Charity surprise winner in Bairstow row
As play started at Headingley on Friday it was 8pm in Wollongong, not far south of Sydney, and the rugby league game between St George Illawarra Dragons and Canberra Raiders was simultaneously getting under way. Australia’s NRL is currently running a promotion called Try July, in which a sponsor coughs up $5,000 for charity for every novelty try celebration witnessed across the month, and the Raiders had been planning. Eight minutes into the game Jordan Rapana scored a try and the Raiders team headed to the corner, where Elliott Whitehead – a Yorkshireman, born in Bradford – mimed taking guard and his teammates used the oval ball to recreate Jonny Bairstow’s controversial stumping at Lord’s. “Oh the stumping – and the Pom is out!” gushed commentator Dan Ginnane.
How about this @sportsbetcomau #TryJuly celebration 🏏 pic.twitter.com/RQMshuviyG
— NRL (@NRL) July 7, 2023
Yorkshire wait for hearing outcome
Yorkshire’s top brass were in London last week, not to enjoy the Lord’s Test but to present their case at a sanctions hearing of the Cricket Discipline Commission. They expect to learn the outcome later this month and on Friday their chief executive, Stephen Vaughan, said the club would “take it on the chin, show some contrition and move on”. But he was not one of those cast into fresh despair by the publication of the recent, damning ICEC report. “Take this the right way,” Vaughan said, “most of us at Yorkshire were very pleased with what we saw. And what I mean by that is a lot of the work we’ve rightly been doing in the last 18 months, Cindy Butts in her review was almost shining a mirror on exactly what we’ve been up to. Her review has vilified really a lot of the work we continue to do here.” He probably meant recognised – Yorkshire have probably been vilified enough for now.
Anderson’s labours spark bad memories for Gough
Jimmy Anderson’s labours in the first two Tests, at Edgbaston and Lord’s, earned sympathy from one of Yorkshire’s favourite sons in the shape of Darren Gough, for whom they sparked memories of his last two Test appearances, against different opponents in South Africa but at exactly the same venues and exactly 20 years ago. “They asked me to come back, told me not to worry, it would do a bit,” he remembered. “Those pitches were so flat Graeme Smith scored double centuries in both games, and I was knackered.” Just 32 at the time, Gough immediately hung up his spikes. “When you know, you know,” he said.
Root suffers that sinking feeling
Joe Root was dismissed in the first over of the second day, caught Warner, bowled Cummins for 19. This was at least an improvement on his last innings, on Saturday at Lord’s, which ended when he was caught Warner, bowled Cummins for 18. It was the sixth time Warner has caught him – the Australian still needs one more to catch up with Steve Smith, but no other outfielder has caught Root more than four times, nor have either Warner or Smith caught anyone else more than four times. This is personal, and deeply one-sided: Root and Warner have now faced each other 30 times in Tests but despite spending many of those games at slip Root has caught Warner just twice (while Zak Crawley, who stands right next to Root in the cordon, has managed it five times in six games, including twice in this one). There can’t have been a more one-sided battle since the one in Birmingham’s Walkabout bar in 2013 that so infamously started the Root-Warner hostilities.
