Will the second-best T20 batsman in England go to the World Cup?

England are now so good, they can admit out loud that certain Test matches mean more than others regardless of what they charge for the tickets, the staging fee or the TV rights, and they can divest themselves of their best T20 batsman, a man in no small part responsible for their only ever international title, in the pincers of contractual small-print. Either that, or hubris is beginning to set in.

They might go to Sri Lanka for the title defence without their second-best T20 batsman too, because that is Owais Shah and they don't seem to like him much, either. But the great meritocracy of sport sends its messages whether they are acknowledged or not and on Shah the free market has spoken. Pietersen aside, he is the one successful English player in the IPL. He has been bought on four different occasions by four different teams, and this year got his first decent run, for Rajasthan Royals. He played 13 games and made 340 runs at almost 38, at a strike rate of 132. That put him inside the top 20 batters in the tournament. In the Big Bash, where he played for Hobart, he averaged 70 at a rate of 150 over eight games.

At the crease he is a magnificent oddity, a one-off, a wired bundle of quirks and ticks, eyes wide and brain burning with the sheer range of possibilities he brings to each delivery. Last year he played the shot of the season at Chelmsford, a defensive prod that went over the stand. With his limber wrists, he might just have easily got the same ball through fine leg, or slipped it past third man. Equally, on another day, it might have struck him plumb in front, or been popped back to the bowler from a leading edge. In attitude, in approach, in appearance, he is an enigma; in short, everything that England distrusts.

The other day, he came in for Essex in a CB40 match with the game won and Ravi Bopara on a hundred. He played incredibly straight; his bat looked like a barn door. He flicked one to the boundary, took a few singles and did nothing really extraordinary, but that was sort of the point: even in so little there was something about it that illuminated Bopara's conventionality. Bopara is very good, and his desire and attitude deserves respect. But the shimmer of something extra.... no, it was all down the other end.

More than any other format, because it is condensed and amplified, T20 cricket needs that something extra, some dynamism from players who will walk the tightrope. Pietersen did, Eoin Morgan does, and so does Shah. It's a quality that's most effective and magnetic when the player has learned to control it, to bring it out when it's needed, and Shah seems to be at that point now.

He should replace KP, but he won't. In fact, they should both play, but neither will. Last year, in the post about Shah's shot of the season at Chelmsford, I wrote that he had 'a racehorse temperament' that had stopped him playing more for England. This was disputed in an anonymous first-person response underneath. I have no idea whether it was genuine or not (it's still there, if you scroll down) but I regret writing it now anyway: it's too glib a description of a complex player. Shah has made his case in the arena where it counts. Wonder if England are going to notice?

Owais Shah plays the shot of the season

The other night at Chelmsford, Owais Shah played the shot of the season. It should not pass unacknowledged. It wasn't a new invention, not a flip or a scoop or a glide; it wasn't a power-mow, a skimming bomb, a cultured hoik. It wasn't from the MCC manual either, not because it lacked orthodoxy, but because it was simply unavailable to most players. It was a piece of skill so pure that very, very few people on earth could have executed it.

I doubt that even Shah expected the result he got. He'd just come to the crease with Essex chasing Kent's 183. The score was 9-1 after a couple of overs. The lights were on, the ball was swinging a little, Essex had to win to qualify from the group. Shah is skittish at the best of times, a fragile, scarred talent, and he began uneasily. Charl Langeveldt and Azhar Mahmood were bowling, taking the ball mostly away from the right-handers. Langeveldt sent one down on a good length, tailing out at about 85mph. Shah picked his bat up, stepped across his crease and shaped to push forwards. In essence that was all he did. As he finished the shot he accelerated a little into the briefest of follow-throughs.

At first, the ball looked to have popped up towards mid-off; maybe Shah had been done a little by the bounce and offered a simple catch. Yet instead it continued to climb. Shah watched it open-eyed. It went up and onwards into the evening sky, cleared the boundary and then carried the two-tier stand and departed the ground altogether. Shah looked down at the wicket. A few of the other players glanced at one another. The ball had to be replaced.

The pace of the game, and its importance, didn't really leave much time for reflection, but that shot was a small miracle of timing and striking. It didn't really help Shah, or Essex, either. He made 27 from 20 balls, and Essex lost by 15 runs. The main talking point afterwards was a catch Scott Styris claimed and had disallowed, yet Shah's shot will stay in the memory for longer than any of that.

