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Jordan Cox, who lots of good judges say is not really a number three, replaces the injured Jacob Bethell, who also, in many good opinions, is not really a number three, and scores 73 batting at number three. Marnus Labuschagne, who has been a number three for years and years, bats at number three for Australia against Bangladesh and fails, and Ricky Ponting, perhaps the greatest number three of all-time says, ‘I think there’s some technical deficiency there… he’s making the margin for error for the bowlers too great. With the length, he can’t score off the back foot. If you can’t score off the back foot in Test cricket then batting becomes a hard game.’ At Headingley, Jordan Cox faces Mohammad Ali and hits one right at the top of the bounce off the back foot and it goes through point like a rocket. It’s only one innings though. Stats say that batters, and that means pretty much all batters throughout history, fail to make their average in two out of three innings, so maybe Cox fails in his next two or three visits because the numbers say that he may well fail, and those failures play into the idea that he’s not really a number three and he’s replaced once again by Jacob Bethell, not really a number three, who has to go to South Africa against the World Champion Test side in statistically the hardest conditions for top order batters, and he fails too, and that proves that he’s not a number three either. So what is a number three in the modern age? We know what it was. It was the best player, what Tom Wolfe called in Bonfire of the Vanities the Big Swinging Dick, or if not, it was the best technician. We know who it was, too – it was King Viv, it was the Punter, it was Rahul Dravid, softening them up for Sachin. It was Kumar Sangakkara, princely and left-handed, and it was Hashim Amla, a whispering Shaolin master who trod so softly he left no footprint on rice paper. On air for TMS in Leeds, Alastair Cook is trying to goad his fellow commentators into mentioning a hundred he scored in a Test at Cardiff against Sri Lanka in 2011. Andy Zaltzman looks up the card. ‘Yes, replying to Sri Lanka’s 400 all out, England 495-5 declared, Jonathan Trott 203…’ ‘Oh yeah,’ says Cook, ‘Trotty got a double, I’d forgotten about that…’ By the time Jonathan Trott was batting number three for England, the mood had shifted and times had changed. Trotty made forgettable double hundreds. Of the emerging Big Four who would dominate this generation of long-form batting, only Kane Williamson (technician) seemed to favour three rather than four. India found their Trott in Cheteshwar Pujara. Steve Smith got concussed by Jofra Archer at Lord’s and Australia stumbled upon Marnus. As batting changed through its T20 era and Test matches became arenas for wobble seam bowling, a number three was something different, somewhere alien, perhaps some place impossible to score consistent runs. It was easy to aspire to bat three when Viv Richards or Ricky Ponting did it. By the time Trott, Pujara and Marnus were grinding out scores it was both warm-up act and dying art. When big shots equal big money, why limit your options in the market by being a grinder? Pujara’s T20 strike rate was 112. Marnus never played the IPL. What youngster yearns for that? As a case study, the modern England batting line-up spotlights the shortage. Come Bazball, Ollie Pope was asked to bat three having never really done it in first-class cricket. His success was equivocal and his credit expired with the feeling that he never really understood how he wanted to play. Almost every innings involved a madcap opening as he sought to Baz it up and also, you know, stay in for a while. Out he went, and in came Bethell, not a number three, and then Cox, also not a number three. Except, how can you not be a number three when nobody really seems certain what a number three actually is? All England seem to know for sure is that Root and Brook bat four and five, with Stokes (until now) at six, and Smith seven, so if you want a go and you aren’t an opener, it’s Hobson’s choice, a spare spot, a non-role, a hospital pass. And yet, and yet… Bethell and Cox have both succeeded, albeit via small sample. Neither show the skittishness of Pope, but nor are they classically defensive batters. In fact, they’re the opposite of that. Both produce tremendous power and chronometer timing from a backlift that goes beyond the perpendicular, a key trait of the batter raised post T20. Perhaps here lies the secret to batting at three in the new age. In Tests, Bethell strikes at 60, and in a career total of 579 runs has made 330 of those in boundaries – 75 fours and five sixes. Cox’s 125 Test match runs to date have included 19 fours and a six. His maiden half century came from 71 deliveries, ten of which he hit to the boundary. What do we deduce from that? Probably that both know they can afford to leave and block a lot of deliveries because their scoring shots count and the board still ticks. They’re boxers with a big punch. It’s really noticeable too how slowly both move around the crease between deliveries. They have low heart rates, these two, and they are un-agitated at altitude. They bat like they want to. To pick up on Ricky Ponting’s technical point, both hit the ball hard with a straight bat, taking it late at the top of the bounce, and they’re white ball guns, which may not be unconnected. Nevertheless, a spectre hangs over this argument, and it’s that of the great Vince himself. As I wrote in Vinciness (out now in gorgeous paperback and yours for just £10 plus p+p here), he too was a not-number-three who hit lots of boundaries - in fact, of players to have scored more than 350 runs in Tests he had the highest boundary percentage, at somewhere over 70. But for Vince, more of a front foot player, it meant he faced more balls consecutively from each bowler as he was not rotating the strike, and so those bowlers had extra deliveries to play on his weakness, which was being caught at slip. Bethell and Cox are younger, less scarred and fleeter of foot than Vince, and if you spend much time batting with Joe Root, the strike will turn regardless. Only one of them can have the place, obviously, so perhaps for now Cox, a not terrible keeper, is actually in competition with Jamie Smith rather than Bethell. The key to accepting either of them, or anyone else born after the turn of the century, at number three is to understand that batting, and cricket, is accelerating, sundering from its past and fighting for relevance in a fast-moving online culture. Nothing is the same, let alone a place in a batting order. Three, now, is whoever walks out there.