Nine months ago, Ben Foakes learnt that he had been dropped as Test wicketkeeper over a 10-second phone call. It remains his last conversation with the England management.
“I knew I was dropped already – just because of the way that lads were being pulled out of games,” Foakes recalls. “You don’t need a degree to work out that if you haven’t been told, you’ve been dropped. I knew it was coming. Then I got told I was dropped. And then ever since, no contact.”
He recounts the brevity and brutality of the conversation. “I was like ‘you don’t need to explain anything. I know what’s going on here’. And then that’s it.”
In an era when selectors have preached stability, Foakes’s Test career has been a throwback to a more frenzied age: he has been dropped five times. For all the anguish of his axing before the 2023 Ashes, when Jonny Bairstow reclaimed the gloves, Foakes found last summer’s news even more painful.
“This felt more final than the Ashes,” Foakes explains. “Then it was like ‘we’ve got too many players to fit in the slots – not necessarily that we don’t like your skill set’. That’s probably easier to accept, however hard it is to get dropped. Whereas when it’s ‘yeah, we’re just moving on’ – I think naturally, it feels like more of an ending.
“When you essentially get racked off, it’s a weird position to be in in terms of motivation. I’ve always felt that I might still play for England and had that desire to get back in. That’s always the driving force. Now, they’re looking to go a fresh way.
“It’s the most difficult I’ve experienced because, in the past, I’ve always felt like there was a way back, with the merry-go-round of Jonny, Jos [Buttler] and me. It always felt like you weren’t out of it. I think when they go fresh start and kind of park guys, under this regime, it’s quite obvious. If they back someone, they give them a good run. So I think just naturally, the way everything kind of lays out, it’s unlikely that you could get another go.”
Even when Jamie Smith, his friend and Surrey team-mate, missed the tour of New Zealand on paternity leave, Foakes was not summoned. Last winter, four other keepers were selected in England Test squads. Age 32, a recall is “not on the radar.”
If Foakes is right, then his career will rank among the most curious in recent English history. Over 25 Tests, he has played more in India than in England. Indeed, at home Foakes has played just six Tests – averaging 40 and hitting a terrific 113 not out against South Africa at Old Trafford in 2022.
To Foakes, his strange career leaves him with an enduring frustration: he is not quite sure how to evaluate his performances. In eight Tests in India, where his keeping was often sublime on turning pitches, he averages just 18.9 with the bat: a figure that must be placed in the context of India’s astounding run of 18 consecutive home series wins. In his other 17 Tests, Foakes averages 35.7.
“I feel like I’ve had my Test career, played 25 Tests,” he reflects. “But within myself, I’m probably unsure because I haven’t had an extended run. I’d still say there’s question marks about my career.
“I just found India away quite tough. Everyone does, but I feel like that’s where my career has almost been knocked on the head. International cricket is cut-throat. For a while I’ve known I wasn’t like ‘the guy’. I was the guy that came in for certain situations when conditions might be really tough. That’s kind of where I sat in my head. I was almost content with that, because I knew that was how it was going to be. So I took every time I got picked as a bit of a blessing, rather than expecting it to a point, just because of the number of droppings I had.”
Foakes’s curse, perhaps, was that his qualities in one area exposed his comparative limitations in another. His very brilliance as a keeper led to England handing him the gloves in India. But the same conditions also showcased Foakes’s struggles attacking with the bat.
“Going to India, I think that role at No 7 is quite important, because generally, you don’t have many batters behind you, and with the nature of the surfaces – in your first 20 balls, you would be having to play a different sort of game. So having an aggressive batter in those conditions can be very important. But then, on the flip side, it is a really hard place to keep.”
Foakes’s best Test innings tended to come when he could accumulate unobtrusively, rather than worry about manipulating the strike. This template helped Foakes score 107 and lift England from 103 for five in Galle on debut in 2018, building partnerships with Buttler and Sam Curran. It helped him put on 173 with Ben Stokes to marshal a recovery from 147 for five against South Africa and make his second Test century. And it led to one of Foakes’s most crucial, yet easily overlooked, innings: an unbeaten 32 to share a 120-run stand with Joe Root and clinch a five-wicket win over New Zealand in the first Test of the Bazball project.
“In places like England, it’s a little bit less important to have that power hitter, because generally you just bat for longer,” Foakes explains. “You’re definitely more in before you’re batting with the lower order, you have the seam bowling all-rounder behind you, so it extends your innings.
“I’m well aware the power hitting aspect of my game is my weakness. India’s the place that exposes that the most.”
Two years ago, Foakes admitted that “I’m not, as you’d say, Bazball”. Yet Foakes is far from the stodgy batsman that he is sometimes portrayed. His Test strike rate, 47.2, is only 1.5 runs slower than Alec Stewart’s; his overall Test average, 29.2, is just one run less than Zak Crawley’s.
The bulk of Foakes’s Tests came under Stokes’s captaincy. For all the unerring excellence of his keeping, Foakes’s tempo was not always an easy fit in the side. Rather than attempt to transform his batting, Foakes sought to turn his difference into a strength; he actually scored fractionally slower under Stokes’s captaincy than Root’s.
“It is difficult because I’ve played a certain way for my whole career. If I were to go out and try to whack it against [Jasprit] Bumrah reversing it around corners, or [Ravichandran] Ashwin, [Ravindra] Jadeja doing their thing and it skidding and spinning, I think it would be unsuccessful.
“I was always like, I have to stick to my guns with how I play, while obviously freeing myself up as much as possible. The bit I came unstuck is just batting with 10, 11 and then throwing my wicket away. That’s the bit I needed to improve.
“If I wasn’t in India, would that have been easier – that’s the question mark for me. But that’s just the way it goes.”
Stewart’s career was marked by perennial debate about whether he should play as a specialist batsman or a keeper-batsman. Jack Russell – to whom Stewart was ultimately preferred as keeper – recently lamented that England take wicketkeepers for granted. Foakes suggests that perceptions of keepers in England differ to those in some other nations.
“I definitely think England views keeping differently to other countries. I think a lot of countries go more down the keeping route. We obviously don’t do that as much, and that’s just their preference.” Perhaps in no other country would Ollie Pope, who has not had designs on keeping full-time, have been selected as wicketkeeper in six Tests.
Yet if Foakes would be entitled to feel that his country have underappreciated him, the same could not be said of his county. Foakes occupies an unusual position in the domestic game: as a red-ball specialist, though he aims to play more white-ball cricket this summer.
Foakes’s focus on the first-class game matches his county’s. Since joining Surrey from Essex a decade ago, Foakes has scored 5,615 first-class runs at an average of 40.7, normally juggling No 5 with keeping. He has won four County Championships since 2018, and is an integral part of the side craving a fourth consecutive title – a feat that no side have managed since Surrey themselves in 1955, en route to seven straight triumphs.
“Red-ball is a huge thing here,” Foakes reflects. “You want to actually go down in the history of the club and be one of those groups that gets remembered.
“If we can go on and win more, it cements us as a legacy team. You don’t want to be a team that’s forgotten. I think we’re at that stage.”
