Mark Wood and Chris Woakes, England’s nice guys, finally finish first

It’s the 48th over of England’s chase, and for what feels like the 20th time in the game, the Ashes are slipping away. The Mitch Marsh assault was kept in range. Ben Stokes somehow summoned another rescue act. Moeen Ali winkled out the big two just when the advantage was building. The rain relented for long enough for England to set up a game. And every fourth-innings set-back had been pushed past.

But still it feels just out of reach. England are 230-7. Victory is still 21 runs away. Harry Brook, the Headingley hero, has just turned villain, a fatal aberration to the predictable bouncer. Australia have won two thrillers at Edgbaston and Lord’s, and a third looks likely. This, finally, is the tail. And Mitchell Starc, destroyer of stumps, and Pat Cummins, destroyer of England, have the ball.

Mark Wood walks in to join Chris Woakes in the middle. Woakes tells him to expect one at his stumps first ball. Wood punches it for a single. The Western Terrace roars.

***

As far back as last year’s tour of the Caribbean tour, you feared Chris Woakes might have played his last Test. Handed the responsibility of leading the attack in the shock absence of James Anderson and Stuart Broad, he failed to deliver. Then the summer rolled around, and those two returned, and a knee injury required surgery. He went more than a year between first-class games. He felt like a known quantity, and white-ball duties had dragged him away. It wouldn’t have been a fitting end for a valued servant for England in Test cricket, but even the true greats don’t always get to depart on their own terms. Sometimes, that’s how it happens.

This summer, as England’s whittled-down injury list began to pile up again, he came back into the frame, but still you wondered if another Test cap would elude him. He returned to the squad to play Ireland and was put up for the media ahead of the game, but wasn’t selected, almost as if England were playing a joke on him. When the Ashes rolled around, he was part of the group but seemed unlikely to play, with even a kid who hadn’t taken 20 wickets in a season since 2018 leapfrogging him in the queue.

When the recall eventually did come, it wasn’t so much down to Woakes – he was just the last man standing. Josh Tongue couldn’t be risked through back-to-back Tests. Anderson clearly needed a rest. Ben Stokes’ knee was buckling after hauling 10 cowed Englishman to – but not over – the finish line at Lord’s. Ollie Pope’s shoulder dislocation left a gap in the XI.

Into this travelling infirmary of hobbling wounded strides Woakes, fit as ever and with a point to prove, even if his shining grin and genial demeanour would never give it away. Perhaps more importantly, he had a bucket list item to tick off. He has achieved plenty for England across formats: A double World Cup winner, a century at Lord’s against the world’s best team, a classic Test won with the bat in eerily similar fashion to what would take place at Headingley. But what had eluded him is what every young cricketer dreams of: a defining Ashes performance.

Against Australia, he averages more than 40 with the ball and less than 25 with the bat. He has never scored a fifty or taken a four-for against them. And that’s still true now. But everything he did was crucial. Three prize wickets in each innings – one to cement an early England advantage, and then two when they were in need. In the first, Marnus Labuschagne was nicked off, and then Mitch Marsh and Travis Head scalped either side of tea. From 240-4, Australia slid to 263 all out. In the second, he got Usman Khawaja on the first evening, and then Marsh (again) and Alex Carey as England raced the rain.

With the bat, he saw England home with an unbeaten 32, and walked off beaming. Known quantities can be good, when, as with Woakes at home, what you can be sure of is something world class, as an average of 36 with the bat and 22 with the ball in England attests to. This was a performance to underline that pedigree. And yet, even when it’s about Chris Woakes, it’s never really about Chris Woakes.

***

When Mark Wood plays, everything centres on him. Every delivery bowled by the other bowlers is time killed between a short, sharp flurry of exocets. Every wicket someone else takes is a gap cracked for him to blast into a gaping hole. And when he does come on, everyone in the ground is captivated entirely. You try and fail to follow the ball from his hands to the batter. You watch his unfortunate victim try and hit it or contort out of the way. And then you look to the scoreboard for the speedgun reading. His first spell was unmissable, even if it only contained a wicket off its final ball. Then he razed the tail. A first home five-for in the blink of an eye.

And then there was his batting, if you can call it that. He’d joke self-effacingly, though not inaccurately, that it’s more like village slogging. But what village slogger can change the course of an Ashes Test against some of the best fast bowlers in the world? His first innings, an eight-ball 24, was England’s defibrillator, with the Ashes dead at lunch and then jolted back into life with an electric surge of sixes. In the chase, his second-ball six was a puncture to the pressure, a moment of genuine surprise in a series that still hasn’t lost its capacity to.

Wood bowled 28.4 overs in the game and faced 16 balls, a session’s play in all. And yet he dominated.

But while he makes playing cricket look like the funnest thing ever, he has had his struggles too. Injuries, of basically any vintage you can imagine, have kept him to 29 Tests in eight years. This was his first Test of 2023, and such is Wood’s fragility, you can’t be sure it won’t be his last. But he approaches his predicament with a philosophical comedy. “Ibiza chill,” was how he summed it up, admittedly while morphined up to the eyeballs after elbow surgery. “I’ll still bowl fast.”

Wood and Woakes are England’s two nice guys, the school friends who will help your mum bring in the shopping rather than raid the cupboards for booze. But each plays cricket in an entirely different way. Wood is unsubtle to the extreme: Rockets with the ball, bombs with the bat. Woakes is all subtlety, a master of the English arts, a manipulator of conditions. Wood gets to 20 and thinks he’s Bradman. Woakes thinks like a proper batter and knuckles down, knowing one partnership is enough to get England close. In this game they each flitted in and out. Often, it was Woakes who worked the openings for Wood to crash into. In the first innings, Woakes’ dismissal on the stroke of lunch paved the way for Wood’s blitz.

But for 14 glorious deliveries in the Sunday sunshine, each found the perfect foil in the other. Wood accepted Woakes’ batting advice, and swayed out the way of the wide bouncer his partner had twigged was coming. Woakes sealed victory with a Wood-like swing, flashed through point before the joyous embrace.

An Ashes series defined by drama of all kings was kept alive by two of its least offensive characters. But the smiles hide a steel, and between them, they showed one thing above all: they, and England, will keep coming at you.