West Indies vs England: Dropping Stuart Broad is a clear sign of where Joe Root sees his team’s future

Tendulkar’s hundred hundreds. The 2000th Test. The millionth ball in Test matches. Cricket loves nothing more than an ersatz milestone, and one such moment was marked on the first evening at Barbados. When James Anderson found the edge of Roston Chase’s bat to have him caught at slip, some numberwang in the press box with nothing better to do noticed that one of English cricket’s great fast bowling partnerships - Anderson and Stuart Broad - had now taken 1,000 Test wickets between them.

There was one problem, of course. Broad wasn’t playing. He was sitting on the balcony of the Garfield Sobers Pavilion at the Kensington Oval, his feet up, a yellow bib on, his bowling boots safely zipped away. “It makes you feel old,” Anderson said of their achievement. It’s a fair bet Broad was feeling older still. After 124 Tests and 433 wickets, his country were getting on just fine without him.

As the first Test between the West Indies and England got under way, an unsubstantiated - and swiftly denied - rumour started going around the ground that Broad’s absence was partly the result of bed bugs in his Bridgetown hotel room. In fact, the truth was even less comfortable: despite being fully fit and in fine form, having taken a hat-trick in the recent warm-up game, the 32-year-old is no longer good enough to command an automatic place in England’s first XI. And even if England fans have long been anticipating this moment, the fact of it still feels strangely disconcerting, like waking up in a strange bed for the first time. For 12 years, Broad has been as much a part of the furniture of English cricket as Jerusalem, beer snakes and the phrase “good areas”. Can this really be the dimming of the light?

Ever since the prospect of dropping Broad first presented itself towards the end of last summer, Joe Root has been trying to play down its significance. “It came down to a gut call,” he said at the toss, preferring instead to underline the strengths of his replacement Sam Curran, who “strengthens our batting and gives us a different angle of attack”. The day before the game, he insisted that if Broad were dropped, it would not be “because of form, ability, or that his career is nearing an end”.

Even so, you can’t deny this was a hugely portentous decision: a bold one, perhaps, but one fully in keeping with the ethos of Root’s England, with its preference for youth, multi-skilled cricketers and a varied bowling attack. As recently as the last Ashes, it was possible to bemoan the homogeneity of England’s pace attack, with its four 85mph right-arm seamers and a long tail. And perhaps the most worrying aspect of the whole situation, from Broad’s point of view, is that his omission feels in large part ideological: a sense that England are moving on not just from Broad himself, but the sort of cricketer he represents.

Broad’s strokeplay may once have inspired airy comparisons with Sobers, the man whose pavilion he was now marooned in. These days, however, he neither bats very well nor bowls very distinctively. He runs in, right arm over, puts it on a length, and moves it a little. His ground fielding is barely adequate. And while his ruthless drive for self-improvement has forced him into numerous technical tweaks in recent years - trying to get more side-on at the crease, trying to rediscover his outswinger, shortening his run-up over the winter - they feel not so much like new tools, but ever more convoluted attempts to recapture the old ones.

And so his place on the sidelines is a recognition that even when fit, rested and in decent form, Broad is now England’s fourth-choice seamer, after Anderson, Curran and Ben Stokes (but still, you assume, ahead of Chris Woakes). Curran’s struggles with the new ball were a reminder of his limitations and inexperience - he’s slower than Broad, and less accurate too - but by the time Anderson and Stokes had prised out four late wickets in the last eight overs, England had swung the game back their way. Afterwards, Anderson brushed aside Broad’s absence. “It’s a shame that he wasn’t out there today, but hopefully he'll get a go at some stage on this tour,” he said. “There will be difficult decisions as this team improves. I thought it was harsh on Jack Leach to miss out.”

Yeesh. Leach was indeed unlucky to miss out, but leaving out a left-arm spinner with four Tests under his belt is one thing. Leaving out a 124-Test England great is another entirely, and a situation with very little precedent in the modern game. All of the seven men above Broad in the list of Test bowlers got the chance to script their own ending (a privilege one assumes will be granted to Anderson and Dale Steyn, too). No bowler with Broad’s pedigree or weight of wickets has ever been dropped before. We are, to a large extent, in uncharted territory.

If there is a recent parallel, it’s with one of the players upon whom Broad used to model himself early in his career: South Africa’s Shaun Pollock. For a decade around the turn of the century, Pollock was incisive, brilliant, talismanic, bowling stump-to-stump with pace, bounce and movement: the sort of bowler batsmen despise facing. But the end would be cruel and swift. By 2006 - when he was around the age Broad is now - he was averaging in the high-30s. His pace had slowed. He had been relieved of new-ball duties and was bowling first-change behind Makhaya Ntini and Steyn. During one Test match in Colombo, he proved so innocuous that he was reduced to bowling off-breaks. In 2007, he was dropped for the first time against Pakistan. Within a few months, he was gone entirely.

Is Broad destined for a similar fate? At the moment, the odds are still on a prompt comeback. It may well be that, in line with England’s horses-for-courses selection policy, Broad eventually evolves into a home-conditions bowler. He averages 27 at home and 34 away, and even an aging Broad would be fancied to give the Australians one last bloody nose this summer.

Then there’s what you lose from the team above and beyond runs and wickets. Anderson and Broad aren’t just a bowling partnership; they’re a brains trust, a think tank, a university of Test match fast bowling whose effect can’t simply be measured in numbers. There are fewer sharper cricketing minds in the England dressing room, and while some of that knowledge and nous is being retained, there will be times on the field when England miss Broad’s thirst for problem-solving, his ready supply for ideas, his ability to plot his way through a spell. It’s no coincidence that Anderson, for example, averages significantly less with the ball when Broad is in the side.

For now, though, Broad remains benched, beached, on the outside looking in. And for all the magnanimity with which he has taken the decision, it must have been a strange and humbling experience for a player who was so crucial for so long, to now feel so peripheral and so powerless. But then, that’s the thing about gut calls: you can’t really argue with them. All he can do is keep working, keep tweaking, keep waiting, keep hoping for one more chance.