When Joe Root drops catches, Joe Root blames the ball.

Remember when English commentators were talking up Josh Tongue’s “extra pace” because he was bowling 85mph? That seems even more nonsensical now after Mark Wood made the Headingley crowd gasp at not just the obvious threat of his bowling but even the speed gun read-outs as he walked back to his mark.

Wood’s first spell was, in at least one respect, perfect. It was certainly dramatic when Stuart Broad dismissed David Warner in his first over, but Wood improved on that by first getting everyone on the edges of their seats and only then knocking Usman Khawaja’s stumps out of the ground with a 95mph snorter.

That’s how you do fast bowling. Get everyone watching, ratchet up the tension, and then deliver the most satisfying and unequivocal dismissal of all. Watching live, we made an involuntary noise of a pitch and timbre we have never achieved before.

Wood pretty much stuck to that method for the rest of the innings. Three of his wickets were bowled and one was LBW, while Alex Carey was essentially caught hit-on-the-head-a-minute-ago, playing a shot he almost certainly wouldn’t have attempted otherwise.

In short, Wood reminded England that the stumps existed after all of the bowlers and one of the batters had forgotten in the previous Test.

Targeting the stumps was a particularly wise approach given the most obvious alternative was relying on team-mates to catch the ball, which is just a mad, mad thing that England bowlers probably should not do.

Several players were at fault. Joe Root put down a couple of chances and then when he finally caught one, he flung the ball into the ground with all his might, as if the ball were the one at fault here.

This reminded us of two things.

1. Ben Stokes trying to throw the ball to New South Wales directly through the centre of the planet in the 2019 Ashes
2. Root’s “Ahhhhhh! In your FACE, ball!” celebration after finally catching one against New Zealand last year

It is not the ball’s fault, Joe.

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Everything’s going right for Mark Wood right now – which also means that everything is already starting to go wrong.

Mark Wood’s become a central part of England’s Test team, which is great. And he’s just got himself another IPL contract, which is also great. Throw in his obligations with England’s limited-overs sides and he’s a busy boy.

When we tweeted about the reasoning behind England’s decision to drop James Anderson and Stuart Broad the other day, we drew a certain amount of passive-aggressive “or maybe they’re just resting them” type replies.

But even before Andrew Strauss had explained the reasoning, this idea didn’t really stack up. Because if Test specialists Anderson and Broad needed resting, surely some of the all-format cricketers were in even greater need of a break? Players like Mark Wood, for example.

A bit of history

Early in 2018, we wrote a piece for Wisden about the possibilities and improbabilities that lay ahead of Wood in the coming months and years.

Wood had just been signed by the Chennai Super Kings and so added another lucrative and educational strand to his playing obligations. It was increasingly hard to see how he’d fit everything in and we went so far as to suggest he might never play another Test.

As you know, we were wrong on that one, but his career definitely forked towards limited overs cricket for a year or so there.

He played just two Tests in 2018. Then, in February 2019, he all but won a Test against the West Indies in the space of eight first innings overs.

“I finally feel like an England player,” he said afterwards.

It turned out to be the only Test he would play all year.

Wood was the fifth-highest wicket-taker in the 2019 World Cup but sat out the Ashes that same summer after suffering side and knee injuries.

He’s since inched back into the Test team, not so much off the back of first-class performances but through a combination of one-day form and increasingly frequent Test cameos that have largely arisen as a result of injuries to Jofra Archer and Olly Stone.

It’s great that some avenues into the team have remained open to Wood, but it does mean that he is now pretty much back where he was in 2018: a fast bowler in demand for T20, one-day internationals, Test matches and the IPL.

The wintry Wood

Mark Wood had a forgettable T20 World Cup at the start of the winter – but he was there. He still travelled. He still trained. He still sat in his hotel room compressed by covid restrictions, worrying about how things were going. After that, he had a far more memorable Ashes series for both good reasons (personal) and bad (the team).

Remember what Paul Collingwood said about going from the T20 World Cup to the Ashes?

“I am sure people are sick to death of hearing about bubbles, but the harsh reality of what we were expected to do was: two years of bubbles, finish the home season and then go to a World Cup where, for six weeks the bubble was even tighter, then do two weeks quarantine and go into the Ashes with two days of on-field practice.”

