By three o’clock in the afternoon the match was just starting to drag. The first day and a half of this Test unspooled at such a frantic pace that the burgeoning stand between Tom Blundell and Daryl Mitchell seemed to make everyone feel a little restless and uncomfortable, as if Lord’s was caught in an awkward silence that had stretched on too long.
They’d only been going an hour, routine business in any other Test, but this one’s run in fast forward. The way they’ve been going at about it in this match makes Test cricket feel like trying to ride a Victorian bicycle, essentially familiar, and yet somehow all very different to how we do it now.
It was at this moment Ben Stokes finally decided to bring on Matt Parkinson. Lord’s ruffled. You could hear the crowd mutter and shuffle. Neighbours prodded each other awake. “The leg-spinner’s coming on.” There are periodic comets that come around more often. The Lord’s crowd saw (and promptly forgot) a couple of fleeting overs from Joe Denly in the Ashes Test in 2019.
Before that, you have to go all the way back to the summer of 1996 to find the last time England bowled a leg-spinner in a Test here, when they played Ian Salisbury against Pakistan. You’re more likely to have seen the Queen here in the last 25 years.
Parkinson is a bristling little bowler, whose hunched shoulders and mean glare make him seem a bit like he’s just popped up from underneath a bridge to nick a wicket off a passing batsman. He got through six overs in his first spell for 21 runs. It was a rich mix, with the odd, inevitable, full toss and long hop among some lovely deliveries that drew shouts and sighs from the close fielders, especially when Blundell almost yorked himself by trying to come down the wicket to hit him back down the ground.
Parkinson had already done better than either of the other two specialist leg-spinners England have played at Lord’s since Salisbury. Chris Schofield got a game against Zimbabwe in 2000 and Adil Rashid another against India 18 years later, but neither got a bowl in either game. The irony, of course, is that England didn’t actually pick Parkinson for this match. He was only here because he’d been called up as a substitute after Jack Leach concussed himself when he was chasing a ball to the boundary early on the first morning. Parkinson, who had to travel down from Manchester, spent most of his first day of Test cricket on the M1.
It beats carrying the drinks, which is what he’s mostly been doing since they first called him up to the Test squad in 2019. He’s delivered more beverages for them than he has leg-breaks.
“I feel like a privileged stepdad from all the time I’ve spent with you over the last two or three years,” said England’s spin coach, Jeetan Patel, who has spent a lot of time with Parkinson in the nets, when he presented him with his cap before the start of play. Parkinson has been on the England pathway for years. He came up through their under-17, under-19 and Lions teams; it was only when they got to the point that they actually needed to pick him for Test cricket that they started wavering.
Quite why the game’s so leery about leg-spin is between English cricket and its therapist. They’ve had a few to choose from in recent years, and it’s never ended up well. Scott Borthwick got one Test in Australia in 2014, and never played again. Mason Crane got another four years later, and hasn’t been seen since either. Rashid, who is perhaps the best England have ever had, played 19 games, the last of them in 2019, and has ended up turning away from red-ball cricket because he had shoulder problems. England never came close to getting the best out of him in Tests.
There are a lot more around the counties right now, Matt Critchley at Essex, Luke Hollman at Middlesex, Rehan Ahmed at Leicestershire, Archie Lenham at Sussex, who all came up through white-ball cricket. Parkinson, who has 126 first-class wickets at 23, is the best of them.
Whether that means he’s good enough is another question, and one that will take longer to answer than he’ll likely get. You could already hear the judgments calcifying by the time he was into his second spell. Like Rashid, he will have to deal with the accusation that he bowls too slowly to succeed at this level of the game.
Of course Rashid could bat, too. Parkinson, on the other hand, is the first man to come in below Jimmy Anderson since Boyd Rankin (another England one-cap wonder) played in 2014. He’s made one fifty in his career, for Lancashire under-17s in 2013, and that’s it. So he’ll have to make his case with his bowling alone. Still, there are plenty out there who believe in him.
Anyone who watched Shane Warne, and there’s been plenty of opportunity to do it these last few days, knows that leg-spin involves a little kidology. What’s less clear with Parkinson is who he’s kidding, the batsmen, or all us misty-eyed romantics who like to think that a wrist-spinner has a future in Test cricket in England.
