We still don’t feel like we know Ollie Robinson all that well, but one thing we’ve concluded is that he is now pretty well established as England’s talker-of-bollocks in chief.

Robinson somehow made the headlines last week for a tetchy and sweary outburst at Usman Khawaja after dismissing him for 141 basically-match-winning runs.

It seemed to us to be fairly run-of-the-mill, heat-of-the-moment fast bowler fare. Presumably somewhat more considered was Robinson’s subsequent Wisden column, in which he bemoaned victorious Australia for their supposed unwillingness, “to go toe-to-toe with us”.

After repeating a whole series of “for your ears only” tyre-inflation comments from Brendon McCullum, Robinson then closed out his column by very uncomfortably promising: “One thing I can guarantee. You’re going to see us come harder and harder.”

We’re not sure what to make of that guarantee, given he had opted for the conditional just a couple of paragraphs earlier, suggesting that, “you could see us come even harder at Lord’s.”

Maybe he talked himself into it. Ollie Robinson can certainly talk himself into a lot of things.

Will England really “go harder”?

Against a backdrop of Test cricket through the ages, England’s win over South Africa at Old Trafford last year was unremarkable. But in the smaller sample of matches played in the Stokes-McCullum era, it is actually in some ways the most remarkable.

That game didn’t deliver the gut-rotting tension of the first Ashes Test and it didn’t serve up a jaw-dropping run-chase like those Jonny Bairstow began to perfect last summer. It is therefore remarkable in the same way that The Straight Story is a remarkable David Lynch film – because it was characterised by such a conspicuous lack of weirdness.

“We’re trying to rewrite how Test cricket is being played in England,” Ben Stokes had said before that South Africa series began, only for his team to succumb to an innings defeat in the first Test. That didn’t feel like much of a rewrite. It felt like a very familiar repeat.

In the second Test, Stokes’ men attempted to keep the unambiguous mindset but seemingly allowed themselves to bend to circumstance a little more. The end result was that they showed themselves to be quite capable of refraining from constant hell-for-leather attack in favour of pragmatism.

After bowling South Africa out for 151, Zak Crawley came out and made 38 off 101 balls. When he was out, England were 147-5. Rather than madly dash to a 50-run lead – which is what people assume they’d try and do now – Bens Stokes and Foakes sedately and unshowily worked their way to centuries.

Foakes’ 206-ball hundred was characteristically steady, but the captain also took it pretty easy having spent the rest of summer dealing in leading-by-example slog cameos. After 98 balls, he was on 41 and he hadn’t accelerated enormously by the time he was out for 103 off 163 balls. An England declaration ensued – but only once they were 264 ahead. There were dramatic moments, but all in all, intrigue outweighed excitement.

The point is that for all the talk about England’s recent approach to Test cricket, they are actually perfectly capable of flexing in the non-American sense.

So why are they so unwilling to do so?

Wrong question

The real question is why do England sound so unwilling to temper their approach. It’s probably because after two defeats in their last three Tests, Stokes and McCullum feel like the players are under enough pressure to alter their method anyway.

Maybe the leadership duo are trying to counter those forces – not because they disagree, but simply because they don’t want the players to stray too far from central principles that have honestly completely transformed the side from when they inherited it.

Ollie Robinson is a key part of England’s team, but he is also a tool of the system. As such, bombastic ‘we’re going to attack even more’ style comments like his probably betray not so much a genuine goal as Stokes’ and McCullum’s ongoing messaging efforts.

Attacking cricket isn’t a cure-all, but erring on the side of positivity has unquestionably worked for England over the last year or so. They’ve shown signs they can moderate their aggression, but they won’t want to do so to the extent they reacquaint themselves with their greatest enemy.

