There is a sense that Nottingham is straining a little at the seams. University students and their parents are in town for their graduation ceremonies, most of which take place this week. The city is hosting the Touch Rugby World Cup, which has a record 188 teams – Australia alone has sent 13 of them – representing nations from Chile to Chinese Taipei and from Lebanon to Luxembourg. In the evenings, after the action at the university’s Highfields Sport Complex winds down, the city centre hums with groups in liveried singlets or flag-emblazoned T-shirts, scurrying through the cobbled laneways seeking somewhere to socialise.
And into this a Test match has been squeezed. In short, these are heady days for the city’s hospitality industry. At a budget hotel on Wednesday a receptionist, checking in a guest, tapped their details into the computer and suddenly looked up, shocked: “Do you know how much you’re paying for this?” With all these visitors and the belated arrival of summer driving people out into the streets, at times the town feels ready to burst.
Yet a few minutes after 11am yesterday, England having been put in to bat, Ben Duckett looked around and saw nothing but space.
Last year Pat Cummins got all sorts of abuse for scattering fielders around the boundary at the start of England’s first innings of the Ashes, an approach that was considered both too defensive and also not defensive enough, allowing batters to score easy singles, rotate the strike and generally live stress-free lives. “They’ve gone defensive straight away,” complained Ricky Ponting. “I’m not a huge fan. If the scoreboard continually ticks over, batsmen never feel under pressure at all. With that field, where are you expected to bowl?”
It was impossible not to think back to those moments as Duckett repeatedly smeared the ball through an empty outfield in the first few overs. Kraigg Brathwaite had taken precisely the opposite approach to Cummins, preferring to keep his fielders close and challenge England’s batters to find a way past them. The problem was, they could.
It took only 26 balls for England to score their first 50, a record for any Test first innings. They failed to score off 11 of those deliveries and scored boundaries off another 10, with Duckett responsible for seven of them. By the time the players took drinks, an hour into the day and still awaiting the game’s first maiden over, England had 86 and Duckett was on 60.
Brathwaite’s decision at the toss, under cloudless blue skies, to bowl rather than bat indicated a fundamental lack of confidence in a callow batting group, but his side’s weaknesses are varied enough to not be easily hidden and his bowling unit is only comparatively stronger. Every captain feels it necessary from time to time to jog over to a struggling bowler, rest a consoling hand on his shoulder and give him a pep talk; the first time Brathwaite was moved to do so the game was only 10 deliveries old.
Despite the morale boost of Alzarri Joseph finding Zak Crawley’s edge with the third ball of the day, with Alick Athanaze taking an excellent catch at third slip, West Indies swiftly became ragged. The second over went for 19, the third for 12. But for an uptick in the hour before lunch, there was little consistency from the bowlers, and though it took a while – and Jason Holder produced another good catch in the cordon to curtail Duckett’s boundary-bothering – the fielding eventually frayed as well.
At times the action seemed fundamentally unserious, which in many ways is fine – cricket is, as Ben Stokes has said, an entertainment business, and a mix of quality and comedy is arguably ideal. Harry Brook completely fluffed a scoop and ballooned a catch to short leg, prompting an acrobatic, somersaulting celebration from the bowler, Kevin Sinclair. For the second time in the series Shamar Joseph was helped from the field mid-over after suffering from cramp.
Joseph, easily identifiable thanks to his ostentatious canary-yellow watch, was presented with the easiest possible catch by Joe Root and almost dropped it twice, the ball bobbling helpfully upwards on both occasions and allowing him to take it at the third attempt, a passage of play that would have been equally at home in a circus tent as on a cricket field.
Ollie Pope looked out of sorts, was dropped just before lunch on 46 and just after lunch on 54, and still ended up with a handsome century and the fifth-highest score of his Test career. Somehow his was the outstanding performance but, perhaps appropriately given the way the day had begun – if not the state of the city – it wasn’t exactly a crowded field.
