Gary Ballance back to his best and ready to make Test cricket return

Last November, Gary Ballance had the look of a cricketer who had played his last Test match. His second stint in Test cricket had been ignominious: 219 runs at 19.90 apiece, culminating in an abject run of 24 runs in four innings in Bangladesh. The suspicion was of a batsman whose idiosyncratic technique had been exposed at the highest level.

Ballance was awarded the Yorkshire captaincy this season - partly, no doubt, because the county assumed that he would be around rather a lot more than in the past three summers. The new responsibility and need to extend his focus away from his own game has brought the best form of his career.

“It is nice, having a different challenge and a different focus,” Ballance says. Andrew Gale, Yorkshire’s first-team coach, believes that Ballance’s batting has benefited from the new role, which has meant that “He hasn't worried about England, it’s been a long way off.”

It isn’t anymore. Ballance has amassed more runs than any other Englishman in the County Championship this summer: a preposterous 815 Division One runs at 101.87 apiece, second only to Kumar Sangakkara. His selection as captain of the England Lions against South Africa is the clearest indicator yet that he is being lined up for a third life in Test cricket.

How to respond to failure in Tests is the eternal question facing batsmen who struggle initially in the international game. In early 2000, Mark Butcher famously enlisted his father to remodel his technique, and re-emerged as a far more successful Test player.

Ballance has taken a very different view. His overall Test record - 1413 runs at a shade under 40, including four centuries - remains very respectable. And, for all the criticism his technique has faced - Ballance has been castigated for moving too far across his crease to the offside and standing too deep, rendering him vulnerable to the ball when it swings or spins - he has steadfastly refused to remodel his game drastically. Instead, Ballance has doubled down on what brought him previous Test success.

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“I've had temptations before. Every time I've tried to change it I've got worse,” he says. “There's no point in changing. I play the way I play, I'm just trying to make it the best it is, try and make my strengths stronger and my weaknesses better. I've worked hard in the winter and have kept working all summer.”

The most striking improvement in Ballance’s game this season has been in his driving, which he showed off in some sumptuous off drives against Steven Finn and Toby Roland-Jones at Lord’s last week.

“I just feel more balanced at the crease. It's massive for me,” Ballance explains. “Whenever I'm balanced at the crease, in a neutral position, then I can get back into the ball and put bat to ball. It's one of those things that I've got to work on really hard to keep good.”

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And ever since returning to Yorkshire after six weeks as an unwanted spare part in India, Ballance has done exactly that. “In the winter he hit a lot of balls,” says Gale. “His work ethic's outstanding and he's got that sheer hunger.”

In his first innings as Yorkshire’s County Championship captain, Ballance made 120 against Hampshire which set up his astounding early season run. Bitter experience about how grim a batsmen’s lot can be out of form has imbued Ballance with determination to capitalise on his own run.

“I was coming into the season feeling good. Getting a score early in the season helps massively too, it gave me a bit of confidence and I just tried to kick on and when it's going well try and make as many runs as possible. There's always a flipside to it when it’s not going so well and you can’t really find a run.”

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It is not just the sheer volume of runs that Ballance has been scoring but who they have come against: three centuries, including a match-saving double in the second innings, against Kyle Abbott, the Championship’s stand-out bowler in 2017, against South Africa this summer and in Australia this winter. Earlier this month, Ballance’s unbeaten 98 on a turning Taunton wicket, the top score of the game, defied Somerset’s spin twins to set up Yorkshire’s victory.

England’s fondness for Ballance is well-known, spying in him a cricketer of excellent temperament and fierce self-belief, ideally suited to withstand the vicissitudes of international cricket. Perhaps they were too eager to recall him a year ago, when he was averaging only 33.64 in the County Championship at the time. Gale has no doubt that Ballance is playing far better now.

“When they picked him last year, he wasn’t playing that well,” he says. “But you can see the consistency that he’s had lately and he’s hardly failed for us this year, and he’s ready to play for England again.”

Ballance believes that he has never been playing better. Morne Morkel and Kagiso Rabada will test that assumption in the tour match at Worcester in the coming days. Come through that, and Ballance is poised to meet them again in Test cricket soon after.