One Root in?

Joe Root has been the poster boy for the current England development system. Identified at a young age, he played for England Under-15's and 19's before selection into the Lions team, and finally promotion into the full test team. With an average of 40.23 and 2 hundreds all ready to his name, you can sense there are brilliant and better things to come. It's pat on the back time for all those backroom staff, the scouts and coaches who nurtured and propelled him to his current excellence.

It is an undeniable success story, but does it come under the moniker of a self-fulfilling prophecy? And more importantly, does it highlight an inflexibility within the England set-up of not being able to move outside these young chosen few?

As any coach will tell a child who is left out of a team, some players develop later than others. For me growing up around the Northamptonshire age groups, the example was Mal Loye, who apparently wasn't selected for representative cricket until he was 16, and then played 2nd XI cricket by the time he was 17. This late development is usually prevalent in players from the smaller counties, who won't get a look in for higher selection due to their lack of 'involvement' at a young age. David Willey is a great example of this. Having only played briefly for the England Under 19's off the back of his inclusion with Northants, his career is really starting to pick up momentum. Yet even after a amazing game in the T20 final and a 167 off 101 balls today, he still isn't really being talked about, where as players like Jade Dernbach and Johnny Bairstow from the bigger and more attractive counties can fail time and time again without ever having to look over their shoulders. Chris Woakes is also a man earmarked at an early age, and despite a string of disappointing one day performance, he gets even higher elevation into the test team.

If England are going to invest so much time and money into the Lions team and give them ever more fixtures in an increasingly congested calender, they should be looking at new players and ones who are performing consistently well, not just those that play for the right clubs, and have the right ties to current England management (e.g. Warwickshire and Yorkshire). Otherwise you might as well scrap twelve of the counties and just play tournaments between the six biggest to see who can out-spend who.