Five England players experienced that after featuring in both the T20 World Cup squad and the Ashes squad. Of those five, only three remain for the upcoming Test trip to the West Indies: Jonny Bairstow, Chris Woakes and Mark Wood. Of those three, only Bairstow and Wood will later be heading to the IPL.

The Windies tour finishes on March 28. The IPL is due to begin on April 2.

The summery Wood

The IPL runs until June, so we’ll get the usual tug o’ war over England players towards the end of it with a Test series against New Zealand due to start on June 2. Hopefully Wood won’t lose an arm in the tussle.

The rest of his summer shapes up like this:

• Tests v New Zealand (overlapping with ODIs v the Netherlands!) until June 27
• The leftover Test v India from July 1, followed by T20Is and ODIs until July 17
• Limited overs v South Africa from July 19, followed by a Test series that finishes on September 12

Unarguably, there are decisions to be made here about which matches Wood will and won’t play. But before you go all, “oh well he can just sit out the T20s” – remember that it’s another T20 World Cup year, so all of those are officially “vital preparation” before that tournament kicks off on October 16. The seven T20s in Pakistan immediately before it will be “vital” too.

How will this pan out?

Injury or burnout probably. That’s a bit grim, but probably true. The incentive to manage players’ schedules in the long-term is never quite as great as the desire to pick them in the short or medium-term.

It’s a bit like the Peter Principle. So long as the player is ostensibly tolerating their workload without any hugely obvious drop-off in performance, there’s no reason not to line them up for one more game. (In fact the player can be as guilty of this line of thinking as the selectors.)

And even if he is well managed, Wood is highly likely to drift away from one format or another in the coming months simply as a result of missing games. You can try and shape it how you like. You can earmark him for overseas Tests and for white ball cricket the rest of the time, but actual cricket will be played parallel to those noble intentions and opinions will shift.

Mark Wood is back in a place where he is wanted for everything. But it is not possible to focus on everything. That is not what ‘focus’ means.

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The ‘nice problem to have’ cliché klaxon is ringing out deafeningly this week. England need to take two full seam attacks and turn them into one.

Three of the six pace bowlers to have appeared in this series so far will be selected for the third Test and three of them won’t.

Three will be happy. Three won’t.

Some of those who won’t be happy will throw full-on hissy fits.

Who will throw the biggest strop if he isn’t picked?

Method

What we need to look at here is each player’s innate narkiness – their predisposition towards throwing a wobbler, no matter what the circumstances. We then need to factor in that player’s justification for doing so in this specific instance because righteous anger is of course the most powerful form of anger.

If we can find a colossal mard-arse with a strong and legitimate case for dispatching their toys from their pram, that’s our guy.

Let’s go in reverse alphabetical order. (It has to be said, this group of bowlers doesn’t spread itself around the alphabet very evenly.)

Mark Wood

Innate narkiness: Wood is an emotional man. At times he brings to mind an actress from the early years of Hollyoaks who we always referred to as “Overreaction Girl”. (We’ve no idea who it was and can’t be bothered finding out.) Wood’s is a short-lived combustibility though. As Roy Batty taught us, the light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long and Wood’s emotions burn so very, very brightly. (‘Roy Batty’ is the greatest character name in the history of science fiction, by the way. Sounds like a shopkeeper from Corrie; is in fact a Nexus-6 combat model replicant.)

Justification: Mark Wood doesn’t play Tests often, but he’s been man of the match in two of his last four, a period during which he’s generally bowled quicker than any England player ever. His record in England is fairly toss though.

Score: 9/20 (3 for narkiness, 6 for justification)

Chris Woakes

Innate narkiness: Even his beards are agreeable.

Justification: Bowled effectively if unspectacularly in the second Test. Bowls effectively if unspectacularly pretty much every time he plays in England. (He actually averages less than Stuart Broad and James Anderson in home conditions. Set against that, he doesn’t especially do anything that someone else doesn’t already do though.

Score: 8/20 (1 for narkiness, 7 for justification)

Sam Curran

Innate narkiness: Hard to say really, but he does look very serious when he plays. He definitely has a stroppy air about him.

Justification: Punches above his weight so consistently that eventually we’re going to have to ask him to step on the scales again. Bustling 79mph left arm swing shouldn’t really deliver much. But somehow it does – and England pretty much always win when he plays. Curran must be among the most annoying bowlers to face in world cricket.

