Friday morning at the Oval, and the ground reverberates to a unique but not unfamiliar sound, the baritone rumble of thousands of pained groans. It was prompted by replays on the ground’s big screens of a particular kind of delivery with a very specific outcome, on this occasion bowled by Akash Deep. The ball flicked off the inside of Ben Duckett’s thigh before crashing remorselessly into, well, the next part of his anatomy that it reached, and with agonising results.
The game was paused for several minutes while the pain subsided and the opener regained his composure (the blow certainly didn’t make him at all cautious, and by the end of that one over Duckett had survived a review for lbw, skipped down the track and missed completely with a wild swing, seen a leading edge drop short of gully and reverse-scooped for six).
