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Harry Brook was given a two-year ban from the Indian Premier League following successive contract withdrawals - AFP/Oli Scarff
Harry Brook will take on India in a Test match for the first time this week. He does so with his stock as high as ever in England, but an uneasy, unusual, relationship has already formed with Brook and the game’s dominant force.
At 26, he has made a successful start as England white-ball captain, an early tick for his leadership skills that make him a Test captain in waiting. After 25 matches, he has a Test average of 58.5, a strike rate of 88.9, and over the winter made a triple-hundred in Pakistan and two series-winning centuries in New Zealand.
As a result, he briefly went top of the global Test batting rankings, although he has now slipped back to No 2, behind his Yorkshire and England team-mate Joe Root.
It is an odd quirk that this is Brook’s first Test meeting with India, an opponent England meet so often. He would have come up against them on tour early last year, but for the compassionate leave he took around the illness, then passing, of his paternal grandmother Pauline, with whom he was very close.
For Brook, when it comes to visiting India, it has been a tale of travails. As an under-19 in 2017, he broke his hand punching a table after he got out (it is hard to imagine the equanimous Brook doing this now).
More recently, in white-ball cricket, he has produced slim returns, as he has when the ball has spun sharply in other parts of the subcontinent. Against India in T20 cricket, he averages 19. In ODIs, it’s 16.7. The small sample of cricket Brook has played in India has led to accusations that he is a flat-track bully who struggles against spin.
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Brook walks after managing just eight runs in a T20 international against India in January - Reuters /Amit Dave
In the Indian Premier League, he played one season with mixed success, then withdrew from lucrative contracts at late notice in the next two. The first, understandably, was following Pauline’s death and then it was to manage his workload just before becoming England captain.
Pulling out of the IPL, whatever the reason, is a sure-fire way to cause offence in India, and now he has been banned from the competition for two years.
Even after his first, family-related withdrawal, sympathy was in short supply. The former India batsman Aakash Chopra, now a very opinionated pundit, warned that franchises should pick English players “at their peril” because they were prone to withdrawing.
That has put noses out of joint in India, as has his straightforward Yorkshire manner, which has often caused inadvertent offence. Brook’s England team-mates joke that he is “an idiot” (Root) and “a bit thick” (Ben Stokes). He is seen as having a high cricketing IQ, but not necessarily being book-smart. In India, the interpretation of England’s babbling Brook might not be so generous.
In his sole season at the IPL as a wide-eyed international rookie in 2023 with a huge price tag of more than £1 million, Brook had a curious time. In 11 matches for Sunrisers Hyderabad, he made just 190 runs, but 100 of them came in a stunning 55-ball innings against Kolkata Knight Riders at the iconic Eden Gardens.
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Brook last played in the IPL in 2023, for Sunrisers Hyderabad - Noah Seelam/AFP
He also offered some innocent commentary on the food and life in India. “I can’t have that every meal,” he said of curry. “I’m not too bad with spice – I reckon I’m a bit better than a few lads here – but it baffles me how people can have curry for breakfast.”
He added: “You walk around and there’s so many homeless people. I feel like I just want to help everybody out. If you walk out of our hotel, 50 yards down the road there’s someone who’s obviously not fortunate enough to have any shelter; they’ve just got a bed on the side of the road. It’s so sad to see, to be honest. It’s definitely been an eye-opener.”
Brook admitted that he had spent a little too much time alone with social media on that trip, and when he made his hundred he could not resist a swipe at the keyboard warriors.
“If you go on social media, people are calling you rubbish and you start to doubt yourself slightly,” he said. “I went out with an I-don’t-care mentality tonight and thankfully, it came off.
“There’s a lot of Indian fans out there who would probably say well done tonight, but they were slagging me off a few days ago. Glad that I could shut them up, to be honest.”
Brook’s capacity to offend continued on this year’s tour of India. Speaking as vice-captain ahead of the second game, he claimed, unprompted, that England’s batsmen had struggled to pick Varun Chakravarthy, the brilliant spinner, because of the smog in Kolkata.
It was indeed a smoggy night, and this was an interesting observation that the players had clearly been discussing together. In India, it was not well received.
“No matter how the light is, if you are not reading the googly out of his hand, you are just not reading the delivery out of his hand,” said the great former spinner Ravichandran Ashwin, who has had a few pokes at Brook over the years on social media.
Brook was then mocked by Ravi Shastri, who was commentating on the series, after another dismissal at the hands of Chakravarthy.
It is fair to say that Brook’s nascent relationship with cricket’s economic powerhouse is a little awkward, to say the least, and he would certainly win few popularity contests in India.
In the modern era, many cricketers go out of their way to stay in the good graces of the hand that feeds them. But Brook falls into a very small category of cricketers around the world: the three-format star who is fortunate to be from a nation wealthy enough (England or Australia) to pay them handsomely on long-term deals that they earn a great living without needing the IPL, or other franchise money.
Brook will be contracted to England for the length of his IPL ban and beyond. It is likely that in that time the only franchise he will represent will be the one based at his home ground Headingley, Northern Superchargers (who, ironically, have been bought by the Sunrisers).
Stokes, Root and Mark Wood are also on top-bracket, long-term England deals that have resulted in them abstaining from the IPL.
Many cricketers from other nations are in the exact opposite position, where they are turning down national contracts – or even retiring from international cricket – because the franchise money is just too great.
While Brook may occupy rare air in that regard, one thing is beyond doubt: he will be desperate to prove that he is a far better player than he has shown in his meetings with them so far and “shut up” some Indian critics once more.
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