Score: 13/20 (7 for narkiness and 6 for justification)

Stuart Broad

Innate narkiness: Well it’s Stuart Broad, isn’t it. We’re tempted to give him 11 but actually we’re going to go the other way because his is often a controlled – perhaps even calculated – stroppiness. (See his first Test interview or his career-long dealings with umpires and opposition.)

Justification: 491 Test wickets and he also made several decisive interventions in the second Test. 14 wickets at 19.42 in England’s previous series in South Africa. David Warner on toast in the last home summer.

Score: 19/20 (9 for narkiness, 10 for justification)

Jofra Archer

Innate narkiness: To say he has more edge about him than Woakes would be to say very little. To say he has about three times as much edge is still saying very little, but that’s what we’re going with.

Justification: Unique in that he can fill in for Broad or Anderson as a controlled opening bowler, but also for Wood as a first-change fast bowler. The best bowler in the last innings he bowled in. Anderson is the only one of this lot who averages less than him in Tests.

Score: 11/20 (3 for narkiness, 8 for justification)

James Anderson

Innate narkiness: Pure grumpy.

Justification: England’s best bowler. Ever. There are still zero signs that he’s deteriorating with age and honestly, if you put your mind to it, you could probably make a reasonable case that he’s actually still improving.

Score: 30/20 (10 for narkiness, 10 for justification and a bonus 10 if he’s forced to sit and watch two consecutive Tests at a ground where they’ve NAMED A FRIGGING END AFTER HIM.

This feels like a match where we would normally write a nice uplifting piece about Mark Wood. Unfortunately, we are midway through writing a lengthy, downpressing (we suppose you could use the word ‘depressing’ if you were so inclined) piece about Jos Buttler.

Actually, it’s not depressing (or downpressing). It’s more neutral. So stay tuned for that, folks. Sign up for our email so you don’t miss a nice neutral article about a guy you’ve just read 20 highly impassioned articles about.

The reason you aren’t getting the Mark Wood article is this: we only have time for one article this weekend. The reasons why we only have time for one article this weekend are these: we just moved house; we just had a son.

Things that are more important than writing about a Mark Wood five-for:

1. Writing about a Mark Wood/Stuart Broad batting partnership

Things that are more important than writing about a Mark Wood/Stuart Broad batting partnership:

1. The birth of a son (or daughter, for that matter – it’s just the son happens to be fresher in the memory)

So one thing and another, it’s been a bit of a fallow month on the site. Once the son has a name and we’ve worked out which parts of the house hold all the various things we took out of boxes the other day, we’ll try and get a bit more ‘content’ out there for you.

In the meantime: Mark Wood eh? What about all that stuff?

Every now and again, Mark Wood bowls extremely quickly and decides a cricket match. We’re currently campaigning to have this event officially recognised as ‘forestation’ on the grounds that the opposition has been Wooded.

Mark Wood is the kind of person who has an imaginary horse. We can state this with complete confidence because he has an imaginary horse.

Wood used to do imaginary jousting with then Durham team-mate Mark Stoneman. “I’d be the Duke of Ashington and he’d be the Earl of Sunnyside,” he explained.

Wood says he’s, “never, ever ridden a non-imaginary horse, but I’ve fed them so I know what that’s all about.”

Your love for Mark Wood will almost certainly hinge on whether or not you think it’s funny that he used the term “non-imaginary horse.”

If you’re wondering about imaginary horse care, apparently, “You just have to feed the horse apples, keep him well-groomed and ride him around the outfield.”

Here is Mark Wood riding his imaginary horse during a Test match.

Let us tell you about the other members of England’s World Cup squad

Back when we had a grim office job at a company that was dying on its arse, no-one wanted to manage our department because it meant a lot more spreadsheets and getting shouted at and not very much more money.

(Culture-wise, the founder once described it as a “sales-led company,” which basically meant that he wanted everyone to be Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. (This is not at all a viable business approach, by the way. The more Blakes you have, the less efficient a firm becomes. From experience, we’d estimate that the maximum number of Blakes a thriving company can accommodate would be either one or none. Probably none.))

One time, when they needed to recruit for the manager role for about the ninth time, they took each remaining member of the team into a side room one by one. To each of us, they said, “We really think that you, specifically, would be perfect for this job,” and each of us said “No, thank you.”

We get the impression there’s been a bit of this at Durham where Cameron “Role Model” Bancroft – a man who almost gave up cricket to teach yoga but then didn’t – has been named captain for the 2019 season.

After everyone else had rejected the job, it seems like there was, at most, one other candidate other than Bancroft: Chris Rushworth.

