Nick Compton feels he was not given a fair chance to prove his mettle

Nick Compton feels ‘let down’

Nick Compton believes he did not get “a fair crack of the whip” by English selectors. While he has not yet been officially dropped from the Ashes squad, the fact that he has not been included in England squad for their practice matches means that the official word is just a formality.

He said: “I don’t feel that I had a fair crack of the whip. I don’t really know where things stand, to be honest. I got told I had been dropped.

“Your guess is as good as mine. Would you drop me for an Essex warm-up game and then pick me? Isn’t that messing a few people around? I don’t know.

“It’s been disappointing of late but I’ll keep fighting on because I regard myself as a fighter. I’ve had to do that time and time again.

“People doubted me when I got picked for England; people doubted me in India; they doubted me when I got nought in New Zealand and then I scored two hundreds, but they even doubted me after that series.”

After getting dropped for the practice games, he responded by scoring 79 against the Australians for Worcester. He also made 81 against them for Somerset last week.

He said: “I feel like this was a very good response, actually. Last week was a very good response, too. Time and time again I get asked to make responses and I feel like I do that every single time.

“Andy Flower said go away and score runs. I have done that. How many runs is scoring runs?”

In the Headingley Test against New Zealand in May 2013 which is believed to have forced this drop, he said: “”By my own admission I wasn’t in a great place at Headingley. It was a poor Test match, no doubt about it.

“But one, or one and a half Test matches, doesn’t really constitute a series or a career. There’s a lot of players early in a season whose feet go missing. I didn’t look too much into it.

“Headingley was a poor Test match and that was it. It was a bit of a shock to hear the news. Perhaps I should have had more of a crack and gone down fighting. In the context of the game, did it matter?”

Nick Compton has scored 479 runs in 9 Test matches at an average of 31.93 so far.

Source: Guardian