An alternate reality tells the story of England’s Yorkshiremen providing a blossoming partnership to save the summerIt is the morning after the day before. The beer-with-breakfast customers have emptied out of the Golden Beam pub on Headingley Hill and wound their way up St Michael’s Lane, scooping a second pint inside the ground as they head to their seats. The sky is bluer than Thursday, the mid-morning sun more powerful. It’s a day for broad-brimmed hats, factor 50 and batting, batting, batting.Jerusalem’s opening arpeggio plays across the speaker system, and the two home ground heroes make their way to the crease. Jonny Bairstow wheels his arms like windmills. Joe Root crosses the boundary with his customary sprint-out-of-the-blocks and a couple...
The issue in this toxic Lord’s Test lies with the ever-nebulous notion of the spirit of the gameFrankly, it’s just not Bazball, old boy. On a febrile, toxic, at times mildly hallucinogenic day at Lord’s the cricketers of England and Australia produced one of the most obscurely rancorous days of high summer sport seen in this country.Australia’s players were barracked by MCC members as they walked into the pavilion at the lunch break, with reports of “physical contact” initiated by the red-trousered ultras. The Lord’s crowd booed and jeered across four gruelling hours from midday to the close of play, a level of hostility that has surely never been witnessed inside this most mannered of environments, a place where a...
Yorkshireman has been marginalised in the past, but England are playing to his strengths now and reaping the rewardsAcross this summer Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes have made it a point of principle to back their players absolutely in public, while building a team environment that is marked most of all by absolute positivity. They will not have had any one player in mind when they came up with this approach, but they have inadvertently created the perfect circumstances for Jonny Bairstow to shine – and the results have been explosive.He is someone who rarely looks happy on the field if he is not happy off it, someone whose confidence can sometimes be fragile. There’s one moment that really stands...
Even as India tightened their grip on the fifth Test, Bairstow was beautifully unconstrainedThe sound is unique. How can this be? A regulation cricket bat hitting a regulation cricket ball: logic tells us this should sound the same whoever is swinging it. And yet intuition tells us otherwise.Kevin Pietersen’s shots sounded like the crack of a rifle. Matthew Hayden’s sounded like an axe slicing through a tree. The bat of AB de Villiers, meanwhile, always made a delightful pock noise, however violently he was hitting it, as if he was simply helping the ball to wherever it was meant to go. Continue reading...
It is easier to play aggressively in home conditions but Alex Lees and Ollie Pope also showed encouraging signs for EnglandI remember watching Jonny Bairstow and Ben Stokes batting together, pounding it all over the ground and thinking to myself this really was the start of a new era. It was 2016 in Cape Town, when the pair put on 399 and hit 13 sixes between them. Trevor Bayliss was a relatively recent appointment as England head coach and we were seeing the impact of his arrival and maybe also the effect of the Indian Premier League.Fast-forward six years and we are at the start of another new era and everyone is talking about the same two batters after the...