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The 2023 Ashes is almost here! And you’re not ready! You think you are, but you aren’t. You don’t know what to watch out for. But don’t worry, we’ve done the hard work for you and come up with this list. You need to watch out for these things…

1. Suggestions that this could be as good as the 2005 Ashes

Nope, wrong. Completely and utterly and unavoidably wrong. Even if the actual cricket is higher quality – which is entirely possible – there is simply no way to match the drama because even though you don’t realise it, the story of the 2023 Ashes is already well underway and it isn’t even close to the story of the 2005 Ashes.

No shame in that though. Doesn’t mean it won’t be an amazing Ashes.

2. Ollie Robinson’s wicket celebration

There are many variants of the Ollie Robinson wicket celebration, but the basic framework of it is a kind of upper cut finger point that is punctuated by a “Woo!”

While James Anderson may well be the greatest swing bowler there’s ever been and Stuart Broad routinely shapes Ashes series, Ollie Robinson might actually prove to be England’s most important bowler in the 2023 Ashes. We all talk about Mark Wood’s pace and when Jofra Archer might come back, but Robinson is the one who’s quietly been really very tremendously successful these last couple of years.

The bizarre trick that Robinson has managed to pull off is taking heaps of cheap wickets while simultaneously persuading everyone that his Test career is about to go up in flames at any moment. As just one example, during the last Ashes he struggled with his fitness and was at times reduced to bowling spin and yet still somehow averaged 25.54 across four Tests. Some would argue he sidestepped some punishment by being off the field at times, but quite honestly the evidence suggests the only thing he sidestepped was taking more wickets.

That series began a fitness run that went back spasm, more back spasms, tooth infection, food poisoning, another back thing and then Covid. Then he got back playing cricket a bit more regularly and just carried on taking wickets for next to nothing. He’s played New Zealand, India, Australia, South Africa and Pakistan and he averages 21.27.

3. David Warner being either rubbish or not rubbish at cricket

Do you know that David Warner is secretly rubbish at cricket? Yes, he is. Absolutely true.

At the same time he does always carry that latent threat of being not at all rubbish at cricket. It probably won’t happen, but it would be hugely awful if it did.

4. James Anderson’s opening spell

One day this ends, you know. One day James Anderson decides he doesn’t want to sling it down in a bobble hat in the Old Trafford nets in front of basically no-one any more. And as soon as he thinks that, he’ll pack it all in. Every last bit of it.

Where will that leave us? We’ll tell you where it’ll leave us. It’ll leave us with the long forgotten concept of England opening bowlers wasting the new ball.

It’s amazing to think that younger readers may not even know about wasting the new ball; may not even comprehend that ‘wasting the new ball’ is actually normality. Since the dawn of Test cricket, England opening bowlers have bowled too short or too wide or too short and wide. Some have spiced things up with a bit of legside filth, but short, wide, or short-and-wide are basically the options.

We don’t know how good we have had it these last however many years. He may have wasted the new ball in his youth, but our trust in Jimmy Anderson is complete and justified these days. No ball is truly wasted. Even the wide ones are an exercise in gathering information.

Not only that, but you know that if there is swing available, Anderson will find it. And you also know that if he finds swing, he will use it correctly and to the full. And when there isn’t swing, you can be sure that he will land his wobble ball on the spot. When it comes to bowling in England, Jimmy is the benchmark. That means you don’t ever need to mope about what someone else might have done had they been given the opportunity instead.

James Anderson has been so brilliant for so long that what he does now seems unremarkable. This is why we all need to redouble our efforts to appreciate what he does while we still can.

5. James Anderson losing his rag at something

The other great thing about Jimmy is that he is a quite majestically irritable cricketer. Even after all these years he still really, really, really gives a shit.

6. Travis Head’s head

Averages 47. Gives it a biff. Looks like he’s about to go and smoke some ribs on the grill out back after a long shift pumping gas at the truck stop.

