Play, Lady, Play
Edgbaston turned Blue for Bob on Saturday, part of a fundraising campaign run by the Bob Willis Fund to raise money for prostate cancer research and awareness. They’ve raised £800,000 in their first two years, part of which has gone towards the development of new, non-invasive tests at the University of East Anglia. The day doubles up as a celebration of Willis, there were hundreds of big bushy wigs on show, and a bowling net behind the RES Wyatt Stand where people were invited to attempt their best impressions of his loping run. Impressive as all that is, the fund’s most remarkable achievement may be that they managed to persuade Willis’s hero, Bob Dylan, to be their Honorary Patron. Dylan is a baseball fan and even wrote a tribute to the New York Yankees’ pitcher Catfish Hunter. His only known contribution to cricket, though, is the brief epitaph he offered Willis: “Bob Willis was a great sportsman who left too soon. I’m happy to keep his flame and cause alive.”
Everybody’s Talkin’
It’s only in an Ashes summer that you’d find the England football manager being asked what he made of England’s cricket on the same day his team beat Malta 4-0. “I imagine it’s the first team in my lifetime to declare on 393 for eight on day one,” Gareth Southgate said on Friday night. “That’ll be an interesting decision because in the end people will judge that on the outcome, as they do all the decisions we make as a coach. But that’s a clue as to the mindset they’re going into the series with. They’re going to be judged on an Ashes series in the same way we’re judged on European Championships and World Cups.” Southgate has worked with the ECB’s director of cricket, Rob Key, on a couple of crossover training sessions at St George’s Park and is a handy cricketer. He sometimes turns out for Pannal Ash in the Nidderdale League, where he and his son Flynn have notched up more than one c Father b Son entry in the club scorebook.
Field of dreams
Unless you’ve been paying close attention, you might think that Ben Stokes’s approach to Test cricket is all about batting quickly. On the second day, though, Australia got their first look at how Stokes goes about it in the field. They were confronted, at various points, with a silly mid-off, a silly mid-on, a leg gully alongside a leg slip and at least one fielder in a position that doesn’t really even have a name. On a pitch like this, his imaginative field placings gave England an advantage.
England’s cunning plan
Not that everything came off. Before the series Ollie Pope promised that England had cooked up a couple of quirky plans about how to get Steve Smith out, and on Saturday morning we got our first look at them. Smith had been in for 14 balls when Ben Stokes brought on Harry Brook, who bowls right-arm rubbish off the wrong foot. The most threatening thing about Brook’s bowling is how embarrassing it would be to get out to it. He has taken nine first-class wickets, one in a Test, when he had Kane Williamson caught down the leg-side in Wellington. He still likes to talk about how he did it now. It means, Brook could rightly point out, he has a better Test record than a handful of better bowlers, including Chris Schofield, who took 237 wickets in first-class cricket, Gavin Hamilton (249) and Ian Blackwell (398) who recorded none in four Tests between them. The record, though, goes to the Lancashire spinner Len Hopwood. He took 673 wickets at 22 each in his 16-year first-class career, but (tough break) played his two games of Test cricket against Australia in 1934, when Don Bradman was at his best. Hopwood bowled 47 overs in one, 30 in the other, didn’t take a wicket in either, and was never picked again.
Meme of the moment
It seemed like Stuart Broad had provided the viral moment of the day when he had Marnus Labuschagne caught behind and set off on a mad sprint around the slips, offering high fives to each of his teammates as he went. But Usman Khawaja topped him when he brought up his century later in the day. The opener celebrated by skipping all the way to mid-off where he threw his bat so high in the air you worried it was going to knock him out if it caught him on the way back down.
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And in the Hollies Stand …
It was dress-up day at Edgbaston, an occasion that requires as much thought and planning among one particular constituency of the sporting public as Ascot does among another. In the usual selection of pontiffs, lifeguards, and butchers, special mention, this year, for Jesus, two sumo wrestlers, five pineapples, 12 caddies, the cast of Scooby-Doo, and, bravest of all, the two blokes in regulation green and gold Australian one-day kit who had, presumably, bought their tickets without realising exactly what they were in for. By late afternoon they appeared to be the only people among the 6,000 in the stand not joining in with the chant of “you’re the convicts, you’re the convicts, you’re the convicts over there”.
