Last Updated on 4 years ago by Charbel Coorey
Cricket News: Jonny Bairstow will aim to play all three formats | Jonny Bairstow says he’ll try play all formats
Jonny Bairstow has assured that he will continue to play all three formats of international cricket following Ben Stokes’ retirement from One Day Internationals (ODIs). English Test skipper Stokes hung his boots from 50-overs cricket as he expressed his inability to cope with the tightly-packed cricketing schedule.
Accordingly, Bairstow is now the only English player likely to feature in every format of the game. He has already played four Tests, two ODI series’ and is set to feature in the T20Is against South Africa this summer.
Bairstow has been in an imperious run of form recently with his Test career getting reinvigorated under the tutelage of Brendon McCullum.
“I don’t know if it’s good or bad that I’m one of the last all-format players,” the wicketkeeper-batsman was quoted in a report by ESPNCricinfo. The 32-year-old reflected on the closely-knit fixtures with several international matches overlapping with each other. There was an instance last month when England was playing New Zealand in a Test series at home whilst the ODI team contested in a three-match ODI series in the Netherlands.
I’ll play all formats as long as I can – Bairstow
“But you know me well enough now: I’ll be trying to play all of them for as long as possible. I’ll be going all out for as long as I can. There might come a time when you do have to make a decision for different reasons, but that’s part and parcel of life and cricket, but in the near future I can’t see me making a choice because I’m loving being part of all three squads,” Bairstow opened up on the issue.
He added, “They’re all individual squads and they’re great to be a part of. It’s exciting. You go into a new one and you’ve got a freshness and new faces and energy around them, because you’re going into a new format.”
Bairstow has already featured in eight Tests and five ODIs in 2022. In addition to that, he played a significant part of the Indian Premier League (IPL) for the Punjab Kings this year.
The Yorkshire player will also turn up for the Welsh Fire for their first three games of the Hundred. Later on, he will be expected to don a crucial role for England in their World T20 campaign Down Under later on this year. Bairstow lamented upon the lack of training days prior to games. He even expressed discontentment over the players’ inability to do anything regarding the scheduling.
“The schedule is the schedule. It’s difficult to say if you want to play less but Stokesy (Ben Stokes) has a point in some ways about the overlapping games that there are. There used to be lead-ins to series and training days before games, but there are back-to-back games coming up now,” he was quoted in the aforementioned report.
Stokes had drawn an analogy of the authorities’ treating players like cars whilst speaking of the back-to-back set of games that England is slated to play. Bairstow concurred with that comparison and conceded that playing each game with full intensity might make the players devoid of the same going ahead.
