The main debate around England’s batting line-up for the first Ashes Test against Australia in Perth next week is who bats at number three.<\/p>\n
Ollie Pope is the man in possession and assistant coach Marcus Trescothick has suggested that will remain the case when the first Test gets under way on 21 November.<\/p>\n
However, some favour the claims of Jacob Bethell who scored his maiden professional century against South Africa in September.<\/p>\n
Bethell, 22, has played four Tests since making his debut and BBC Sport asked CricViz to look at his non-boundary strike-rate to figure out his overall effectiveness with regards strike rotation – a perceived weakness.<\/p>\n
If you consider all the deliveries he has faced in Tests and exclude the boundaries he has scored, Bethell has a strike-rate of 23.4.<\/p>\n
In comparison in the same timeline, Harry Brook and Ben Duckett are striking at 44.9 and 42.0, excluding their boundary shots.<\/p>\n
If we push the timeline back to since Brendon McCullum took over as the head coach of England’s Test team, Bethell’s non-boundary strike-rate is still the lowest of all top seven batters in the timeline, behind the likes of Alex Lees and Ben Foakes.<\/p>\n
Pope is fourth of all those batters, with a non-boundary strike-rate of 38.4, behind Brook, Duckett and Joe Root.<\/p>\n
A small detail but one which Bethell will be keen to improve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The main debate around England’s batting line-up for the first Ashes Test against Australia in Perth next week…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-259007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}