7. England’s openers

Ben Duckett’s had three good months, which makes him just about the most successful England opener since Alastair Cook first began auditioning for Andrew Strauss’s successor all the way back in 2012. Three good months does not a Test batter make however. We’d probably be talking about Duckett’s prospects an awful lot more if his weaknesses weren’t massively overshadowed by those of his opening partner, the Wobbleatron 9000.

Unlike many, we aren’t enraged by Zak Crawley’s continued presence in the England Test team. We aren’t delighted either. We’re just sort of ignorantly and excitedly watching it unfold in front of us, like that time we went to see Event Horizon in the cinema, entirely unaware it was a horror film. What’s happening? Where’s this going? What’s up with his eyes?

8. “Doctored pitches”

Check the series previews. Have England cheated yet? There is literally nothing in cricket funnier and more baffling than the very specific Australian notion of a “normal” pitch and the unshakeable belief that anything that remotely deviates from that must by definition have been tampered with somehow.

Australians will moan about Indian pitches favouring the spinners, but it’s funnier still when they object to English pitches because they’re essentially outraged at being asked to play sport on grass.

9. Ben Stokes’ bowling

Anyone who’s seen The Prestige will know that some tricks are performed at a cost. It feels like every time Ben Stokes bowls an over, another chunk of his cricket career dies.

Stokes is not averse to sacrifice and the Ashes will obviously be a period when he’s willing to erode his body in pursuit of wickets. At the same time he’ll want to get out of bowling whenever possible.

What’s interesting is that this is common knowledge. Both teams know the less bowling Stokes is obliged to do, the more comfortable England will feel continuing to play him as an all-rounder. It’s a bit of a paradox really: the less he’s called on to bowl, the more viable a bowler he remains.

Stokes’ aim, therefore, is to keep overs in the bank. Australia’s goal is for him to fritter them away before the series is out – that way they’ll only have his batting and his captaincy to deal with and England may struggle to balance their side.

Conversely, England’s other all-rounder, Moeen Ali, will want to get through some overs so that he can recover some rhythm after restricting himself to limited overs cricket in recent years.

Australia won’t want Moeen bowling and they will want Stokes bowling. You can see how this might play out.

10. Michael Neser

If you clicked through to the 2005 Ashes article earlier, you’ll know that the defining feature of that series was how Australia turned up quite reasonably assuming that they could demolish England however they chose, having done so in every series throughout the whole of the 1990s and beyond.

Those Aussie sides were able to transcend conditions, but that incredible run of Ashes success began in rather different fashion, in large part thanks to an accurate swing bowler who really made the most of being in the opposite hemisphere.

Terry Alderman took 41 wickets in the 1989 Ashes. There were six Tests, but still… 41 wickets! This wasn’t even his best effort. He’d taken 42 in the 1981 series.

If you’re touring England and you don’t have Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, you could do worse than turn to a bowler who can swing it like Terry Alderman. Based on his record in county cricket and the big booming arcs that brought him a hat trick against Yorkshire a few weeks back, Michael Neser could be such a man.

Failing that, more recent history suggests that Scott Boland landing it on just one corner of a postage stamp might be the way to go.

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Happy Ashes everyone, unless you’re Australian!

Ollie Robinson doesn’t do his pointing upper-cut celebration every time he takes a wicket, but he does it often enough that it certainly feels like he does.

Plenty of bowlers have had signature celebrations over the years – little sequences of actions they reflexively do in response to each dismissal. A lot of the time it feels like the same piece of footage played again and again, but the better ones vary within a recognisable framework. Dale Steyn’s chainsaw-starting/mole-punching move had huge emotional range, for example. One day he’d do it furiously; the next day he’d do it so furiously you’d worry his boiling blood was going to burst through his skin.

Ollie Robinson’s move is sneakily adaptable. You tend to think he always does it the same, but he doesn’t.

The basic shape of it is he jumps side-on and then delivers an upper-cut with index finger extended. When he arrived on the Test scene back when there were no crowds, it was immediately obvious that this swinging point was also punctuated by a loud, percussive “woo!”

