Dominic Sibley says he wondered if the step up from county cricket was too big Sibley admits he was shocked by spell of bowling he faced against South Africa

                                                                                            Dominic Sibley recalls the moment he wondered whether he was good enough to be an England opener.

It was late December, and he had just been caught behind for four off South Africa's Kagiso Rabada at Centurion (below), leaving him with a Test average of 10.5 and a nagging doubt about making the step up.

'I thought: if they bowl like that all series, I'm not sure I'll get a run,' he tells Sportsmail. 'I spoke to my opening partner Rory Burns, and he said the same thing. He reckoned it was the best opening spell he'd faced —even better than the Ashes, when he'd faced Pat Cummins.'That innings was Sibley's fourth in Tests, and followed an underwhelming tour of New Zealand, where he had scored 22, 12 and four — and had his leg-side technique unsparingly dissected by TV's cognoscenti.

In fact, he was able to rationalise his lack of runs at Mount Maunganui and Hamilton, saying: 'I told myself that I'd only had three innings, which wasn't a fair reflection.' It was not until the first Test in South Africa that he began to question himself but team-mates rallied round.

He says: 'I spoke to Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad, and they said I should keep doing what I'd been doing.

'For them to say that, urging me not to worry, really helped. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have my doubts. But I got 29 in the second innings and took confidence from how I played.'

Fortunately for England — who have spent most of the decade looking for a reliable opening pair after Andrew Strauss retired in 2012 — the 24-year-old Sibley is a stubborn sort.In the next Test, at Cape Town, he made a superb unbeaten 133, paving the way for Ben Stokes to seal a memorable last-evening win. It was a performance that belonged to the English tradition of over-my-dead-body openers — an innings of which Len Hutton or John Edrich or Mike Atherton would have been proud.

Stokes was man of the match, but tried to slip his medal into Sibley's kitbag, only for Sibley to quietly return the favour on the team bus. 'There was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing,' he laughs. A bit of fun — and a sign he belonged.

Sibley's quirky technique meant he knew he'd come under scrutiny in New Zealand, but the attention still caught him off-guard. He says: 'You get told you'll be under the spotlight, but you can't really prepare for it.

'I knew how I'd be depicted because my technique is a bit different from the textbook. But between New Zealand and South Africa, I had to believe I would be successful with my method.'In South Africa, his opponents quickly cottoned on to his penchant for the leg-side, and could regularly be heard mocking him on the stump mike.

'A lot of it was in Afrikaans, so I wasn't really listening to too much of it,' says Sibley, who is spending the coronavirus lockdown at his parents' home in Epsom. 'Anyway, I've had that since a young age.

'I've always known my strengths. I like to leave well and look to play straight towards mid-on. I showed in South Africa that I had an off-side game, but I'm one of those players who has to earn the right to play through the off-side. I'm never going to be fluent there from the start.

'At times in that series, there was Anrich Nortje at one end and Kagiso Rabada at the other, each bowling 90mph-plus. You don't get exposed to that too often in county cricket. It's about being thick-skinned.