Gary Ballance has prepared for the season in impressive style © Getty Images
Gary Ballance has confessed that losing his England place last summer hit him harder than he expected and he needed to consciously shut out critics he felt were “jumping on the bandwagon” in questioning his technique.
Ballance was dropped after the first two Tests of the 2015 Ashes series following a run of faltering form in which he managed only one half-century in 10 innings, the consensus among commentators being that his preference for playing from well inside the crease had been exposed as a weakness by the New Zealand bowlers in the summer’s first home series and again by the Australians.
“It is never nice losing your place and to be honest, it was tough,” he said. “For a while I was struggling mentally and normally I consider myself quite strong in that respect. I was just going through a tough patch. I was struggling for form – you tell me a cricketer that hasn’t.
“As far as I was concerned, it was just one of those things but because my technique is a little different to a standard person people like to comment. That’s fair enough – people have got a job to do and that’s fine with me.
“But you have to be quite strong as a professional to block these things out, especially when people start jumping on the bandwagon.”
Ballance was insistent last summer that he would not change what he considered to be a well grooved method that had brought him success. Even after his dip in form, his Test average still stood at 47.76.
Since then, he says he has made some adjustments but that the core of his technique is still the same.
“There are always little things that I can do and that’s what I’ve done, I’ve changed little things are worked on little things but the core is still there,” he said. “As long as I know when I’m at the crease I am balanced and with a good head position, I’ll be able to move forward and back as needed.
“When you are going through a bit of bad form you are always looking at little things, what is going wrong, what you have done right in the past. I just tried to look at how I was playing a few months before that in the West Indies.
“I’ve had the same technique throughout my career and I’m pretty happy with the way my stats have been in Test cricket and first-class cricket. I know what works for me and I know when I score runs what I do well.”
Ballance said that he was grateful for the support he received from coaching staff and team-mates at Headingley as he tried to deal with the setback.
“Everyone around the club was very good,” he said. “The players were very welcoming at having me back in the side. There are guys who know what it is like to lose your place, who have been in and out of international cricket and know how to deal with people who it has happened to.
“It’s nice to come back into a side that was winning and playing good cricket, that always helps.
“I got a few decent scores, a big hundred at Sussex and a few other 50s so I was pretty happy with the way it went. And at the end of the day we won the Championship, and team success always breeds individual success.”
His form since Yorkshire stepped up their preparations for the 2016 season has signalled a continuation of where he left off, with a century in a two-day friendly against Lancashire in Dubai and another in the first-class match against MCC in Abu Dhabi.
“I feel good,” he said. “I’ve started well, went to the UAE and got a few hundreds there, I could not have asked for a better pre-season.”
An early recall has become an even stronger possibility with the misfortune of James Taylor’s enforced retirement. Taylor occupied the No. 5 slot in the Test side in South Africa, where Ballance was in the party but not used, which creates a vacancy for the first home series of this summer, against Sri Lanka. But Ballance’s focus is on building some form in the Championship.
“I’m really not looking very far ahead,” he said. “I just want to get back to playing for Yorkshire and scoring runs. If I can do that, everything else will take care of itself.”
He says he draws inspiration from the way his Yorkshire team-mate Joe Root recovered from being dropped by England during the 2013-14 Ashes whitewash after struggling for runs.
“All sportsmen have their ups and downs and the ones that come back stronger are the ones that go on to have a good career,” he said. “Joe is a good example of that.”
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Source: ESPN Crickinfo