It’s honestly not much different to his bowling action, only underarm.

But while those are the nuts and bolts of it, it seems there’s plenty of scope to mix things up a bit.

Sometimes it’s a relaxed point that calmly expresses relief. Sometimes it’s almost apologetic with the upper-cut delivered right near the torso so you’d have to be viewing from the right angle to even know it had happened.

Other times it’s full-blooded.

It can be hard to gauge eyelines on TV coverage, but it often seems to be preceded by a good eyeballing of the dismissed batter.

This week we learned that the eyeballing can sometimes come afterwards too, alongside a facial expression that seems to be equal parts Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Michael Ironside in Scanners and Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

There aren’t too many areas of life where you’d feel in any way comfortable being on the receiving end of that.

Memorable stuff. However Mohammad Nabi’s celebration v Pakistan in the 2019 World Cup remains our all-time favourite wicket celebration.

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That feels the most likely outcome here. You pick Ollie Robinson and generally something goes wrong with him. This time around our money’s on – ooh, let’s see – auto-brewery syndrome.

To whisk through Robinson’s last few months once again, it’s gone back spasm, back spasm, tooth infection, food poisoning, back thing, covid.

The man he’s replacing, Matt Potts, has, in contrast, been a picture of health. He’s also bowled well enough. The issue, if there is one, is that Potts doesn’t really offer anything different to England’s other bowlers.

In fact the more Potts has played, the more we’ve thought about that baffling comment of Rob Key’s at the start of summer that he offered a “point of difference” in England’s attack. How exactly? By being quite a lot younger?

In the last Test Potts was England’s smallest and slowest seam bowler. We suppose that’s different, but we’re sure they could find smaller and slower seamers if they made a bit of effort.

Robinson will also be England’s slowest seamer, but at 1.96m he won’t be the smallest. Crucially, he makes use of that height, unlike the similarly-sized Stuart Broad. He also averages 21.28 in nine Test matches, despite being so decrepit that he has at times resorted to bowling off spin.

Ollie Robinson probably improves England’s bowling, a facet of the game that is, quite honestly, the least of their worries.

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Great news, England fans. Ollie Robinson’s come up with a far more efficient way of getting through his very many injuries and illnesses.

To recap Ollie Robinson’s recent fitness record: a back spasm in Hobart; three missed Tests in the West Indies for much the same reason; a tooth infection at the start of the county season; then food poisoning; then more back problems; and now Covid-19.

There’s progress here though because Robinson had actually already been ruled out of the Griffins’ match against New Zealanders with the back thing when he tested positive for coronavirus. So there’s an efficiency here. Robinson has hit upon the ingenious idea of scheduling his ailments concurrently rather than sequentially.

This is great news for England because it raises the possibility that Robinson could get through lupus, a broken finger, chronic debilitating sinusitis, a ruptured pancreas and monkey pox before this winter’s tours rather than being out of action until 2024 as everyone assumes he will be.

Ollie Robinson.

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We’re pretty sure we know how this Test will be remembered.

The England team for the first Test averaged less than 273, so it didn’t seem unreasonable that they gave up trying to chase that on the final day against a really very good and balanced bowling attack.

Others disagree, but it seemed a highly sensible draw to us. Rain ruined the game, not England.

It will go down as a paradoxically memorable ‘forgettable draw’ though. Not just for the return of fans after a year of Covid emptiness, but for two striking debuts. Perhaps James Bracey will make his duck memorable with hindsight, but in the immediate aftermath, the performances of Devon Conway and Ollie Robinson feel a little higher profile.

Devon Conway

New Zealand debuts are always weird because fans elsewhere in the world have grown reluctant to pay too much attention. It’s not disregard for the country as a cricketing nation that gives rise to this, so much as the fact that they generally only play two-Test series.

