It took England so long to find a new opening batsman that the man they were trying to replace ended up taking on the job of searching himself. So long that he had to quit before he had finished. In the eight years since Andrew Strauss retired in 2012, England have tried 18 openers in 18 combinations. There was Alastair Cook, obviously, Nick Compton, Joe Root, and Michael Carberry, then Sam Robson, Jonathan Trott, Adam Lyth, and Moeen Ali, Alex Hales, Ben Duckett and Haseeb Hameed, Keaton Jennings and Mark Stoneman, Joe Denly, Jason Roy, Rory Burns, and, just lately, Dom Sibley and Zak Crawley. Strauss had a hand in picking some of them, during his three-year stint as the ECB’s director of cricket. He is at this Test, working for Sky, and running the Red For Ruth campaign to raise money for the foundation he set up in his wife’s name after she died in 2018. “When I cast my mind back to the time I was director of cricket there was a real frustration that the Test team seemed to take one step forward and then go one step back,” he says. “It didn’t feel like we were making the progress we wanted to, in particular with the top-order batting, where we sort of had a conveyor belt of people coming in and out where we showed promise but weren’t able to show the consistency we needed.” Compton, Jennings, Lyth, Robson, and Root made centuries, Stoneman and Hales made five fifties in 11 Tests each. But Strauss thinks it is only now it finally feels like they are close to fixing the problem. “If you look at that batting conundrum we’re closer to sorting that out than we have been for some time. Sibley and Burns at the top of the order are made of the right stuff temperamentally,” he says. “They’ve got slightly quirky games but very effective games, and that is a big tick. And as we all know if the openers are doing their job then that makes it so much easier for the shot players coming in down the order.” On Sunday, Burns and Sibley put on 114 together, it was England’s first century partnership for the first wicket in England in four years, and the second anywhere since Cook retired in 2018. It was a little slow – and between all their tics and stylistic eccentricities, it certainly was not much to look at – but it worked. They are second and third in the averages for this series, behind Ben Stokes. Burns has 234 runs at 46.80, and Sibley 226 at 45.20. Between them, they have faced 202 of the 529 overs West Indies have bowled. This being England, Strauss’s thoughts are already leaping on ahead to how they might do in the Ashes. “For me, the biggest challenge was opening the batting in Australia,” he says. “There are two reasons for that, one is that the extra bounce of the ball is very hard to deal with, especially when the ball is new, and the other is that the Kookaburra does tend to swing a lot for the first 10 or 15 overs. After that, it gets much flatter. “ So you have that feeling as an opener in Australia that you’ve really got to dig deep and find a way through those first 10 overs or so when you feel the advantage is really with the bowlers and then if you can get through that then you’re in great position to go on and get a big score. “I look at their games and I think Rory Burns showed some fantastic technique and ticker against Australia last year. He played brilliantly in that Ashes series, probably the pick of the English batsmen,” Strauss adds, turning back to last summer, when Burns scored 390 runs at 39. “With Dom Sibley, his method of getting across the stumps and into the channel outside works well in most circumstances, but he might have to be careful of that potential to be caught down the leg-side, or at leg slip in Australia.” Sibley did score a century against Australia A at the MCG in February, so he has had some good experience there. All that is a way off yet. England have a series against Pakistan to play first and tours of Sri Lanka and India this winter. They face them, for the first time in the long time, with some hope their openers will be up to it. There is something reassuring about knowing England have a reliably boring opener or two. It feels like the ravens have returned to the Tower at last.