There was a Pakistan fan walking around Edgbaston carrying a small blackboard on the second day. “Free Imran Khan …” he’d written on it, “and get him in the team.” He stopped to talk about it with a couple of the police officers standing guard around the back of the pavilion. “I’d like to report a crime,” he told them, “by the 11 players out there on the field.” The officers chuckled. “Not much I can do about that for you, sorry.” Even their supporters seemed to have reached the point where they just want this tour to be over.
With dismal inevitability, the weather had turned by the time Pakistan actually got out to bat in their second innings and the bright sunshine that lit up England’s batting through the afternoon had been occluded by a bank of heavy grey cloud that had blown up from the south-west. They turned the floodlights on just in time for Saim Ayub and Azan Awais to go out and face up to another new-ball burst from Ollie Robinson and Jofra Archer. The lights didn’t help anyone, if anything they only made it easier to see what was coming.
This is the first first-class match Ayub has played in 11 months, since he turned out for Karachi in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy last October. The week before last he was busy hitting sixes in the West Indies, playing in the middle order for the Jamaica Kingsmen. Fair to say that however many throwdowns he fitted in after being flown in for Pakistan, none of it did a whole lot to prepare him for the job of opening the batting in a Test match. He couldn’t help himself but try to drive the very first ball Robinson bowled, and of course was caught at second slip.
In came Abdullah Shafique. Robinson had got him four times in five innings in this series. Three balls later, Shafique edged the ball to first slip, and it was five in six. That made it a double-wicket maiden. By stumps he had figures of 6-3-10-2.
Never mind the 1980s trend, this is the 1890s trend. Robinson’s recalcitrant attitude and unreconstructed opinions have always seemed like a bit of a throwback as a cricketer, but if his average drops any lower he’ll have to start playing in a top hat and handlebar moustache. He’s taken 21 wickets at 6.66 so far in this series, which is the kind of bowling average that’s usually accompanied by a black-and-white photo and an obituary. It is the lowest bowling average ever recorded by an Englishman in a series of three, four or more matches in this country.
Robinson’s now up near the top of lists that have remained unchanged in the annals for the large part of 100 years. He’s moved up above a handful of spinners who played on uncovered pitches, and, among the quicks, the legendary medium-fast bowler SF Barnes, who took 34 wickets at 8.29 runs each against South Africa back in 1912. You might describe Barnes as one of the sport’s immortals if it weren’t for the fact that his ashes are interred in the wall of the Warwickshire museum around the back of the RES Wyatt Stand.
Barnes was a Staffordshire lad, and when he died in 1967 Warwickshire sealed his remains in the top of one of the gateposts at the entryway they had named after him. They knocked it down again when they renovated the place in 2010 and it was only a last-minute intervention by the museum curator that stopped them being bulldozed into the rubble.
Barnes was an infamously pitiless critic of everyone else’s cricket, but even he might have enjoyed the spectacle of Robinson working away at that same sort of medium-pace, slips set and keeper up to the stumps.
Today’s old salts still seem to hold a little suspicion though, especially the ones who have bowled with him in Test cricket. Neither Stuart Broad nor Jimmy Anderson seems quite ready yet to forgive Robinson for the way he so often pulled up injured when he was playing with them in the past.
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They have both been full of praise for the way he has played this summer but quick to point out, in the very next breath, that the real test will be whether he can do it again on flatter pitches against better batters when the conditions are against him.
He hasn’t bowled more than 18 overs in an innings this summer, but then who needs to be able to bowl a second or third spell when wickets keep falling like raindrops?