By 1pm, the only play left under way at Lord’s was at the wrong side of the stands, where the lads and dads with nothing else to do were batting with umbrellas in front of bins. The Test they had paid to see was done before lunch. In the end the whole match lasted only 996 balls, which made it the shortest game here to include all 40 wickets falling in well over a century. Pakistan’s Hanif Mohammad batted about that many by himself against West Indies in Barbados back in 1958, and you didn’t have to strain to hear the grumbles of one or two older salts around the ground complaining that this latest generation do not know how to build an innings.
Emilio Gay was the only man who managed to stitch together as many as two hours batting in the middle, and even he needed a lot of good fortune to do it. Still, the batters had more of a match than the spin bowlers on either side, who didn’t get to bowl a single over between them. Last time this happened in England was a Test against West Indies at Headingley in 1988.
In the circumstances, they had to pick one of the quicks to be the man of the match. Kyle Jamieson, Nathan Smith and Gus Atkinson all picked up five-wicket hauls, but in the end the accolade went to Ollie Robinson, who earned it with the best Test figures of his career, seven for 77 altogether, including five for 39 in the first innings and three in four balls in the space of one crucial over in which he dismissed Devon Conway and Rachin Ravindra leg before wicket and had Kane Williamson caught at short leg in between the two. Given England had only just been dismissed for 140 themselves, it was the closest this match had to a defining moment.
On this pitch, in these conditions, Robinson’s best ball has the beating of any batter in the game. On the third morning, he reduced Glenn Phillips to laughing at the sheer bloody futility of it all when he found the outside edge of his bat with an away-swinger that skipped off through the slips, and then, very next ball, found the inside of his bat with an in-swinger that whistled just past his stumps. Where was this bloke during the winter? Playing Sydney Grade cricket, as it happens.
Conway’s wicket was Robinson’s first in Test cricket since he had Alex Carey caught at short leg in the Ashes Test here in 2023. Robinson had played a couple of games in between – he managed 11.2 overs in Headingley a week later before he left the field with a back spasm, and 13 more at Ranchi when he was on tour in India in 2024 – but didn’t dismiss anyone either time. All told, he has missed 31 Tests in the last two years, and the best part of 5,000 overs in field. They ought to have been some the best years of his Test career.
Trust is a fragile thing, hard to earn, easy to lose. Robinson finally ran out of it in that match at Ranchi, when his bowling in the first innings was so innocuous Ben Stokes didn’t bother to use him in the second. If it had been the first time it had happened, Robinson would have gotten away with it. But it wasn’t.
In the fifth Ashes Test at Hobart in 2022, Robinson’s fitness was criticised by England’s bowling coach, Jon Lewis, after a back spasm meant he was able to bowl only eight overs in the first innings, and he had missed the entirety of a three-Test series in the West Indies later that year with similar problems. His bad back caused to him walk off the field again in that Ashes match at Headingley in 2023. The upshot was that senior players in the team felt they couldn’t rely on him to bowl his overs, that they too often had to pick up his slack. Stokes and Brendon McCullum will forgive just about anything but a lack of effort.
It didn’t help that Robinson had rubbed people up the wrong way when he launched a podcast offering behind-the-scenes insights into the team with his new partner soon after he had been through a messy and very public separation from his young family.
All that background to his recall means it’s hard to measure exactly what Robinson’s performance here was worth. England won’t judge him on these four days but on the next four weeks, and most especially on how he goes when the batters are set and the innings has already run a hundred-and-some overs and they need a third, fourth and fifth spell from him.
The talk is that he takes his strength and conditioning work more seriously since Sussex made him red-ball captain this season, but England have heard similar things from him before. In 2022 Robinson said he had turned himself into a “gym freak” because he was so keen to get back into the team. Time will tell whether it really is going to be different this time. It always does in the end.
