Shoaib Bashir’s preparation for this match was not exactly ideal. The early summer brought three games for Somerset in the County Championship in which he took a total of four wickets, but with the vastly more experienced Jack Leach at the club he was then left out of the squad and farmed out on loan. He still kept his place in the England side, having made his debut in India over the winter, but in the opening Test of the summer he neither bowled a ball nor scored a run. Between sessions at Lord’s the head coach, Brendon McCullum, repeatedly pulled together Bashir and Ben Stokes and jokingly introduced them: “This is Bash, if you haven’t met him …”
England were expected to beat West Indies here, and many will give them little credit for doing so. Though it has thrown up some extraordinary statistics – England had never in their history scored 400 runs in both innings of a Test – it was in many ways a pretty ordinary game. But the evidence it provided of the assimilation of Bashir, the nursing of this callow 20‑year‑old, so short of experience and recent sources of confidence, to the point where they could toss him the ball on the fourth afternoon with a Test in the balance and he would go and win it for them, that is something extraordinary.