Now Chris Rushworth is a fine individual and a guaranteed member of the first team, but he made one fatal error in his bid to become captain: he practised bowling and became good at bowling.

Just as there is a hierarchy of suitability for the position of England captain, so there is a similar list for counties.

As Mark Wood told Cricinfo: “We have a young team so there were only two other players I thought could have done it.

“One would have been Alex Lees, but at this time in his career it’s probably better that he focuses on himself and goes under the radar a little bit.

“The other one would be Chris Rushworth, but we all know bowlers never become captains because they think that we’re dumb.”

They’re sticking great long highlights packages of each day’s play on YouTube. Who knew?

And what better day to start with than Mark Wood bowling at 94mph and half-deciding the third Test in the space of four overs? (Day on of the first Test, you say? Well, yes, that would have been a better day to start with. Point taken.)

Email subscribers, you’ll have to click through to the website to watch the video because embeds don’t appear.

2 minute read

You may remember that earlier in the year, we wrote about the weighted, weighty decisions faced by Mark Wood this season.

Wood’s long format career has been in the balance of late. An IPL contract seemed likely to keep him out of all early season first-class cricket and a consequence of that would have been reduced likelihood of playing any Test matches.

Fortunately, he bowled a load of toss in India and on such small things do career paths hinge.

Mark Wood’s performance for Chennai Super Kings

Wood took 0-49 from four overs in the opening match of this season’s IPL. He was the most expensive bowler on either side. He hasn’t been asked to play again.

At some point since then, Wood approached the team bosses and said something like: “Um. If you don’t really need me, could I maybe go home and play cricket?”

The Chennai Super Kings people said yes.

So what happens next?

In the short-term, Wood will attempt to secure a Test spot by playing precisely one first-class match for Durham ahead of the Pakistan series.

Technically, he is “the man in possession” having played England’s most recent five-day match, only it never really seems to work like that for bowlers.

Also, he didn’t make an unarguable case in his most recent Test outing and there’s also a case for saying that England would be better off trying to identify a short-pitched specialist as the third seamer.

Whether he plays the Pakistan Tests or not, that single County Championship match is the only one Wood is likely to be available to play until England’s short format commitments come to a close on July 17. Durham then have just one more Championship match in which he’ll be able to showcase his red ball competence before the India Test series starts. He’ll probably be rested for it.

What happens longer term?

That’s the bulk of Wood’s season. That’s his opportunity to “nail down a Test spot”.

Should he fail to achieve that aim – which, given the circumstances, seems entirely possible – he could instead train his hammer on the shortest format and try and nail down an IPL spot.

A man who prepared for this Test summer by playing the IPL and who prepared for the IPL by playing a one-off Test match might at some point conclude that he’ll get better results if he narrows his focus.

Conclusion

Being a professional cricketer can really get in the way of being a professional cricketer these days.

4 minute read

Chris Woakes is a very good and admirable cricketer. He didn’t have the best of time in the last Ashes but has since bounced back in the shorter formats. If he were to play a Test match, he would not doubt take a bunch of wickets. Nevertheless, England should pretty much always play Mark Wood instead, who may or may not perform as effectively, and quite often not.

Now the first thing to say is that we like Chris Woakes very much. We believe he will play plenty of Tests for England and it stands to reason that this also means that we believe he will take many Test wickets and consequently bring us a great deal of Test joy (which is a very real and important brand of joy).

He is also widely perceived to be a very nice man. If in thirty years time our daughter were to tell us that she was going to marry Chris Woakes, we’d say: “Chris Woakes is almost 60. This age gap is unseemly.”

However, if by the magic of time travel he was the exact same age as her, we’d say: “This is evidence of real actual time travel. This is incredible.” But once we’d dealt with the seismic technological development (and really, what else is there to say?) we’d say that on balance, given some of the other historical figures she could have ended up with, Chris Woakes is an adequate and acceptable choice.

Although actually, now that we think about it, isn’t Chris Woakes married? Maybe we’d be concerned about why he was running away from his own time period given that he had a wife and a burgeoning international cricket career back then. That would be a bit suspicious.

Anyway, the point is that Chris Woakes is an agreeable-to-likeable man. With hindsight the whole ‘would you be happy for him to marry your daughter’ thought experiment was a bit of a misstep on our part given their respective ages.

