England wicketkeeper Ben Foakes says he was dropped in a 10-second phone call when he got the chop nine months ago. The Surrey star admits he “knew it was coming” and hasn’t had any contact from England since.
Foakes was canned after the Test Series in India last year which was his 25th Test appearance and now potentially his last. For years he had shared the duties behind the stumps with Jos Buttler and Jonny Bairstow but England now appear to have moved on.
Jamie Smith has emerged as first choice and even when he’s been missing the ECB selectors have turned to Essex’s Jordan Cox and then Durham’s Ollie Robinson.
When Foakes found out about his latest setback he concedes the writing looked to be on the wall as players’ schedules were moved around and he waited for the phone to ring – which was the last time England would call.
He told the Telegraph : “I knew I was dropped already – just because of the way that lads were being pulled out of games. You don’t need a degree to work out that if you haven’t been told, you’ve been dropped. I knew it was coming. Then I got told I was dropped. And then ever since, no contact.”
Foakes also recalled how the conversation panned out as he added: “I was like ‘you don’t need to explain anything. I know what’s going on here’. And then that’s it.”
Being axed wasn’t necessarily anything new for Foakes, who throughout his Test career has been dropped five times. He was left out before the 2023 Ashes but the 32-year-old admits the news last summer was even more painful and felt like the curtain really had more come down.
“This felt more final than the Ashes,” he added. “Then it was like ‘we’ve got too many players to fit in the slots – not necessarily that we don’t like your skill set’. That’s probably easier to accept, however hard it is to get dropped. Whereas when it’s ‘yeah, we’re just moving on’ – I think naturally, it feels like more of an ending.”
The Surrey man also acknowledges that he was never the man for England, at least he was never made to feel that way, and the call often came his way when the conditions would suit what he could offer. As a result he saw Test outings as a bonus, rather than something to expect.
He said: “For a while I’ve known I wasn’t like ‘the guy’. I was the guy that came in for certain situations when conditions might be really tough. That’s kind of where I sat in my head. I was almost content with that, because I knew that was how it was going to be. So I took every time I got picked as a bit of a blessing, rather than expecting it to a point, just because of the number of droppings I had.”
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