According to Wellington, who yorked the Corsican bandit at Waterloo, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.
Ben Stokes will never be mistaken for the Iron Duke. But the England captain may recognise the truth of that old saw. England should now be 2-1 up in this series, not 2-1 down, and they might have won all three Tests if the players had not greased their fingers with butter.
It was a noble against-the-odds victory at Headingley, achieved largely through the efforts of their limping captain and his Durham team-mate, Mark Wood, whose ferocious fast bowling on the first afternoon blew away the Australian lower order. What would England not give for a fully fit Wood?
Alas, it will never be. He has always struggled to raise a gallop for more than two matches at a time, and it will be a surprise if he fires at both Old Trafford and the Oval. He’s not built that way.
He will always have Headingley, though, as Bogie and Bergman had Paris. Seven wickets, and 40 runs belted with the fury of a man who has a Luger pointed at his vitals. ‘Goody Woody!’ went out the cry, from Ashington to all parts of the kingdom. So off to sunny Manchester we go, hope restored.
Yet questions remain, and the answers are not clear.
Zac Crawley, first. Like those troubled children who identify as cats or planets, he imagines himself to be an opening batsman. Like those children, he has been indulged by grown-ups who ought to know better. After 37 matches, when a batsman of true Test pedigree should have declared his talent beyond argument, he pooters along at 28, like a crabby driver dodging roadkill on a Kentish lane.
There is always another side to the story, and dressing-room ‘insiders’ have let it be known his George Formby tribute continues to buck up his team-mates. As the arse-nipper in Leeds approached its climax, Crawley picked up that trusty ukelele and gave them Mr Woo’s An Air-Raid Warden Now.
This is the red meat in McCullum’s larder: all for one, and one for all. In Crawley’s case, however, one (off the mark) usually leads to the poorhouse. A gilded dwelling, built of tasteful bricks and handsome masonry, with a porte cochere, but a poorhouse nevertheless.
In six goes this summer the great entertainer has passed 50 only once, first up at Edgbaston. He has played some gorgeous strokes. He often does. Some of his boundaries, if marked for aesthetic appeal, might be worth eight. But they’re not, and a man who gets out so consistently, and in such tame ways, when he appears to be established, is letting the team down.
They love him, though, and they’ll like him even more when he introduces impressions of Frankie Howerd and Tommy Cooper into his repertoire. ‘Oh, shut your faces!’ We shall do just that, young man, when you start making the scores a Test match opener should. Until then, every time we see you take guard we shall be thinking of the great Ken Platt: ‘I won’t take me coat off, I’m not stoppin’’.
Next, Jonny Bairstow, on whom McCullum and Stokes have slapped a preservation order. No wonder he’s keeping wicket like a stately home, shelling catches, as Ron Atkinson might say, ‘for fun’. He’s carrying too much timber, as Jim Maxwell has noted, and not moving freely behind the stumps. That broken leg sustained last autumn on the golf course was always likely to be a more serious impediment than some judges let on.
Sometimes he doesn’t move at all. The failure to snaffle Usman Khawaja in James Anderson’s opening over of Australia’s second innings at Birmingham looked dismal at the time, and has acquired more significance with every subsequent session. A Test match was surrendered there and then.
Has any England wicketkeeper performed so poorly in three consecutive matches? You’d have to go back to the Sixties to find an answer, and it might not be ‘Jim Parks’. Bairstow has failed to accept eight chances, ranging from easy to ‘a bit awkward’, and his general sloppiness has helped to make England look like an Under 11 set-up in the field.
Fancy letting Harry Brook go for that steepler to dismiss Mitchell Starc! As his games master at St Peter’s, York, could have told him: ‘if you’re not going to claim a catch like that, boy, hand the gloves to someone who will’.
Bairstow’s batting has also gone off, as it has in the past. Last summer’s roses, which smelt so sweet, tended to obscure the fact that there have been a few thorns in his career. So it wasn’t the wisest notion to send Steve Smith on his way with a haughty chirp when the Australian chipped a catch to mid-on. Vengeance is mine, and I shall repay.
It’s clearly time to restore the best wicketkeeper in the land; a man who has also proved his worth with the bat. Ben Foakes’s average is four runs brighter than Crawley’s. Will they send for the Surrey man? Probably not. Captain and coach seem determined to sink or swim with the chubby Yorkie on deck, so send for some life-preservers.
Then there is The Anderson Conundrum, a good title for a Robert Ludlum thriller. Wood will certainly play at Old Trafford, and it is impossible to exclude Stuart Broad or Chris Woakes, who did so much to turn things round at Headingley. They will want to play a slow bowler, so Mooen Ali remains, and Josh Tongue, who made a good first impression at Lord’s, is a serious contender to replace the crumpet-scoffing Ollie Robinson.
Everybody wants Anderson to bowl from the end that bears his name one last time. Everybody wants him to take the 14 wickets that would give him 700 in Tests. What a pole that would be to plant! But England’s leading wicket-taker performed indifferently in the first two Tests, and no team is selected for sentimental reasons.
Were the man from witch country to miss out on his home ground, that would be melancholy. As Jimmy Ruffin warbled, farewell is a lonely sound.
Vielen Dank, D!
Excellent, Hendo, much enjoyed!