“Root’s bloody out,” the old man gasped. It had happened while he and his wife were fetching fresh cups of tea. “So who’s this batting?” she asked. He craned his head sideways so he could try to read from the big screen. “Jonny Bairstow. Then it’s Stokes, Foakes and the bowlers.” He sucked his teeth. “They ought to shut up shop or they could lose this.” She pursed her lips, clearly unsure whether or not she agreed. But he was wearing a Nottinghamshire cricket club tie and had, you guess, watched a lot of cricket here over the years. There was a crack down below. Bairstow had just thumped Trent Boult for four through the covers.
And over in the Fox Road stand a song broke out. “Oh Jonny Bairstow! You are the love of my life! Oh Jonny Bairstow, I’d let you …” The lady squinted. “What are they singing?” she asked. “I didn’t catch it.”
There were all sorts in at Trent Bridge: kids who had been allowed to skip school, stay-at-home parents with babies in slings, students, skivers and the retired. These weren’t people who had planned their day out a year in advance. Most of them had decided to come the previous evening when the club announced it was going to be free entry, a decision that paid for itself in public relations (not to mention the bar takings). A week after the MCC were being criticised for high ticket prices at Lord’s, Nottinghamshire had opened English cricket up to the public. So it wasn’t a typical English crowd that came. But then, this isn’t a typical England team, either.
In the match these two teams played at Lord’s this time last year, New Zealand declared their second innings and set England a chase of 273 in 75 overs. They refused to do it and spent the afternoon plodding to a boring draw. This time round, England earned their opportunity by bowling New Zealand out in the morning. They needed 299 runs, and had 18 fewer balls to get them in. But England weren’t weighing permutations, there were no delicate calculations about run rates and wickets in hand. They were simply hellbent on winning the thing. You could see it from the moment Alex Lees laced the first two balls of the innings through the covers.
Lees, who hit more boundaries in his two innings this week than he did during his eight hours of batting in the three Tests he played in the West Indies in the spring, is the batter who best exemplifies the changes the team have made in the weeks since Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes took over. England pressed on, and on, and on, harder and harder. So that at tea, when they needed another 160 runs from 38 overs, and had six wickets left but only three batters among them, they decided to accelerate again. New Zealand, meanwhile, were making plans for how to get the one wicket they needed to break the back of England’s innings.
They decided to open the session with their two best bowlers on the day, Boult and Matt Henry, bowling short with the field back. The 20-minute stretch that followed was one of the dizziest, giddiest passages in 145 years of Test cricket. Bairstow pulled Henry for two fours, then hooked him for two sixes, then he smacked Boult for three more, down the ground, through midwicket, over long leg. He went from 43 to 96 in the space of only 18 balls. Bairstow had barely made a run so far this series. He had been playing like a man who was trying to remember how you’re supposed to go about Test batting after his recent spell in the IPL.
Now he simply gave up trying to readjust. After all, as he said later, this situation was something like a one-day game anyway – so why not play it that way, and to hell with the risks. It worked. If he’d only scored a single off his 75th ball he would have broken the record set by Gilbert Jessop 120 years ago for the fastest hundred made by an Englishman in Test cricket. Bairstow played so extravagantly well that Stokes, who made 75 off 70 balls, ended up playing second fiddle. But then McCullum once hit a Test century off 54 balls, so it was all a little slow by his standards.
When it was all over, with, heaven believe it, 22 overs still to go, that elderly couple must have come tumbling down from the stands along with all those wide-eyed kids and worse-for-wear members of the Barmy Army. “See,” I like to imagine her saying to him as they stepped out of the ground into the warm sunshine of the late afternoon. “I told you so.”