(Also, a quick note to say that we’d rank Mark Wood slightly above Chris Woakes on the likeability scale because he can be genuinely funny – and really, what other worthwhile quality would you ever look for in a person?)

(Another quick note. No matter what else he does, likeability will always be something of an uphill struggle for Craig Overton (remember him?) because he will always retain the air of someone who maybe once did a racism.)

(Yet another quick note. If he ever stops to think about it, Jamie Overton will probably  resent the fact that he also faces an uphill struggle for likeability because of the tarring-by-association that comes with being a twin.)

(Final quick note. We’ve just thought how Jamie Overton can easily avoid this. He should cast Craig as “the bad twin” which would of course make him the good twin, ergo likeable.)

Here’s the thing about likeability: at no point did Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath slow their wicket-taking as a result of our feelings about them during their playing days. Likeability and Test performance are not really connected and when you’re picking a team, it’s 100 per cent about how effective you think the player is going to be. (We’re going to be honest here, we’re going to flatly contradict this point a little later in the article.)

So what does Chris Woakes actually do? Let’s take a look at England’s bowlers to see what each of them offers and let’s do it according to Steve Harmison’s Theory of Units because that is something we fundamentally agree with.

Swing bowling: Jimmy Anderson is pretty much the best swing bowler there’s ever been.

Tall bowling: Current form notwithstanding, Stuart Broad has been a very good tall bowler.

Reverse swing bowling: Wiser men than us might disagree, but from what we’ve seen we feel like Ben Stokes has a legitimate case to be considered England’s best reverse swing bowler. Certainly, most of the occasions when he ‘makes things happen‘ seem to be occasions when the ball is also reverse swinging for him.

Spin bowling: Moeen Ali is the man who makes the ball bounce a bit funny by spinning it with his fingers.

So what does Chris Woakes add to the palette of things? Does he do anything different to the people listed above? Does he do any of the things listed above better than the people listed above?

Not really. In contrast, we could also add…

Fast bowling: Mark Wood.

Now, we can’t help but concede that Mark Wood is not always a fast bowler. Sometimes – perhaps even a lot of the time – he is just as fast-medium as everyone else. In fact it is not all that uncommon for him to bowl less quickly than Chris Woakes, who we would generally categorise as ‘brisk’.

But Mark Wood can bowl quickly. This is a thing that he is capable of doing and on the occasions that he manages it, he adds an extra thing to the bowling attack, which improves as a consequence.

When Mark Wood bowls quickly, he is electrifying. Chris Woakes is not electrifying. This is not meant as criticism of Chris Woakes because the truth is that very few players are ever electrifying. Being electrifying is a rare and valuable thing and that is why whenever you have a choice between a player who is possibly electrifying and one who definitely is not electrifying, you should always pick the possibly electrifying player even if there’s a more than reasonable chance that he will actually not perform as well as the other guy.

Cricket is meant to be fun and those rare moments when you think to yourself ‘something is happening’ are the most fun of all. Andrew Flintoff’s career record is famously nondescript, but he will always retain a warm place in our heart for all those occasions when he made us feel like something was happening.

There is also the small matter of retaining Mark Wood as a Test cricketer. Not so long ago we wrote at length about how the two Tests against New Zealand in 2018 potentially represented the final chance for him to have a career in the longest and most memorable format of the game.

Chris Woakes has been in the England Test team enough that we’re pretty confident he will be picked again. Wood, on the other hand, seems to exist in a constant state of maybe having already played his last Test without anyone actually realising it.

Wood should be picked and then hopefully something magical will happen and we can all stop worrying about the game fracturing into pieces for a day or two.

< 1 minute read

The big news from England’s warm-up piss-take of a match against a New Zealand XI is that they’re thinking of having Retired Hurt open the bowling. Accounting for three batsmen, he was England’s most successful bowler after Jimmy Anderson, who took 4-56.

Root deployed just the nine bowlers and even fewer of them actually opened. Mark Wood got three overs with the brand new ball and frankly, England may as well persist in doing that.

We’re aware that opening the bowling is meant to be some huge great deal and that making Stuart Broad come on first-change would put his mental health at grave risk – but if his replacement’s only going to bowl a three-over spell, as Wood would, it isn’t necessarily a monumental disadvantage in any real meaningful sense.

Fresh from his new and exciting experience, Wood also had some helpful advice for the Hamilton groundsman: “I think they should burn that top end, so I don’t have to bowl from there any more.”