Deep down, beneath the layers of mooching sang-froid, Ollie Robinson might have bridled a bit at Matthew Hayden’s description of his bowling as “124kph nude nuts”. He might have felt the pressure of becoming an improbable pantomime villain, cricketing Dracula, the embodiment of some discing quality of potty-mouthed medium-fast aggression that seems to have united Australia across the generations in its ire towards a slightly blank-looking 29-year-old from Margate.
It seems unlikely. Robinson has always come across as reliably impervious. Has any English sportsperson embodied quite so expertly the concept of “bloke”? Here is a cricketer who appears at all times to have emerged on to the Test match outfield from a mist of scotch eggs and energy-drink cans, who seems even in the middle of a nine-over spell of tireless short-pitched nihilism-cricket to be bowling in a pair of sliders and an old Metallica T-shirt. Here he comes, the Dude, dressing gown tails flapping, still taking his Test wickets, still demonstrating that doggedly insistent mastery of swing and nip and seam and angles at the crease.
