Asa Tribe bats like the answer to a question that no-one has quite got round to asking. What exactly are England looking for this summer, as they seek to reboot their Test team after a chastening winter in Australia?
Are they looking for batters with a proven weight of county runs, who can shore up that "misted" link between the national team and its traditional feeder system? Or are they looking for another self-starting, "high-ceiling" performer who needs to be rescued from the constraints of the domestic game if his full potential is to be realised?
At the age of 22, Tribe arguably qualifies on both counts. So far this season he's notched a brace of second-innings fifties in the space of three Championship matches for Glamorgan, including an untaxing 67 not out in this week's high-scoring draw against Leicestershire - from which it has been difficult to draw many conclusions other than he's calm, cultured and unafraid to make hay while the sun shines.
It was late last summer, on the other hand, that Tribe marched to prominence with four centuries in five distinctly varied innings: including two in a row in the often derided One-Day Cup, and a maiden first-class double-century against Northamptonshire, which helped to drive Glamorgan towards their first promotion since the year of his birth in 2004.
Perhaps most revealingly though, he popped back home to the Channel Islands in the midst of that run, where his whopping 175 from 156 balls at St Martin helped his native Jersey thrash Papua New Guinea in the ICC Challenge League.
Though Jersey is clearly no backwater, with a competitive national team whom Italy pipped to the recent T20 World Cup on net run-rate, it is also an island of just four teams and 104,000 people, less than a third of the population of Cardiff. Tribe's emergence from that limited talent pool, and his subsequent strides towards wider recognition - including with a maiden winter with Paarl Royals in the SA20 - suggest a player who hasn't yet accepted any limitations on his ambition.
"People in Jersey want to see me do well," Tribe says, while watching his old team-mates - his brother Zak included - taking on MCC on the main square at Lord's. "Even today, guys have been coming up to me and saying they're really proud, and stuff like that, which is a nice little driver to keep pushing. And I hope that this shows that other people from Jersey and other smaller islands can make this transition."
He says it was a chat, at the age of 15 or 16, with the current national coach, Neil MacRae, that sparked his bid for higher honours. "He asked me, what do you want to get from cricket?" Tribe recalls. "And that's when I realised I probably would have to go off-island. So I did my A levels shortly after, and then fled Jersey."
It wasn't a unique recognition, he adds, so far as career progression in the Channel Islands go. "People in a lot of different industries also realise that, to make the next step, you have to leave," he says. "In the cricketing environment, you're playing the same people every Saturday, and it takes a lot of motivation for those people to want to come back.
"If there's no drive, they can very much fall out of the game. They're only playing for the love of the sport, right? And that's why, when you get into the highest honours of playing for Jersey, that's probably where people just call it a day at the end. They're just happy with that level. For me, I always wanted to grow further than that."
Tribe's next step was a season for Crouch End in the Middlesex Premier League, before those A levels paid dividends with a place in the now sadly denuded University Cricketing Centres of Excellence (UCCE) system at Cardiff Metropolitan University, from which his Glamorgan opportunity arose. The ECB's decision to cut funding to its six UCCE campuses has since undermined one of the best alternative routes into a professional career, and Tribe is unafraid to voice his criticism of the decision.
"I think it should continue," he says. "I'm not saying Glamorgan is the best county out there, but we've certainly taken players from the UCCE set-up - there's obviously myself, Will Smale, Andy Gorvin and Dan Douthwaite, to name a few that have come through that pathway. It'd be a shame to lose out on that, especially for someone like myself who doesn't come through an Academy pathway. It can still be beneficial for people who develop slightly later."
Tribe's development is in overdrive right now. A maiden winter in the England Lions set-up allowed him a front-row seat for the Ashes build-up, before a truncated but instructive stint in Abu Dhabi in February, where Ben Stokes and Moeen Ali made guest appearances on Andrew Flintoff's coaching staff.
"It was a great experience, because you can see that level, and know that you're the next step," Tribe says. "To be around the England boys at Loughborough before we actually went to Australia, to be in an environment that is ready to go and play an Ashes series … it is enhancing my game, as well as everyone else's."
