Former England captain Sir Alastair Cook says Zak Crawley has been the “most backed player ever”.
The 27-year-old Kent opener is playing his 64th Test match for England during the final game of the Ashes series this week.
Dismissed for 16 in England’s first innings, Crawley’s Test average sits at 31.44 with just five hundreds to his name.
Cook scored 12,472 runs in 161 matches with 33 tons and is England’s second-highest run scorer in Test history.
Speaking before the start of the fifth Test in Sydney, Cook told TNT Sports: “It’s a tricky one because you look at him [Crawley] and you watch him and he’s quite a hard player to be a pundit on because he’s the best player to ever average just 30.
“Because you look at him and you think he’s got all the attributes [in] his game. He plays amazing shots, he can knock the best bowlers off line and length, he can be intimidating because he’s a tall lad and yet his stats over quite a long period of time now are 30.
“So that’s whether he plays for England, whether he plays for Kent, we’re talking about first-class cricket.
“So, when Brendon McCullum got the job, he said to everyone, I don’t want Zak Crawley to be consistent, I just want him to go out there and one in five, one in six, win us the game.
“I understand why he said it because it’s all about taking pressure off the player, taking pressure off Zak, just go out and bat and if you get a couple of those scores we’re going to back you.
“He’s been the most backed player ever, almost guaranteed to play the next game because on his day, which has been few and far between, he can play just the best knock.
“For me, this game’s a big game for Crawley, like a lot of the players, but it’s about run making now for Zak.”
Crawley played four County Championship games for Kent last summer, five in 2024 and seven in 2023.
Cook believes the Kent opener would benefit from a prolonged spell on the county circuit.
“If I was involved, it would be ‘you’ve got to go and play red-ball cricket for Kent’, and not treat it as a warm-up,” added Cook.
“Go and learn to play the situation better, be consistent, challenge yourself to be consistent, and if that means there’s a bowler bowling 70mph with the keeper up, find a way.
“Not just saying, ‘oh that’s nipping around, it’s different to Test cricket’. Find a solution, find a solution to that problem because guess what, the problems might be slightly different in Test cricket, you might get a 90mph bowler trying to knock your head off, or as we’ve seen in this series, a keeper standing up, you’ve got to stay in your crease.
“For me now, for Zak to take the next level, he’s got all the experience now in the world you want, he’s got to look at consistency and that’s the be-all and end-all because the guy can seriously bat.”
