Thirty-Three Faces, Zero Overlap: How Deep Is England's Depth, Really?

A strange fantasy takes shape in my head. One evening, three grounds. A Test at Lord's, an ODI at The Oval, a T20I at Cardiff — all starting at the same hour. Three England teams walk out, but the condition is single and merciless: no player may appear in two places. Joe Root will not sprint from Lord's to The Oval, Harry Brook will not return from Cardiff to bat in a Test second innings, Ben Stokes will not bowl and bat on the same day. Thirty-three separate faces, zero overlap. I am genuinely sitting here, can't wait for you to tie your laces — just to find out who England's No. 10 Test batsman, third opener and sixth death bowler actually are.

In 2026, the silence at the stadium became the loudest player on the pitch. That day I learned that the distance between absence and presence is never merely numerical. In the same way, the question "who is missing" is never less thrilling than "who is there." Dan Senior, Katya Witney and Will Hewlett have sat down to debate this fantasy, and the real question is not just format — it is depth: how strong is a country's third layer, really?

England means a land of multi-format players. Root is trusted in both Test and ODI, Brook in Test and T20, Stokes mainly in Test (and formerly ODI), Mark Wood a pace storm in Test and T20. That overlap is England's comfort. One good player serves three formats, and there is no headache before squad announcements. But behind this comfort lies a hidden truth: the more overlap, the fewer players are actually proven. When you hunt for thirty-three separate names, you discover how untested the third string hiding behind the overlap truly is.

The question is not only numerical. Test cricket demands endurance, technique, patience — a five-day mental game. ODI demands balance between accumulation and acceleration, the craft of building an innings. T20 demands strike rate, power-hitting and the precision of death bowling. Three formats, three different professions. You can ask one person to do all three, but to build three teams you need a separate craftsman for each trade. And England's list of craftsmen is not equally long in every trade.

England's depth story is really three separate stories, and the most brutal one belongs to the Test side.

When I open that "Rising Star" file of mine, a pattern jumps out. England's white-ball system churns out roughly a dozen T20 specialists a year — the Hundred, the Blast and franchise-league rotation amount to a whole factory. If someone can bowl yorkers only in the death overs, there is a place for him in England. But does the County Championship produce red-ball batsmen at the same rate? There the game is slower, wicket-dependent, a fight with the weather. A young Test batsman is built over five or six seasons of patience. So the Test side will be the weakest in this exercise — because backup is scarce, and the backup that exists never gets the chance to prove itself.

Think about it. For a Test you must find three top-order batsmen, a keeper, four or five seamers and two spinners — all with red-ball experience, all with county runs, all with the patience to leave the red ball. Remove Root, remove Brook, remove Stokes — how many of the names that surface lower down are genuinely Test-grade? This should be the true centre of the debate. Because in white ball England have abundant alternatives, but in red ball the hand looks rather empty.

The ODI side is the most vulnerable room in this exercise. That sounds odd, because ODI sits in the middle and should be easiest to fill. But the problem lies precisely in that middle position. Players good enough for Tests have begun skipping ODIs — workload management, franchise money and schedule congestion together. And pure T20 specialists lack the head to build a fifty-over innings — they win matches in ten overs but cannot construct over three hours. So an ODI needs someone who can leave the ball at one end and hit sixes in the last ten overs — that hybrid character is the rarest of all.

In my Delhi notebook I once wrote that an ODI innings is much like a city traffic jam — slow at the start, faster in the middle, and at the end either a blare of horns or a silent gridlock. The batsman who can handle those three moments is ODI-grade. England's first string has men like Root, Ben Duckett or Stokes who know this. But strip out the overlap, and among the second-string ODI batsmen, who can truly hold three hours of patience — that is an open question.

The T20 side will be the easiest to build — and precisely for that reason it tells us the least. England's white-ball factory holds so many specialists that a large share of the thirty-three will come from here. Because of the Hundred there are now bowlers who bowl only ten overs and that is their profession. The list of power-hitters like Phil Salt and Will Jacks is long. But the trouble is that this very abundance is a mirage. In a format that is easy to fill, depth cannot be proven, because competition is thin. A T20 specialist is good because he never had to fight five days of county cricket for a spot — he only had to land one franchise contract.

Here lies my second fear: the satellite-club system and the franchise market together let big nations bypass the domestic pathway. For England, the Hundred and overseas leagues have created a parallel structure where youngsters skip the hard county route and become white-ball stars directly. It is fast, bright, market-friendly. But over the long run it erodes depth — because a player who has never fought five days with the red ball cannot become a Test side's third batsman. So this three-format exercise is really a mirror: how broad England's system is, and how shallow.

There is another layer that usually gets lost in the discussion — the all-rounder question. When a player appears in two formats, assigning him to one tests whether his secondary skill is genuine grade or merely a bonus. Keep Stokes in the Test side and the ODI team loses his power-hitting; keep him in the ODI side and the Test team loses his bowling. That kind of sacrifice is the real fun of the debate. And the keeper question is the most brutal — you need three separate keepers, each batting-capable, and beyond Jamie Smith England's keeper-batsman depth is not especially deep.

The method of the debate is itself an analysis. Placing each player in his "strongest format" means admitting that cross-format performance data shows a player who plays multiple formats is demonstrably stronger in one. That is easy to prove numerically: the gap in average, strike rate or economy across formats is often large. But the method has a trap — the first-XI advantage. A player gets regular chances in one format, so his numbers shine there; in the format he plays sporadically, his data suffers from a small sample. So determining the "strongest format" also measures the history of opportunity, not only skill.

This is where a disagreement of mine settles in. The exercise questions England's depth, but what it actually measures is not depth — it is the value of overlap. Suppose six England players can play all three formats. Then instead of thirty-three you actually need twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and the depth looks greater. Conversely, if overlap is low, the squad looks weaker, even though the total resource is identical. In other words, the exercise punishes flexibility more than real skill. I test it against two pieces of evidence: first, England's white-ball ranking stays near the top year after year because the pool is broad; second, the same pool contracts in red ball because the pathway is narrow. So the real conclusion is not "England lack depth" — it is "England's white-ball depth is far greater than its red-ball depth, and that gap is exactly what the three-format fantasy catches."

A second disagreement: we treat the number thirty-three as proof of depth, but number and depth are not the same thing. Thirty-three names do not mean thirty-three international-grade products. County cricket has many bowlers who are superb on green May wickets but vanish on a flat deck against international batsmen. Filling numbers is easy; filling quality is hard. The true test is how many of the thirty-three genuinely meet a specific format's demands, rather than merely occupying a slot.

For years I have sat at small grounds in Delhi watching England's white-ball matches, noting in my notebook who rushes and who leaves the ball. That notebook taught me that a team's real strength is not in its first eleven — it is in the twelve to thirty-three, the men whose names nobody remembers but in whose hands a match's fate is settled. England's twelve-to-thirty-three list is very short in red ball and very long in white.

So the next time someone says England's depth is extraordinary, ask one question: behind thirty-three names, how many can keep the patience to leave the red ball? This fantasy is a seed — England's selectors will have to think about it, because in a three-format calendar, holding overlap together is becoming impossible. Esports taught me that history can run at the speed of a refresh — and whether England's bench is deep or shallow will now be decided not at Lord's, but on empty county grounds, under a sun-baked red ball.