He emerged from his travels in serious credit, with an unbeaten century against Australia A in England Lions' unofficial Test at Allan Border Field in December, and further unbeaten fifties in Canberra and Abu Dhabi. But the bulk of his winter, he says, was devoted to self-knowledge, in particular a tweak to his trigger movement that he believes has enhanced his technique against high-pace bowling.
"I didn't get picked for the first two games [in Australia], but I look back now, and that was brilliant," he says. "As much as you want to be playing, that gave me three weeks to really nail down my game.
"Everyone says there's more pace and bounce in Australia, and that is true, but the type of bowling is different as well. It's not so much about swinging the ball and challenging your front pad. It's more riding the bounce, more lateral movement off the wicket. Those three weeks were essential for me to gear up for how I wanted to bat."
Tribe credits the Lions batting coach, Neil McKenzie, for helping him put his tweaks into practice - "I wanted to do a big trigger, because I like the way Kohli bats, but Macca said you only need a small movement to get you into position" - but he's adamant that such fundamental change can only come from within.
"The premise that I have about my batting, I like it to be my own decision to make a change," he says. "Obviously, you speak to guys with good knowledge and you take it on board. But I don't want to change things if I don't believe it's right in my own game.
In the wrong hands, such self-possession might come across as arrogance, but as a previous generation of biomechanically tinkered fast bowlers would attest - James Anderson among them - change for the sake of change can be as career-ending as a refusal to budge in the first place.
"I'd say I'm quite a curious person," he adds. "I like exploring new avenues and that doesn't just stop at cricket, it extends beyond that. I don't like being stagnant. I like growing and I like being a better player than I was each year.
"But I remember saying to the Glammy boys before I went out [to Australia], I don't want to go into this environment and just change everything. I'm a bit stubborn in that way. What's got me here has got me here, so it must be good enough so far.
"But they were like, you might not change because you're being told to change. You might change because you think that's what's required to perform at the next level. That was a good piece of advice. I took the change that was required and felt like it's helped me."
Some of that change, he says, stemmed from his fast-tracking into Glamorgan's T20 Blast set-up last summer, and the need to create scoring opportunities from deliveries he might have been content to defend in red-ball cricket. One minute, he was playing against Wiltshire in a One-Day Cup warm-up, the next he was making 40 from 26 balls at No.6 against Middlesex, and adapting his game on the hoof.
"I was triggering back in a different way in T20 to get into a position to hit, and I felt like that gave me more time," he says. "So already my cogs were turning … if I've got more time against quicker bowling, surely I can bring that into red-ball as well, if I'm going to be facing lads like Mitch Stanley, who are bowling good pace in the nets at me. It was something I couldn't really ignore."
His fast-tracking continued with his winter in the SA20. Though he had initially assumed his call-up was a joke, he performed creditably throughout the competition, even earning the plaudits of Kevin Pietersen along the way. His 164 runs at a strike-rate of 120.58 included key roles in a trio of victories, most notably 51 from 34 balls against an MI Cape Town attack featuring Rashid Khan, Trent Boult and Kagiso Rabada.
"It was an unbelievable experience, and a great opportunity to face some of the world's best bowlers," he says. "It might be nice to develop slowly and just push on a little bit, but sometimes getting thrown right in the deep end really tests where your game's properly at."
Who knows what he'll be flung into next, but Tribe appears to have the self-assurance to adapt, come what may.
"Cricket can spiral very quickly," he says. "This last six months to a year that I've had, I wouldn't have dreamt of being in this position. But it's a 12-month sport now, so you can get in the habit of going, and going, and going, without actually processing what's happened.
"But sometimes you have to take a second to just reflect," he adds. "That's what Richard Dawson, the Glammy head coach, just told me to do. Assess how it's gone, give yourself a pat on the back."
And get ready, no doubt, to go again. He's been pretty good at asking questions of himself so far in his short career. At some stage, you sense, England's selectors will be ready to ask him the ultimate one.
