So Just Who Is Being Lined Up To Be Our New Branderson?

Succession planning is the cornerstone of all successful sports teams – the identifying, developing and then blooding of new talent to replace the old and waning.

Yet even the most assiduous mess up the process, which is why hale and hearty though James Anderson and Stuart Broad still seem, their successors should already have been lined up by the selectors... and primed for action.

But have they? And if so, who are these heirs to our greatest pair of opening bowlers and their legacy of 1,000 plus Test wickets?

England play Australia this summer for the Ashes, cricket’s biggest, most famous and longest-running duel. One imagines that if everyone available is fit by late July when the squad for the first Test is picked, then Broad and Anderson, or ‘Branderson’ if you like, along with Ben Stokes plus one other between Mark Wood or Chris Woakes, will start the series as England’s pace attack.

Others will need to be ready. Anderson will be 37 and Broad 33 prior to that first Ashes Test at Edgbaston on August 1. For some modern players, age can be just a number given their enhanced fitness and the protection offered by central contracts. For most, though, the biology does not lie, which is probably why Broad sought to remind Joe Root, England’s captain, that he still retains the vim of younger men by hitting him on the head with a bouncer at Trent Bridge, though Root had the final say by scoring a hundred.

It is a law of nature that bowlers of advanced vintage not only feel the strain more than their younger counterparts, they also struggle to shake off niggles as they once did. So while form is unlikely to be an issue for Broad and Anderson, as both know their game backwards, fitness could be, which is why a phalanx of likely lads needs to be primed for action not just for the Aussies, but also going forward into the International Cricket Council’s Test Championship, which begins with that series, but runs for the next three years.