If anything, the weather was perfect. Even on Trent Bridge, if you closed your eyes you were pretty much on your own, such was the silence in the crowd when the game started the next day. Some 17,000 supporters seethed silently in the sunshine, perhaps wondering if they could stop themselves from sweating and shrinking pores through sheer force of will if they could eliminate all distractions and just focus.
For a while, England received little encouragement in the stands and none on the pitch. CricViz analysis shows the swing of the new ball is lower than in any Test in the country in a decade. In related news, this is the first time since 2012 that the country will play a Test without Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad. In their absence, Chris Woakes has started the bowling; the 35-year-old is often underrated, including by the current England squad – who left him out of the first two Ashes Tests last summer as a result He came back and won Player of the Series – but his first season here was on a flat pitch and it didn’t help that his ball was smeared with brittle paint and it was a punishing toil Work, not only was he hooked after five hopeless shifts, but he wasn’t seen again all morning.
Woakes, who turns 50 ahead of this Test, has been backed up by Ben Stokes and challenged to make up for the loss in the squad since Anderson’s retirement. Deprived leadership and sanity — something Anderson has always watched as a coach. Broad himself has not been close to the game as a commentator since. Woakes didn’t achieve immediate success, but the quote can be applied to many stages of his career, starting with his arrival in the Test squad in 2013 (one wicket in the first game, none in the second, and none in the third The game has a) ), but here he is.
The threat to England this morning came from other sources. Sometimes a piece of news travels through the crowd and you can almost hear it, like on the last day of the football season when a team threatened with relegation scores an important goal elsewhere. Nine rounds later, the recalled Mark Wood had the ball, and as the increasingly improbable results recorded by the speed gun flashed on the big screen, people pushed their neighbors, heads turned, grins, eyebrows arched— —93.9 mph, 96.1 mph, 97.1mph, up, up. Wood’s presence awakened everyone from their torpor (although if one of the highlights of a full day of watching elite sport is “that moment when the big numbers show up on the big screen”, then maybe some questions should be asked).
Since 1965, the Royal Air Force aerobatic team has gained a reputation for its ability to accomplish a seemingly simple feat: combining precision and coordination with extreme speed. On days like these, Wood is a human, Red Arrow, with a similar ability to leave witnesses gasping and stunned, missing only the multicolored vapor trails.
He replaced Gus Atkinson in the 10th game of the day. His first pitch gave Mikyle Louis the win and a narrow win at 93.9 mph. His second one pulled away, all by himself – at 96.1 mph. His third sprint was long distance and went over the stumps at 95.2mph. Lewis also used his arm to charge into fourth place, clocking a relatively uninspiring 92.2 mph. England moved the third gully into position to match their three slips. The fifth arrow went to the stumps and Lewis stabbed the bat into its path at 96.5 mph for a single at the last minute. Kraigg Brathwaite achieved something on the final single – 95.2 mph. It was the fastest pitch by an English pitcher in the country since records began in 2006, a title that only lasted about 10 minutes, the time it took for him to deliver his second pitch. The record stood until his third pitch.
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It was pure electricity that was spectacular and had the crowd shaken to its core as the batters swayed and squirmed. The only thing missing for Wood was a wicket: late in the afternoon, there was still no reward after one catch fell into the slip, another flew into the grasp of Jamie Smith and a third flew past Harry Brooke , he’ll end up on the ground with his head in his hands.
It’s hard to know how much of Lewis’ eventual dismissal was due to his brain being whipped and scrambled by the challenge of facing Wood, his synapses giving up and lying down. He took a wild swing on Shoaib Bashir’s relatively simple spin, got it completely wrong, and narrowly escaped punishment – indeed scoring four runs – but instead of learning his lesson, he immediately did it again . This time Brooke, running back from mid-off, took a brilliant catch and the ball fell off his shoulders for the first wicket of the day, for Bashir, the English white man. It was the team’s first at home, and for Wood, his goalscoring was a bit woefully inadequate and disappointingly indirect.
