Debutant had an unsettling start but showed on the pitch that he has an authority that belies his inexperienceLord’s doesn’t have a James Anderson End; you’ll find that a couple of hundred miles north at Old Trafford. But if it did, it would be the one Ollie Robinson was bowling from first thing on Sunday morning. Anderson has preferred the Pavilion End right through his 18-year Test career, and has likely got through more work from it than any other fast bowler ever has from any single end in the history of Test cricket. He had his back to it when he bowled here for the first time, against Zimbabwe in 2003, and more often than not it has been...
Ollie Pope, Dan Lawrence and Zak Crawley the most egregious offenders as Tim Southee puts rash hosts in a great messIn December 2011, a group of 11 sports car enthusiasts from the Japanese island of Kyushu were driving in convoy north along the Chugoku Expressway when one botched a lane change, clipped the median barrier, spun round and scattered the cars behind him into a series of futile evasive manoeuvres that ended in what newspapers would describe as “the most expensive pile-up in history”.When the police arrived they found eight wrecked Ferraris, two Mercedes, and a Lamborghini strewn “in a great mess” along a long stretch of the motorway. The police chief described it as “a gathering of narcissists”. Related:...
England bowler took wickets having apologised for his offensive tweets but his future is now out of his handsThe day’s play was a half-hour old when Ollie Robinson came on to bowl, first change at the Nursery End. The applause was loud and conspicuous, an unexpected show of support for a man who surely must have been worried how the crowd were going to react to him. In a lot of ways the situation in front of him now was pretty similar to the one he’d faced when he was bowling the previous evening, Devon Conway and Henry Nicholls were still in, their partnership up to 160 now. In others, of course, it was a lot more challenging. You guess...
It was possible to feel sympathy and scorn for the bowler as the fallout from grotesque remarks marred best day of his careerThe clouds blew over Lord’s midway through the afternoon, when Ollie Robinson was deep into his second spell. He had bowled well, had won his first Test wicket that morning when he made Tom Latham play on, and was working away on his second, the great Ross Taylor, who he soon dismissed leg before wicket. It all seemed so sweet, but away from the middle it was already turning sour. There was no way for Robinson to know it then, but around that same time, screengrabs started circulating on social media, showing a series of offensive ‘jokes’ Robinson...
Experienced debutant’s sudden rise to prominence has been a long time coming, partly thanks to a shift in national allegianceIf there is an advantage to making your Test debut a few weeks short of your 30th birthday, it must be the knowledge that you will have gained in those years about the game and yourself. Perhaps that is why Devon Conway, New Zealand’s latest international sensation, showed no signs of nerves on his first visit to Lord’s.There was one early scare, when he got a thick inside edge to a Stuart Broad delivery that was arrowing into his pads, leaving the bowler standing head in hands while Conway jogged through his first two runs in Test cricket. Two balls later...