Wisden Cricket Monthly editor-in-chief Phil Walker ushers in the start of the Test match summer in the lead editorial to the upcoming magazine – available to pre-order now and out next week.
England’s meek departure from last month’s Twenty20 World Cup jarred on a number of levels, with their dismantling by India coming relatively low down on the list.
On that, by the way, they probably had it coming; the team has stagnated, certain players have not kicked on, while a few others, not least Jos Buttler, seemed oddly listless, almost as if the relentlessness of their rarefied lives – beholden as they are to deathly soul-emptying schedules and the contractual expectation to keep climbing ever higher because sport’s industrial complex demands that the next bit be bigger and more magnificent than the last bit – just caught up with them and laid them out.
Buttler just looked knackered and bored by the end of it. But perhaps that’s projection on my part. The event over here in England failed to catch fire; anecdotally, my mates’ cricket WhatsApp group was pretty quiet, at least until the Test squad was announced, when, bang on cue, it cranked up again.
No cricketer energises the fingers of our little digital echo chamber quite like Jonny Bairstow, the one-man culture war of last summer’s Ashes. He’s always elicited strong opinions. He is one of those cricketers for whom it’s impossible to be indifferent. Just two years ago he was the grinning face of the rambunctious Stokesian era, a player irrepressibly reborn under an enlightened new approach embarking on a wild run of form will go down in folklore. For two months and five Test against New Zealand (twice), India (once) and South Africa (twice) he was Bradman and Botham all at once, 664 runs at 94.8 struck at nigh-on a run-a-ball.
Thereafter the story turned in on itself: a disastrous accident on a golf course, resulting in a broken leg in three separate places and which led to him fearing he might never walk again, ruled him out for a whole winter and when he returned to active cricket just in time for the Ashes he was told he’d be keeping wicket. The purists were aghast. The Ben Foakes appreciation society picketed outside Lord’s. Everywhere was uproar.
In the midst of it, Bairstow caught a couple of good ones, and dropped a few bad ones. The ludicrous stumping kerfuffle at Lord’s, when he wandered out of his crease, saw his stumps disturbed, and everyone (except for the Australians) lost all sense of perspective, seemed to encapsulate the chaos that suddenly threatened to engulf him. That he came back hard in that series, making runs in the final two Tests, was testament to his deep reserves of willpower, which has often sustained him through a truncated, shape-shifting 100-Test career.
He brought up the gallon – just the eighteenth England player to do it – in India, commemorating the feat with a couple of punchy if insufficient cameos as part of a series in which he failed to reach 40 from 10 attempts. From there he staggered on through an IPL season and then to a little more T20 cricket. Twice a world champion, he was one of Buttler’s bankers. It didn’t work out that way. His flat-footed slap-waft to an Axar Patel arm ball in the semi-final spoke of a man whose heart was saying one thing and his mind something else.
I’m writing this a few days out from Lord’s and the resumption of the Test summer (welcome back, old friend etc). The Jimmy carnival is being rigged up as we speak. The pre-event interviews and weepy montage packages will be recorded. The ceremonies will be carefully orchestrated for maximum feels. Finally Anderson will be brought out on a sedan chair, placed at the top of his mark, and left to roll in on a conspicuously green track one last time. In return, a few West Indian kids, facing him for the first time on a ground they’ve never seen before, will compliantly leave a couple of straight ones that angle down the slope. It will be quasi-religious, over the top and entirely irresistible. It will be remarked upon, once more with feeling, that he has received the send-off he ‘so richly deserves’.
And all the while Bairstow will be looking on from somewhere, pleased for his mates yet enraged by the fates. It may well be that his time as an England cricketer is up. If so, it will be hard to argue with Rob Key’s assertion that two years into the Stokes-McCullum project it felt like the time was right to shake things up. The new squad is forward-thinking and clearly carved out with a view to an Ashes scrap in 18 months. The future stops for no man, not even one as cussed, bloody-minded and resilient as Jonny Bairstow. Sometimes maligned, often misunderstood, the England team will be a little duller, a little less intense and unpredictable, for his absence. He will be missed.
This feature is in the latest Wisden Cricket Monthly. To buy single issues or subscribe digitally click here.
