Nearly two years after his last Test on home soil, and having missed the first two games of this Ashes series, Mark Wood sought Ben Stokes to ask if the England captain had any requests or instructions before his belated introduction to the contest at Headingley last week. “He just asked: ‘Are you ready? Are you ready to bowl some thunderbolts?’ I said yes, and that was it,” Wood said.
His thunderbolts brought him seven wickets and several records; his bowling in the first-innings peaked at 96.5mph and hit an average speed not seen in this country since Brett Lee visited for the 2005 Ashes. Now his focus is on unleashing some more when the action moves to Old Trafford next week. Wood says he is “absolutely” determined to make sure “lightning strikes twice”, a process which starts immediately with him spending the next few days not doing much.
Before Headingley Wood had not played any competitive cricket since leaving the Indian Premier League in mid-April. In the first three days in Leeds he bowled 28.4 overs, eight deliveries fewer than he delivered in the first six months of the year. Given his injury record, and his lack of recent match practice, the free week before the fourth Test is well timed. He not only needs to guard against fatigue, he has physical wounds to heal: Wood so regularly falls to the turf as he strains to deliver the ball at maximum speed he all but shredded the skin on his elbows.
“I’ll speak to the physio, but I imagine I will bowl once or twice, a couple of gym sessions, maybe some running, but it won’t be too drastic,” he said. “I have to let the body recover. It’s my first game in a very, very long time, especially in Test cricket. I’ll get myself in a good space, let the wounds recover and get myself up for the next one.”
Almost as remarkable as the pace of Wood’s bowling was the speed at which he scored with the bat, sprinting to 40 off 16 balls in England’s two innings. Since people started counting how many balls each batter faces nobody has come close to scoring so many runs so quickly in a Test. Wood ended with a strike rate of 250; of those who batted in both innings of a Test his closest rival is Stokes, who scored 41 at 195.2 against Pakistan last December, and of those who batted only once it is Jacques Kallis, with 54 at 216 against Zimbabwe in 2005.
“It fills me with great pride to say I can do well against Australia,” Wood said. “Look at facing Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc. One, it’s not easy. Two, it’s really intimidating. They’re bowling fast, they get good bounce. More often than not they come out on top. Luckily this time it’s the one out of a hundred I managed to get through.”
Wood did not score the winning runs at Headingley – that honour fell to Chris Woakes – but the moment he pulled his second ball into the stands to take England to within 12 of their target certainly felt decisive. It was fitting that England were carried to victory by two players who missed all of last summer due to injury, who were making their first appearances in the series, who had made crucial interventions throughout the match and who drove together to the ground every day of last week, talking about the impact they were determined to make.
“We’ve car-shared all week, we’ve got a lucky car [parking] space, we promised that we’d get runs and wickets,” Wood said. “I think we’ll park in the same place every time we turn up here.”
After three matches that have been thrillingly dramatic, with supremacy swerving drunkenly from one side to the other and with the added spice of a few unexpected storylines – all of Lord’s turning apoplectic as a result of a stumping; Jonny Bairstow carrying a Just Stop Oil protester off the field like a sack of coal; an argument about a haircut – pre-series comparisons with the unparalleled drama of the 2005 Ashes are starting to seem realistic. Wood, though, thinks it is not there quite yet.
“When you’re in it I think you don’t appreciate it as much,” he said. “For me, 2005 was the absolute pinnacle. I don’t feel like it’s been to that magnitude, but it’s great to have that support, which has been amazing everywhere we’ve been. You feel it on the street walking around, people messaging. It’s amazing as a nation that we can carry this weight of support with us.”
