Jonny Bairstow is a walking marvel, literally.

The fact that he’s still playing cricket after such a severe leg break a year ago, with several pieces of metal keeping him standing, is extraordinary.

It’s not just that he’s still playing that’s so remarkable. He kept wicket for all five Ashes Tests over the summer, continuing his blistering record during the Stokes-McCullum era, and carried the runs on into the end-of-season T20I matches. Everything he does from here on out is a bonus which England are lucky to get. But they could really do with that bonus coming in again during this World Cup.

Bairstow is an England white-ball great, potentially an all-time one. With a cut off of 2,000 runs, only two players average more than 45 and strike at more than 100 in the history of ODI cricket. One is Bairstow, the other is AB de Villiers.

Since Bairstow came into England’s fifty-over side in 2017, only Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma have scored more runs as an opener than he has. His runs have come at a higher strike rate than all those with more than 1,000 runs in that time apart from Jason Roy, and only Rohit has more centuries.

Quite simply, Bairstow is one of the greatest ODI openers of his era. The partnership he shared with Roy over the last five years has a claim to rank among the best of all time. The unbreakable record the two shared was arguably the defining factor that allowed England to turn their fortunes around in white-ball cricket. It was a huge part of how they won the 2019 World Cup.

In that tournament, Bairstow and Roy averaged 82.28 for the first wicket and shared four century stands out of seven innings. As an individual, Bairstow scored two centuries, both of them at the thick end of the group stage when it mattered most.

Four years later, he has the potential to be even more important to England’s campaign. With a different type of opening partnership established alongside Dawid Malan, Bairstow is now the main aggressor early on. While Malan’s consistency and appetite for big scores make him an indispensable part of the side, if England are to follow the 2019 blueprint of going out of the blocks hard, as Jos Buttler has suggested, the burden of that falls largely on Bairstow.

Since his return to ODI cricket, those fast starts and high-scoring opening partnerships haven’t followed. It took him three innings to get into double figures, after a golden duck at Southampton, and he finished the series with a top score of 13. In the first match of the World Cup, he hit his second ball for six and picked up a four in the same over before he drove Mitchell Santner to long off for 33 off 35.

It’s still early days, with Bairstow only five innings into his fifty-over return. But with every passing game, England will grow hungrier for the starts they became used to when he and Roy were in their pomp.

Their patience could well pay off. In 2019, Bairstow started the World Cup with a duck in the first over of the tournament. England lost their second match against Pakistan in which Bairstow made 32 off 31, and by the time they’d played seven games in the tournament, Bairstow had made just as many ducks as he had fifties.

Against Bangladesh this week, he looked closer to his old fifty-over self. Crunching pull shots and short arm jabs brought a near run-a-ball fifty. Alongside him, Malan also attacked from the start as they brushed aside the memories of Ahmedabad. That tried and tested formula seemed to click into place for the first time since Bairstow’s return.

But if England are to repeat their triumph of 2019, Bairstow’s tournament will also need to follow a similar trajectory.

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