Dawid Malan out to make most of ‘fantastic opportunity’ on return to Test arena

Dawid Malan is returning to the Test arena with unfinished business on his mind after admitting the manner of his dropping three years ago left him hurt and “very emotional”.

Malan has been drafted in as an antidote to England’s long-standing top-order travails and will take up the number three slot against India at his home ground of Headingley on Wednesday.

That brings the 33-year-old full circle, having been dropped against the same opponents in 2018, just five matches after finishing the 2017/18 Ashes as England’s top-scorer Down Under thanks to a fine 140 in Perth.

Since then he has gone on to forge a productive path in short-form cricket, spending the last 11 months on top of the international cricket council’s Twenty20 rankings and earning a deal in the Indian Premier League.

Despite a notable lack of red-ball cricket in recent times – scoring an eye-catching 199 in his only first-class outing this year – Malan is back in England whites with a chance to show former national selector Ed Smith was too hasty, and perhaps too harsh, in his assessment of him.

Smith sent Malan on his way with an observation that he may be better suited to overseas conditions, a bitter reputational blow, but never called on him again to test the theory.

“I think at the time when you get dropped you’re very emotional, you feel you should be playing,” he said on the eve of his comeback appearance.

“It probably did affect me for the next four, five, six months; I went away and played some tournaments and I just couldn’t get in the right head space after all of that.

“Having a bit of a break and gathering my thoughts. I found a new lease of life and realised what I’d done wrong the first time. Luckily enough I was still in and around the white-ball stuff to put some of that into practice. So hopefully this time around the stuff I’ve learned puts me in good stead.

“Yes, not playing a lot of red-ball cricket probably doesn’t help with the rhythms and the flows of Test cricket but that’s the challenge,” he said.

“If we are here, we believe we are good enough and it’s up to us to find a way of batting for long periods of time. A good 30 or 60 is not good enough really, you want to score those big hundreds and to do that you have to bat for a day, day and a half. That’s where the challenge comes when you don’t play a lot of red-ball cricket, but I don’t think we’d be here if we didn’t believe we could do it.”

Malan’s return in place of Dom Sibley is one of two expected changes to the side which went 1-0 down at Lord’s, with the uncapped Saqib Mahmood and Craig Overton vying to take over from the injured Mark Wood (shoulder).