Fast and not angry, Cameron Ponsonby takes a look at Mark Wood, the key to England’s World Cup success.
He’s nice, isn’t he? Isn’t he nice? I think he’s nice. He’s just so… you know… nice.
Mark Wood is the People’s Pacer. A meme-worthy, mean fast-bowling machine, the Ashington athlete who has become England’s finest piece of wedding crockery. Too delicate to be used in anything but the most special of occasions.
And so with England beginning their World Cup campaign against Afghanistan in Perth on Saturday, Matthew Mott, Rob Key, Jos Buttler and the lads have told you to reach for the top-shelf and start unpeeling the bubble wrap. The King is coming to tea.
Wood has recently released a book, The Wood Life, an autobiography disguised in the form of a faux self-help book.
“I just wanted it to be different, really,” he told The Grade Cricketer. “If a book is just, ‘I did this and done that’, especially in my case, it’d just be ‘I played cricket, I got injured, I played cricket, I got injured…’ It’d be boring as shit.”
A boring assessment, yes, but an accurate one. In 2022, Wood sat on the sidelines for almost seven months with an elbow injury. And yet, the cricket he has been fit for this year includes the Ashes, England’s historic T20I series in Pakistan and now the World Cup. Oh, and the one Test he played in the West Indies where he got injured. You see, this is why we only bring Uncle Wood out on special occasions. Because people break things.
That Wood has made it to the tournament is an achievement in itself. The 32-year-old has played just 44 T20s in total in his career, with 23 of those coming for England. First injuring the elbow in March, it had been hoped he would return in July following surgery, but the injury failed to heal so the decision to go under the knife was made once more. It was a race against time to make it to Australia, but it was a race that was won with time for Pakistan to spare.
Players are often held in higher regard when they are out of the team than in, but Wood’s high-pace allure was even better in reality than it had been in people’s imaginations when he took to the field once more in Pakistan.
Regularly bowling north of 95mph, and at times even hitting 97mph, his returns in his two games of 3-24 and 3-20 immediately cemented his place in England’s ideal starting XI.
High pace is always useful. No team has ever been worse for having a bowler who can hit people in the face. The wickets in Australia are expected to be fast and bouncy, making high pace even more important. But if they turn out to be slow, as they have in Geelong, then that extra bit of speed becomes just as vital.
Wood’s aggression with the ball is to England what a hug from a mother is to a toddler. The answer to any and all of life’s problems.
“Energetic. Fasty. And Northumbrian.” Were the three words Wood used to describe himself in an interview with the ECB reviewing his career. It’s a combination that has seen him become one of the most popular figures inside the dressing room and also with the general public.
“You’ve got to want to bowl fast.” Wood said. “The reason we probably produce so many fast bowlers in this area is because, one, the wickets, but two, the values of hard work, charging in, never giving up and that you don’t get anything unless you work for it.”
The sight of Wood sprawled across the floor after falling over after bowling has become a common sight for fans. An image of maximum effort that is both endearing and wince-inducing as your mind casts back to that hot feeling you’d get when you used to graze your hands on the playground concrete growing up.
It is something he says never happens in training, but only when that extra 10 per cent kicks in on matchday. And it happens for whomever he’s playing for, whether it’s England or Ashington, as evidenced when footage of him playing for his boyhood club did the rounds this summer.
Wood first played cricket in Australia over ten years ago, when he travelled as a teenager to play a season of club cricket, before enjoying it so much that he returned for a further two, rejecting the advances of a Premier Division club in the process on the basis he simply was having too much fun where he was.
“Those times in Australia certainly helped me with my confidence and made me feel like, this isn’t just going to be a hobby, I can do it and I can be a professional.”
A decade later, Wood returns not only as a professional, but as one of England’s keys to World Cup victory.
