The ball comes out perfectly. Wrist cocked and straight, fingers behind the seam. The length is perfect: full enough to hit the stumps, not full enough to drive. The line is perfect: off, maybe off-and-middle. A little away movement and the edge is in play, the same edge that Mitchell Marsh found twice at Headingley. Or it thuds the pads and gets him leg-before for the 44th time in a largely underwhelming red-ball career.
In short, it is exactly the ball you bowl if you want to get Zak Crawley out. The ball the analyst would tell you to bowl. The ball every fast bowler strives to master. What you do not expect is for the batter to stand up in his crease and clout the ball into the crowd with all the scornful insouciance of a man plonking a seven-iron on to the 16th green at Augusta.
With that stroke Crawley moves from 178 to 184. England move past Australia’s total of 317 with the loss of two wickets. Crawley now has more runs than anyone else in this series. Crawley is playing one of the greatest ever Ashes innings by an Englishman. All sentences that are correct grammatically and factually, but somehow make less sense the more you look at them.
Everywhere you look at Old Trafford there are open mouths, wonky brows, twisted faces producing unintelligible vowels. What is happening? What is happen? What is? Wha?
If madness is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result, then maybe genius is getting it. Perhaps it strikes you as vaguely hyperbolic to use that term to describe a batter who came into this Test with a marginally lower career average than Tim Ambrose. Then again, how many other cricketers on the planet could have pulled off an innings such as this, in a game of this magnitude, against an attack of this pedigree? How often does that happen?
Perhaps you call it luck. Or perhaps, as another golf enthusiast almost said, the more chances you give a guy, the luckier he gets. What was remarkable about this innings was that it was essentially indistinguishable from the dozens of abortive innings we have seen from him in the past: the huge swishes outside off, the dangerous flicks across the line, the sense of a batter operating at all times on the very precipice of disaster.
These are exactly the same shots that have reliably been getting Crawley out for four years.
There were outside edges that flew for four. There were inside edges that flew for four. Uppish hooks and drives that landed safe. An lbw decision given out on the field that was overturned on review. Flicks down the leg-side that found fresh air rather than the glove or the toe of the bat. This is Zakball in microcosm, and it is not quite as brainless as it sometimes looks. The sooner you grasp the initiative, get those slips out, get the shine off the ball, the easier batting becomes.
But even to reach that point, a lot of things have to go right. You need a team culture that keeps giving you those chances. You need the talent and stubbornness to cash in on the days when it goes right. But most of all you need a blithe attitude to risk that goes against virtually every batting intuition in the book: an approach that is basically inseparable from the immense wealth and privilege into which Crawley was raised.
Crawley’s father, Terry, is one of the richest men in Britain. But he wasn’t born into his fortune. He was a futures trader in the City of London, a world of gamblers and speculators, of wild fluctuations in fortune. Some days you make the wrong call and the walls collapse around you. But you hold your nerve, because you know that in this world fortune favours the brazen. You dust yourself off. You go harder and bigger next time.
And by and large this is the way Zak bats. He faced 182 balls yesterday, and 51 of them produced a false shot. Any one of them could have dismissed him.
But you hold your nerve, because what’s the worst that can happen? You get out, life is still good. You get dropped, life is still good. You fall out of cricket entirely, and by any recognisable standard life is still good. How many cricketers on Earth are this invulnerable to failure? Perhaps only a very few.
Rather than inhibiting Crawley’s instincts, England have chosen to work with them. And of course there is a certain bittersweetness there: imagine, by way of a thought experiment, if a player such as Ravi Bopara had received the same kind of love and indulgence that Crawley has enjoyed.
When it fails, of course it reeks of decadence. But when it works, the returns can be stupendous. And as Crawley finally took his leave, 189 runs to his name, the Ashes back in the balance, it was to the sound of 26,000 dazed and dazzled spectators, all of whom – much like Crawley himself – had hit the jackpot.