Owais's racehorse temperament has cost him with England, but this was a glimpse of the possible. Perhaps only Sehwag could play a shot like it - Shah's was that good.

The Strauss Two

Occasionally - rarely - it can be worth interviewing England cricketers who are not Kevin Pietersen.

Richard Hobson's piece with Andrew Strauss in the Times today yielded a nugget: 'He thinks he knows nine of the eleven he would like for the first [Ashes] Test at Cardiff, declining to identify the two vacant places'.

Who are the Strauss Two? Acknowledging the wishes of the captain by keeping this item blind, OAS will be one, music to the ears of IRB, RSB and of course MPV. 

But IRB is one of three dumped by Strauss so far, with MSP and SJH. So the news that either the spinner's spot or the third seamer is settled [do the math, as the kids say] is bad news for one or the other. Which could it be?

Strauss would offer only coded clues: 'We must acknowledge that an Ashes series is different to others. I am thinking of the extra attention, expectation, pressure, and the brand of cricket Australia play. We cannot afford for any of our players to be surprised by the challenge'.

Given that SJH is constantly surprised by everything that ever happens to him ['I need to sit down and have a chat with Straussy, find out where I stand' etc] and MSP subsides into Bambi-eyed shock every time a batsman gets after him, it's still hard to tell. 

Maybe it's even a further incentive to that Pro Arch century-maker, who only ever looks surprised when he's bowled. 

Answers on a postcard.

NB: One of Strauss's finest attributes is his refusal [so far] to refer to himself in interviews as 'Andrew Strauss'. So let's hope Andrew Strauss gets what Andrew Strauss wants.

No business like Shah business

'A bit susceptible to pace early on' is one of those blanket criticisms sometimes applied to batsmen. It's a little like a clairvoyant cold-reading a crowd: 'I'm seeing a white room with cream curtains...'. Practically everyone's been in one, just as every batter is vulnerable to a 90mph yorker bowled by Wasim Akram. 

Yet it's a criticism that has attached itself to Owais Shah; it was trotted out as conventional wisdom on TV, radio and newspapers yesterday. 'Ooh, he's got a strong bottom hand... can get out to pace bowling early...'

It's just a fear of unconventionality, a fear that has its natural home in England, where, in May 2005, almost every commentator of note expressed grave doubts over the suitability of Kevin Pietersen for Test match cricket.

Shah is antsy and odd at the crease, especially early, all mad stares and quirky rituals, but the ball cracks from his bat and he drills lines through the field. He hits it either very early or very late; both are fine qualities to have. 

Anyone who reaches Test cricket with their idiosyncracies intact has character, and the next age of batting will be all about unconventionality. Owais Shah has it, and England, and the media need to embrace it. Show the love, boys. Owais can play. 

The Unusual Suspect

Owais. Oh Ace. What a waste. The litany of obscure and unlikely injuries sustained by England players that will forever be topped by Derek Pringle, who did his back writing a letter, and Chris Lewis, who shaved his head and got sunstroke, has a new entry. Owais Shah has scratched his cornea. 

Scratched it after out-batting Ian Bell in Basseterre, too. Ian Bell and his dodgy ticker, long suspected if not officially diagnosed. 

Shah deserves his go. His eyes - when not scratched - burn with the kind of ambition that seems to have faded in Bell's. Energy radiates from him. Caught on hotspot, he looks like something out of Predator. He fidgets and flickers at the crease, and for the first few overs seems self-consciously aware of the doubts that surround him. But he's just so unusual, so loose and unpredictable with his front foot splats over square leg and his forehand drives through the covers, that it's easy to see him as a distant cousin of Chanderpaul or Katich, a man to whom convention means little and results mean everything.

I remember watching Alvin Kallicharran bat for Warwickshire against Hampshire in a John Player League match way back when at May's Bounty. Kallicharran was five feet tall if he was lucky. His bat was the length of his leg. The tops of his pads approached his waist. He looked like a boy in a man's world. But he simply slaughtered the bowling that day, hitting several sixes down the ground and over the hedge into the road, a carry that only the gifted could make. Kalli was smaller than most of the kids in the crowd, but he'd found a way. Shah has found a way too.

No team with Kevin Pietersen in it should be afraid of the unconventional. Shah would be a rich addition to the middle order, with KP taking the totemic number three position at last.