Dom Sibley interview: I was happy England dropped me – by the end I was hoping for rain

If, by the end of Dom Sibley’s 22-Test run in the England team, cricket did not look like much fun, that is because he was not having any.

“The pressure of Test cricket can take the enjoyment out of it. You see that with a lot of players,” Sibley tells Telegraph Sport in his first sit-down interview for three years.

Sibley is considered by his peers to be among the most mentally tough players on the circuit. He can concentrate for hours on end while batting, and was brave enough to leave his home county Surrey aged 22 in search of greater opportunity. But, by the end of his time in the Test side, he was so “technically and mentally” scrambled that he was relieved to be dropped.

“Definitely,” Sibley says, when asked if he was hearing what people were saying about his game. “That’s natural, in the world we live in it’s so difficult to avoid. Regardless of what the noise was, I was in my own space thinking that it was going to be a tough day. I was waking up and thinking ‘I could do with those clouds coming in…’

“I look back at clips of how I was moving and my technique, and I think ‘Christ, how did it get to that?’ Being out in the middle, facing bowlers, and thinking ‘genuinely, I don’t know how I am going to score against these guys’.

“Even before the ball had been bowled, I was almost in a position and my body was doing things that I wasn’t in control of, and it was getting me in such a bad place that I was never going to be able to recover. When you are facing guys like [Jasprit] Bumrah, who are unbelievable, I just wasn’t in a place to deal with that.

“I was thinking my technique isn’t allowing me to succeed, that is quite a s—-y place to be. When I was dropped, I was very much like ‘corr, that is probably a good thing’. I didn’t have any bitterness towards coaches about selection. I was just in the bush technically, and mentally, and it was good that I was taken out of that environment.”

Sibley was dropped two Tests into a series against India at a time when the lowest ebbs of the old England, before Bazball, were yet to be reached. There were still 10 Tests – just one of them won – remaining of the Joe Root era, including a drubbing Down Under and defeat in the Caribbean. But the struggling Sibley has, in some quarters, come to represent the era because of the contrast in his style with Bazball. Sibley’s Test strike-rate of 34 is a sharp contrast with the current swashbuckling openers Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett. He describes himself as being “pigeon-holed” for his defensive style, but the 28-year-old does not disagree entirely.