Round about two in the afternoon, the atmosphere at Old Trafford was loose and giddy. The crowd were two or three pints in, the sun was out, and England were already 200-and-some runs on. Everyone was waiting for them to declare but, for once, the team were not in a hurry.
On the balcony outside their dressing room, Brendon McCullum had his feet up on the chair in front of him. He had one eye on the Times crossword and the other on his tablet, which was streaming the golf from Hoylake. In the huge temporary stand away to his left, the crowd were threading beer snakes together, batting beach balls back and forth, and baiting the fielders.
These were idle hours, and enjoyable ones, watching England bully up a bigger lead before beginning the serious business of trying to bowl Australia out again. There were 25,000 or so very happy English men and women in the ground. And out in the middle, there was one very, very angry one.
Jonny Bairstow has been pissed off all summer long. He was annoyed by the way everyone kept harping on about how his injury had affected his mobility. “It’s funny,” and he didn’t mean ha ha, “people have said ‘you are limping’, well, I do not know anyone that has had a major leg injury that does walk exactly the same as previous.” He was annoyed that people kept saying England should pick Ben Foakes to keep wicket instead of him. He was annoyed with the Australian commentator Jim Maxwell for describing him as overweight, and annoyed with the English papers for turning it into a back-page story.
Bairstow was annoyed that after 93 Tests, 5,623 runs and 12 Test centuries – and four in five innings last summer – he still has to put up with pundits who can bat half as well picking over his technique. He was annoyed that everyone seemed to have forgotten the run-a-ball 78 he made on the first day of the series. He was annoyed that no one seemed to know he has made more dismissals per match than almost any other English keeper. He was annoyed with himself for missing so many chances. And he was annoyed with Australia – boy oh boy, was he annoyed with Australia – for stumping him when he walked out of his ground at Lord’s.
For the first half-hour or so at the crease you hardly noticed him, but if you were listening carefully you might just have heard him ticking. He batted with a very different tempo to Ben Stokes, who had set about the bowling like a man using a towel to fight off a swarm of wasps from a family picnic. Bairstow tucked in neatly alongside his young Yorkshire teammate Harry Brook, he was nine off 12 balls, and 15 off 24 before he scored his first four off the inside edge. Like the distant clouds, he carried an air of ominous intent. He had a point to make, and was biding his time before doing it.
Then Josh Hazlewood bowled him a short one. Wallop. Bairstow hit it with a month’s worth of pent-up irritation. He had enough spare for the next one, too, which Hazlewood pitched up on middle stump. Bairstow thumped it back down the ground for four more. He was on 49 off 50 balls when Stuart Broad was out caught.
And you wondered, then, whether Stokes would bother sending Jimmy Anderson in to bat with him. But England wanted every last run they could get – they have suffered too much over the years to ever give an Australian an even break. And besides, it felt as if Bairstow still had some issues he needed to work through.
In the next 40 minutes or so, Bairstow and Anderson put on 66. The No 11’s contribution was exactly five, four of those with one shot, a pull off Pat Cummins that made Stokes bang his hand on the dressing room door in applause. He played bravely, though, ducking some short balls and wearing the rest. It was an end-of-the-pier partnership, full of good and funny stuff.
Bairstow kept nicking the strike by sneaking quick singles whenever the ball flew through to the keeper – he did it twice off bouncers that sailed over Anderson’s head, then again off a third that hit him on the glove. Alex Carey eventually started underarming the ball in to try to run him out, but this time around he found he couldn’t hit the stumps.
When Bairstow did have the strike, he made the most of it by punching and clipping fours and bashing sixes into the stands square of the wicket with his front-foot pull shot. From 50 at a run a ball, he raced to 99 off 81.
Anderson was damn near run out coming back for the 100th, Bairstow’s shout of “no!” nearly broke windows, and then, agony, Anderson was out leg before wicket to the very next ball. So Bairstow was stuck on 99, one run short of the hundred which would, you guess, have been all the catharsis he needed.
There are some batters who would have been happy enough to have the 99 runs. For Bairstow, you guess the single he was missing will be one more thing to be incensed about.
