leave all three stumps open, stand back in his stance and then whip the ball away through the offside at the last moment, just as it appears it’s about to clip his stumps is fascinating to someone like me who could only ever successfully play spin by getting forward to it, right over the top of the ball before it has chance to turn. There’s only really him and Brook I’ve seen do that.
However, he also seems to share that Brook trait of being able to get himself out at any moment, often to a terrible shot and often also to situations that dictate he play a little more watchfully.
I think what has been clear from his tenure is that he’s a ‘that’s the way I play’ kind of lads and as much as it’s frustrating at times, because as England have shown us, you can’t simply have one method all the time, I think it’s possible to have one of them type of players in the side and have success. Given the makeup of the batting as it currently appears, we do atleast seem to have become a bit more traditional over the past 18 months and maybe back down in Division Two he can begin to thrive again if we can consistently put him in positions where he can be expressive and not have too much of a burden on his runs given the advantageous positions we’ll be putting him in.
Ultimately he’s a ‘finisher’, if we can have him coming in at 300-5 instead of 130-4 as was regularly the case last year I think we’ll see the better side of him again. You’ll note also from the above that I think his best position for us would be the standard wicketkeeper slot of number 7, it’s where I think he’d be most effective. It also gives more responsibility to the lads who’d be in the side solely for their batting.
Excellent appraisal. My only concern is his slump in form back end of last season. Went about 10 innings without a score