A fire alarm seemed fitting cause for delay, as Moeen Ali waited to discuss his response to England’s emergency call for the first time at Edgbaston yesterday.
The ground’s evacuation was a drill, as it turned out, but the all-rounder’s return appears anything but, Moeen in line to play his first Test match since the summer of 2021 when the Ashes begin here in Birmingham on what looks a dry wicket in less than 48 hours’ time.
And a test it will be, not only of Moeen’s retained ability for a craft he had left behind, but of the environment Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have built and its thus far universal capacity for individual uplift. Players have come, a few have gone, some certainly to return, but virtually without exception all have grown in stature. Even Alex Lees, the player most severely cast aside by this regime, has taken its teachings back into the county game and looks better for them at Durham.
But will the magic work on Mo? Because for all the dramatic romance of a hugely popular figure’s recall, that really is what this all hinges on: the punt that a cricketer seemingly ripe for a Bazball boost finds not that it has come a few years too late, but that it kicks in so emphatically as to offset a daunting absence from this most demanding form.
In the name of tempering expectations, then, it is worth stating the obvious in that while England may have coaxed back their most talented off-spinner, he is not Muttiah Muralitharan, nor, more to the point, even Nathan Lyon. As an all-rounder, anything like a half-decent series would see Moeen join the likes of Andrew Flintoff and Ian Botham in passing both 3,000 Test runs and 200 Test wickets but, for all statistical similarity, he is not the kind of player who might define a series like those two, either. Incidentally, Stokes, who certainly is, needs six wickets to join the same club; Stuart Broad, amusingly, is already in it.
What Moeen is, or at least was and now must prove to be again, is a match-winner, one with a penchant for getting good players out, a particularly fine fourth-innings record in Test triumphs and an ability to conjure deliveries no other English spinner could.
Accepting the dearth of alternatives, the gamble is the same as that which has kept Zak Crawley at the top of the order: Moeen may be inconsistent, but come off once or twice in a five-match series and that may be good enough. The stakes, though, are arguably higher: when Crawley fails, it does not come at the cost of Australian runs.
Moeen is, of course, acutely aware of all this. The 36-year-old is, admirably, seldom one to mask his frailties and ceded plenty of them in what was an almost hilariously self-effacing press conference yesterday.
"I’m sure they know what they are going to get from me — there won’t be a lot of maidens," Moeen said, acknowledging that he’d "never been able to hold an end" and "could go for a lot of runs".
Australia are, no doubt, thinking the same, Moeen admitting he’d "100 per cent" target himself, before Stokes and Jonny Bairstow offered a sample of what is to come in the afternoon’s net.
"I spoke to Baz and he said he’s not bothered about how I perform, which is quite nice," he added, and while that leniency surely has a limit, else you or I be in line for a call-up, it is not difficult to see how Moeen might be liberated by the confinement of his brief, a "free-hit" as he called it, without the pressure of playing for a place, the assumption being that this really is one last job.
And through everything, the sense from Moeen here was of measured determination to make sure it is a job well done. After all, he does not need Test cricket. He is a World Cup-winner in both formats, an IPL champion with Chennai Super Kings only weeks ago and set to benefit exorbitantly from franchise cricket’s lucrative explosion through the twilight years of his career. But, under this captain, he wants it still.
"One thing I really want to make clear is that I’m going to try to give this everything I’ve got, more than I did before probably," he said. "Playing a lot of white-ball, you win trophies and they mean a lot. But when you do well in Test cricket, it feels better than any other event that you can play."
Moeen has shelved a nice broadcasting gig and a family holiday to the Cotswolds for this assignment, though not a trip to Windsor Castle, where today he was receiving an OBE for services to cricket. Back in England whites this summer, duty calls once more.
