What incentive is there for players such as Yorkshire CCC’s Fin Bean given England's stubborn Zak Crawley stance?

Runs and wickets in the County Championship? Ha! That’s so pre-2022 and the era of Bazball.

These chaps pick on instinct, doncha know, such as Jacob Bethell (no first-class hundred but batting at No 3 in the Test team), Josh Hull (11 first-class wickets at 84 when he made his Test debut in September) and Shoaib Bashir (10 first-class scalps when Stokes saw a two-minute clip of him bowling to Alastair Cook on social media, hitched up his trousers and declared: “By Jove, this fella’s got something!”

Of course, instinct can take you a long way and has much to commend it; Bethell, quite clearly, has plenty about him and could enjoy an outstanding career.

Bashir has made a steady if unspectacular start to his own Test career, another 21-year-old learning the ropes at the highest level.

Hull has the height and skill to serve England, perhaps, while other leftfield selections have prospered; Tom Hartley took nine wickets on Test debut in Hyderabad, for instance.

But there is also a danger of getting too funky, a sense that the current England management perhaps even take a perverse pleasure in ignoring a compelling body of work/evidence in county cricket, which in turn speaks volumes for the way that the county game has been devalued and degraded (another story).

The balance is delicate, between picking on instinct and proven track record, but the worry hereabouts - as highlighted by England’s stubborn support of the struggling Zak Crawley - is two-fold.

First, it may encourage players to turn their backs on the red-ball game in favour of the franchise circuit and, second, disincentivize - or at least appreciably dishearten - those with ambitions of playing for England.

Take Yorkshire’s Fin Bean, for example, who naturally hopes one day to represent his country.

Here is a young player, 22 years old, who has made a fine start to his career as an opening batsman at Yorkshire, scoring almost 2,000 runs from 30 first-class games at an average a touch below 40.

Bean is the sort of player and character who will give his all regardless, but next year is an important one for him, as it is for the team, as he will be facing Division One attacks after Championship promotion and, theoretically, can rack up a volume of runs to press his claims.

Or can he?

Indeed, England’s rush to throw a protective blanket around Crawley, after he finished his New Zealand tour on Monday with a return of 52 runs from six innings at an average of 8.66, may not exactly put a spring in the steps of young players around the country when they return for pre-season nets.

Why, the suspicion that were Crawley an item of clothing he would no doubt be a bulletproof vest was hardly assuaged by the comments of assistant coaches Marcus Trescothick and Paul Collingwood during the final Test in Hamilton.

“I think the important part of this is to remember we’re very much focused on him being the opening batter for a good period to come,” said Trescothick.

“We’ve seen the damage that he does and how he goes about it.”

Collingwood remarked: “The way he’s playing in the nets, he’s hitting the ball really well, he’s just finding ways of getting out.

“With Zak, we’re not asking him to be consistent, it’s about match-winning moments.”

Not only has no England opener batted more often in a series and emerged with an inferior average, with Crawley dismissed each time by pace bowler Matt Henry, he has now gone 28 innings since the last of his four Test hundreds, accumulated from 97 innings in which he is averaging 30 - a figure he has not achieved in any of his last 10 visits to the crease.

This is not meant to be a criticism of Crawley, an outstanding player on his day who England believe can win Tests in Australia in a year’s time; rather, it is to stand up for every batsman with designs - in that spirit of healthy competition that pervades all professional sport - on his place.

Ultimately, a batsman’s only currency is runs - not the threat of runs. That Crawley needs runs - and plenty of them - is clear. Fair play to England, in many ways, for backing him as they have, but that must not be at the expense of fairness to all.

If Bean, or someone else, flowers in the season’s early weeks, then give him a go.