It’s just coming up to noon at Old Trafford, and England are nine for one. Moeen Ali is in, and struggling. He can’t seem to get his feet moving, and Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood keep beating him outside off. Moeen has scored nine from 27 balls, one four off the outside edge, when he gets the one he’s been waiting for from Hazlewood. It is full and straight, the same sort of delivery that Shaminda Eranga gave him back in 2014, on his Test debut, and before you know it Moeen is up on his toes, bringing the bat down and around, and the ball is flying away fine behind him for four.
In 2014 England were starting all over again, all over again. They had a new managing director and a new head coach, a new opening bat, a new fast bowler, and a new spinner too. Odd thing was, the one they had picked never seemed entirely sure he was the right man for the job. Moeen had been taking his wickets at 32 each in the previous couple of seasons, but really he still thought of himself as a No 3 batsman. He was the leading run-scorer in the County Championship the season before, and just the week previously he had made 162 against a Surrey attack led by Chris Tremlett.
England, though, don’t need him to be a No 3. They are more interested in the fact that he can bowl a doosra. Moeen is a little puzzled by this. A few weeks earlier he had been the fourth spinner in the England Lions squad. But he is phlegmatic about it, as he is about most things. During his personality profile test, he was asked: “Why do you think we should invest in you?” He told them that he was ready to play for England, and would give them 100%, he felt that “if I am picked, that’s fine, and if I’m not, that’s also fine, because there is more to life than cricket”.
They ended up picking him at No 6 on his debut, at Lord’s. England were 120 for four when he made it to the middle. He left his first ball, and his second and third too. His father, and coach, Munir, enjoyed the next day’s papers, which describe his boy’s watchful play outside off. Eventually Eranga gives him one in his slot, full, up on middle and leg, and though Moeen will say later that he can’t remember much of what happened in that moment he does recall the feeling of it, the way he knew he had middled it as the ball skipped across the outfield for four. There was a lot of promise in that one shot.
In the years that followed, Moeen did just about everything his team asked of him. He was their opening batter, and their opening bowler, played as their only spinner and their second spinner, sometimes even as part of a three-man spin attack. He batted at No 4, No 5, No 6, No 7, No 8 and No 9, scored some of England’s fastest fifties, like the 75 off 66 balls he made against South Africa in 2017, and some of their slowest centuries, like the 108 off 281 against Sri Lanka three years earlier. He has even, on a handful of occasions, got to bat at No 3, where he always imagined he would play.
They gave him four Tests there, one away in India in 2016, two more against them at home in the summer of 2018, and the last in Sri Lanka that winter.
He did not do much in them, just a single, slow, fifty at the Oval, then he was moved back down the order again, to play with the tail. There were compensations. He took 195 wickets by the time he retired, more than Fred Titmus, Jim Laker, more than Hedley Verity, more than any English spinners, in fact, apart from Graeme Swann and Derek Underwood, a Test match hat-trick, 10 in one Test, against South Africa at Lord’s. But underneath it all there was always that one unaddressed question of what his career might have been if England had taken his batting as seriously as he did.
England used a fair few No 3s in that time. Gary Ballance got a long run, so did Joe Root, though he never really wanted to do it, Jonny Bairstow had seven Tests there, the same number as Nick Compton and Dawid Malan, Tom Westley got a summer, James Vince a winter. The last time they were playing the Ashes here they hadsomehow ended up giving the job to Joe Denly. Moeen though, who had played 99 innings there in first-class cricket, and had an average just a lick under 50, was needed elsewhere. And that was how it finished for him.
Until Jack Leach went down with a stress fracture, earlier this summer, until Ollie Pope dislocated his shoulder in the second Test at Lord’s, until Harry Brook made a mess of his one innings there at Headingley. And so here he was: Moeen, back, and batting at last in the position where he always wanted to be, head still, body cocked, bat waggling like a dog’s tail, the hopeless, handsome batter, still blessed with that gorgeous leg glance, still playing those breathtaking cover drives.
He made 54, passing 3,000 Test runs in the process, and while we all thought about what might have been, you guess he, himself, was happy just to have this one last chance.
