England are in pursuit of a clean sweep: 2-0 up with one to play, the hosts are heavy favourites against a West Indies team they have had the better of on all bar one day of the series so far.
The noises coming out of the home camp are all positive. Every batter in the top seven has a half-century to their name, and all of Ollie Pope, Joe Root and Harry Brook have scored centuries.
With the ball, pace newbie Gus Atkinson and Shoaib Bashir have taken five-fors, while Chris Woakes took six wickets across the match at Trent Bridge and Mark Wood produced one of the fastest spells of bowling in the history of English cricket. Captain Ben Stokes, who for so long was plagued with a troublesome knee, is now finally playing a full bowling role, which has given the team the balance it has been missing for over a year-and-a-half.
It is hard to find a thread to pick at with this team currently. The major selection debate over whether it was the right call to retire James Anderson will rumble on for decades to come, but everywhere else things are falling into place.
Gone are the laughable and, admittedly, at times tongue-in-cheek comments from players about Bazball inspiring opponents like Yashasvi Jaiswal, or Chinese proverbs delivered by Zak Crawley, or coaches coming out to the media after a horror days’ play and saying that ‘everything went very well, actually, thanks for asking’.
Bazball MkII has been grown up and determined. Vice-captain Pope is talking about the group’s desire to be “ruthless”; that the mantra of the previous era was designed for a team that was low on confidence, and now that they have that confidence, they want more.
“The team is looking really set at the minute,” Pope said after the win in Nottingham on Sunday. “I feel that everyone has kind of grown into their roles and now there’s a real hunger — there always is a hunger — but now there’s an extra bit in that batting line-up and now we feel like we can go on to do even better things. We want to be ruthless.”
That is not to say all the fun is gone from England, however, as two sentences later, Pope also mentioned that one day they might score 600 in a day. It was a comment that encapsulated everything about the current set-up: a desire to win, combined with a desire to entertain. They want it all.
England’s pursuit of the whitewash continues on Friday here in Birmingham. If the win at Lord’s was too easy, the win at Trent Bridge was a little too tricky. The margin of 241 runs shows that the result was never really in doubt, but in their first bowling innings England struggled to get the new ball to move, while in their second batting stint they lost their final seven wickets for 96 runs. Furthermore, at 281 for four in the first innings, their final tally of 416 was also a little disappointing. But these are the margins we are talking about: whether England are winning well enough for our liking, rather than whether they are winning at all.
“Hopefully, I’ve only just started,” said Brook when quizzed about his batting average of 62.54, a figure that stands as the second-best in history (minimum 20 innings) behind only Don Bradman. “I want to play every Test match I can. Test cricket and playing for England is my priority. I don’t want to think too far ahead, the Ashes is a long way away and we have a lot of Test cricket before then.”
There are 16 Tests until that Ashes trip: four more this summer, where England will be pursuing a whitewash of both West Indies and Sri Lanka. Not since 2004 have England won every Test match in a home summer, but such has their start been that anything less in the next six weeks could be deemed a relative failure.
England are unlikely to make any major changes for the final Test, with the rotation of a seamer, perhaps Atkinson out for one of Matthew Potts or the uncapped Dillon Pennington the only likely option.
For the tourists, Gudakesh Motie, who missed the Second Test through illness, is likely to return.
