Welcome to Hull. The question for England’s newest Test debutant leading in to this series-ender was: are you ready for this? Are you ready for the step up? Can you, Josh Hull, take the white heat of the purest form? Brace yourself. We’re flying into the sun here.
In the event it may have helped that what both teams dished up either side of lunch on day two was something closer to a beer match, or one of those YouTube compilations that explain why people in Australia think the county championship is basically something along the lines of cheese rolling or hay bale tossing.
Run-outs and misfields came and went. Some light metre nonsense meant Chris Woakes bowled four balls of off-spin that cannot, repeat cannot be unseen. Earlier England had lost six for 35 playing like drunken lords at a picnic.
In the middle of which Hull was bounced out by Asitha Fernando, who is an entire foot shorter than him, skying something that ended up close to hip height, a rare of example of the ball getting small on you.
Watching this you half expected a wicketkeeper to fall over while invisible hands posted laughing crying emojis across the sky, or Alastair Cook to appear and start doing bowling impressions. Josh Hull? Welcome to the kill zone.
Happily Hull played his own part well, coming on to bowl at 2.28pm with Sri Lanka 70-2, and showing nerve and heart and no little skill. It was in its own way an extraordinary moment. Has any fast bowler ever come into an England Test team with so little to back it up?
You could – and some will – call Hull’s selection the most damning statement of thanks-but-no-thanks ever directed at county cricket. Picking him is literally saying, there is nothing to be gained from succeeding in this. We will instead pick a 20-year-old with 16 wickets at 62 because we like how he looks. How are you meant to feel about this if you’re a 27-year-old with hard-earned county numbers, winning games every week, running through the pain, dreaming of a bigger stage?
On the other hand, elite sport is supposed to be unforgiving, a hierarchy not just of numbers but of possibilities. And Hull is an ingredients selection. This is an optics-based pick. Its about the look, the height, the levers.
Bowlers can be built and moulded if the raw clay is here. Hull is 6ft 7in and has rugby player lines. The outline is good. Even when he dropped a dolly of a catch at mid-on later in the day, crocodile hands, there was a feeling of yeah, well, long way down, size 15 shoes, what’s the weather like up there. England cricket loves tall things. The feeling is, we will be fine if we have tall things. Tall things are the weapons with which we will fight and if not quite beat Australia, then at least make Australia respect us (for our tall things).
And of course when England talk about Hull being “an investment” and a two-year project what they mean is we need a tall bowler for the Ashes. With this in mind they also want a left-armer because both numbers and feelings tell us that left-armers in that clear white southern sun, pitches that bounce, massive bluey-green outfields, well, it all just seems to work.
Left-arm seam bowlers have taken 78 wickets at 18 in the last three Ashes series in Australia, or rather the two significant Mitches have. If this seems simplistic (Mitch Johnson in 2014 was a generational terror, left arm or not; Josh Hull has bowled just over 1,200 balls in first-class cricket) then sport often is simple. Simple works. And also, he can bowl. You could feel the necks craning as Hull took the ball after lunch. His run-up is exceptionally long. He seems to appear on the distant horizon like an iron man emerging form the sea. He runs in with his hands low and wrist cocked, not so much the perfectly balanced 6ft 7in sprinting style of Mitch Starc as a purposeful trundle, like a siege tower being wheeled into place.
His first ball was pitched up 82mph and whacked hard to cover. His second swung back in out of the hand. His fourth was belted through mid-off for four. But it looked good. There is a slinginess there. The front knee is braced. The bowling boots were agreeably grey and non-fancy. Its all very simple, feet straight, ball delivered from side on, looking behind the arm. Rod. Titch. Big Bird. Hullsy. Reinforced Steel. He looked good.
The fastest ball of Hull’s spell was 85mph. There was movement in to the right-hander but nothing away. And two and half overs in the big moment arrived, a ball pitched up at 82mph, seam scrambled, perhaps an unintended cutter. Pathum Nissanka was drawn into a drive that he basically toed to extra cover, where Woakes took a fine diving catch.
England’s players ran to Hull, like penguins swarming around a lighthouse.
There will surely be harder days than this to come. But none, perhaps, where it all feels quite so open, and quite so much fun.
