NASSER HUSSAIN: Zak Crawley did not set the right tone as England collapsed again

When the ball does a bit in Test cricket, England tend to find themselves 60 for six. They need to come up with a way, when conditions are challenging, to ensure it is 200 for six instead.

They need to get rid of their tendency to collapse and that means the batsmen getting their tempo right.

Batting on the kind of pitch presented to them in Grenada, they are either completely in their shell or a little bit over eager and have this ongoing tendency to lose wickets in clusters.

England’s Zak Crawley will be disappointed as an opener to get caught at short extra cover

The two flat roads we saw in Antigua and Barbados were never going to help sort out the issues that had been deep set with England’s batting for a couple of years now.

And it will be down to the bowlers, once again, to pull the team out of a hole.

It was certainly a good pitch to bowl on, offered a lot of sideways movement and appeared to be a little uneven and two-paced.

But as Jack Leach and Saqib Mahmood showed late in the day, if you showed some guts and character, you could bat on it. Yes, there was some swing and seam movement but players must react to that.

Someone like Zak Crawley is a case in point. We applaud his tempo at the top of the order because he doesn’t just sit there, he tries to put bat to ball.

Crawley did not set the right tone as the England batsmen failed to strike the right balance

Yet he will be disappointed as an opener to get caught at short extra cover. That’s not the way to set the tone.

Unfortunately, it did. Not enough players trusted their techniques and looked to survive.

Alex Lees was an exception, showing some guts and character up front and combating Kemar Roach, one of the best bowlers in the world at bowling to left-handers from around the wicket and someone who has now dismissed him three times in the series.

Lees is an old school Yorkshire opening bat, who tries to bat long with a pretty simple technique. That’s nice to see given some of the openers England have had in the last couple of years.

Second time round, though, he will want to end the tour with a sizeable score, just to make sure he is there come the first Test match against New Zealand in the summer. Before the defiant last wicket heroics of Leach and Mahmood, someone like Chris Woakes showed how to strike the right balance.

Alex Lees showed some guts and character up front in combating Kemar Roach

He put away the bad ball, tried to be positive and attacking but was also resolute in defence. That is something England have struggled to do when opposition bowlers are on top.

Over the last couple of years, they’ve either been completely in their shell, or as Crawley was, slightly loose.

When I played with Stuart Law at Essex, he would be positive when the ball was doing a bit but that meant being positive in defence too.

That is what Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul did for India at Lord’s last summer.

They found a way of getting their side to a par score by playing that way. In similar circumstances, England find themselves way below par.

Pre-match, Joe Root spoke about how his side had avoided a bad session leading them to a loss in the first two games.

Jack Leach and Saqib Mahmood also showed guts and character late in the day

But they batted on two roads in the first two matches and the key for this red ball reset that I keep hearing about is not how you bat on such surfaces, but the ones on which it does a bit.

Those are the circumstances in which a bad session will truly cost you.

Of course, the old maxim is to not judge a match situation until both sides have batted, but this total is not going to win you many Tests, so England will have to play well from here.

The start of this match has also highlighted the move of Root up to number three.

It’s fine when the bat is dominant but looking forward to the summer, if bowling conditions prevail will he want to continue to do that?

We haven’t learned a great deal about the top six in a run-friendly tour so far, but we might do over its remainder.