It was a tough day for Moeen Ali, fined 25% of his match fee for using a drying agent on his hands and rubbing a hole in the skin on his forefinger caused by excessive contact with the Dukes ball’s pronounced seam. Spin bowling has always been a painful business – back in 1913 Surrey’s Razor Smith, nicknamed because of his unusually slight frame, noted that he always knew immediately on releasing the ball whether it would turn or go straight, because if it was a turner he would “get a sharp pain in my shoulder … many’s a time I have gone home feeling as if my right arm was coming off at the shoulder and almost wishing it would do so”.
But the finger has taken the brunt. Yorkshire’s Ted Wainwright, who played five Tests in the 1890s, suffered terribly from spinning-related cuts and lesions. “I used to hold the ball between the thumb and first finger, with the finger pressing along the seam,” he said. “The pressure upon the finger often made the skin break, and I was repeatedly troubled with soreness as a consequence; in fact, it was no uncommon thing for my finger to bleed.” Eventually he took to wearing a bandage on the first finger of his right hand which, he insisted, “far from assisting my bowling, handicapped it very considerably”. From the pavilion, though, the sight of his white finger set conspiracy theorists spinning, leading to him being dogged by rumours that he had commissioned a rubber finger stall to cover his finger, avoid injury and add bonus spin.
Ideally a finger-spinner eventually develops a hard callus on their finger to withstand the savage seam. Perhaps Moeen could have a word with Graeme Swann, something of an expert in this regard. “I’ve tried surgical spirit, Friar’s Balsam and urine in a bucket – dip your hand in it,” he once said. “They are all pretty similar – they toughen the skin.” He may originally have found these three liquids equally effective, but Swann did eventually settle on a favourite: “There have been a few different methods for toughening your spinning finger and I’ve tried them all,” he said. “I dip my hand in urine. I find that works best. I do wash my hands before I go out to bowl and, no, I don’t lick my fingers between deliveries.”
Fans pig out but bye-bye Darth
Forget the rain, the denizens of the Hollies Stand are more than capable of making their own fun. Among the attention-grabbing action on a damp Sunday were three little pigs – well, pigs the size of full-grown humans wearing inflatable pig costumes – being chased around the stand by a man dressed as a butcher wearing a George’s Cross-emblazoned cork hat, and a well-proportioned, heavily tattooed bearded man wearing nothing but tuxedo-themed underwear gamely attempting to provoke a Mexican wave. But the stewards have a keen eye for these things and can tell the difference between the boisterous and the genuinely dangerous, which explains why a lightsabre-toting Darth Vader was seen being led, head bowed, out of the ground soon after lunch.
Jamie Redknapp makes an appearance
If Vader had any competition for the title of most sombrely dressed person at Edgbaston it came from Jamie Redknapp, who was pictured in the stands dressed all in black, with bonus black sunglasses. Other than his appearances alongside Andrew Flintoff in the long-running gameshow A League of their Own, Redknapp has little past association with cricket or cricketers. Archive searches discover that he told the Express in 2014 that on family holidays “we like to go to the beach, play cricket, football, golf or have swimming races” and the only other link is a trip that same year to watch Manchester United play QPR – then managed by his father, Harry – when he joined Kevin Pietersen as guests of QPR’s then co-owner, and current chair, Amit Bhatia. “Excited for today. Come on urrrsssss. If we get a point #drinksonme,” Bhatia tweeted. He was not required to buy any drinks.