The odds of a top order New Zealand batsman becoming a significant presence for a cricket supporter from another country are slim. They might be rubbish. They might be no more than okay. They might be really good but pull a hammy at the start of a tour of your country and miss the entire series. They might be part of a New Zealand team so dominant (or rain-affected) that they only actually get to bat twice.

All of this is compounded by a level of media interest that is informed by exactly these things.

The upshot is that even after 57 Tests, someone like Tom Latham is still not exactly a household name, even in the kinds of households that talk about cricket a fair bit.

Devon Conway neatly bypassed all this with a sneaky ruse. “If I score 200 in my very first knock when pretty much all of my team-mates fail then people will have to notice me,” he reasoned.

So this is what he did.

When they describe the innings in years to come, they’ll probably say that he reached 200 with a six because that’s a quick and easy thing to say.

But the shot to reach 100 was the striking one. You get one angling down leg when you’re on 98 and it’s crying out for a nudge or a nurdle. Conway figured he’d spin-ping it in the air to the square leg boundary while standing on one leg.

Ollie Robinson

The man who bowled that delivery to Conway was England’s Ollie Robinson who would then bowl him in the second innings. Robinson took 7-101 in the match and New Zealand’s declaration batting did not contribute to that enormously.

It was a performance good enough to encourage selectors to flirt with switching from pencil to pen for writing his name in the future. Except he is now suspended.

This is a complicated one and some elements feel a bit messy and disingenuous.

England and New Zealand had joined in a rather hollow, choreographed ‘moment of unity’ ahead of day one, during which the England team stood wearing T-shirts denouncing discrimination in a bid to express that ‘cricket is a game for everyone’. (Look, it’s a nice and correct sentiment and we know that you’re trying, but the 100% white Test team who were wearing those T-shirts did kinda imply that you could maybe, possibly be doing a tiny bit more in a practical sense.)

Contrasting with this markedly, close of play found Robinson explaining how he was, “embarrassed by the racist and sexist tweets that I posted over eight years ago, which have today become public.”

The tweets are really not nice, but to our eyes they’re not shot-through with hatred and vitriol. They read more like the dumb ‘humour’ of an 18-year-old who’s becoming an adult while communicating almost exclusively with 18-year-olds with equally minimal exposure to the wider world.

We’re pretty confident Robinson will have grown to become rather less of a tit and may even feel that he should not be fully accountable for the excruciating actions of the 18-year-old version of himself. You are responsible though. It’s up to everyone else whether to qualify the opprobrium.

The ECB has not yet qualified it much at all – but it’s worth thinking about why. They sent him out to say sorry in his first England TV interview – which is a tough thing to have to do – and he’s now been indefinitely suspended pending a disciplinary investigation.

This seems a bit grandiose and coming-down-hard-on-this-kind-of-thing at first glance, but this is largely just a reflection of how we view suspensions. He’s not banned. It’s not punishment. They’re trying to work out whether that’s necessary.

Because the ECB definitely need to confirm that Robinson is definitely not racist and sexist. It’s one thing to have historic tweets brought up, but if you slap him on the wrist and then during the next Test everyone finds out that he spends his spare time raiding hotels angrily looking for asylum seekers, they’d cop a fair bit of criticism.

But at the same time we have this weird situation where Robinson’s captain is talking about giving him, “an opportunity to learn and understand he has to do better,” when he’s almost 50% older and has almost certainly already done that.

Proportionality is probably something that will only really materialise once we’re out of the murky waters of doubt.

Anyway. As we said. A memorable debut.

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Test cricket is back. Even if it’s a last minute two-Test series that even the boards who arranged it seem a bit nonplussed about, Test cricket is a wonderful and important thing – and never more so than to those who are making their debuts.

The general astonishment that England have managed to get so far down their long list of wicketkeepers that James Bracey is actually going to play a game for them diminishes the significance of his debut a touch. We’re interested to see what nickname he earns (the smart money’s on ‘Brace’) but the real point of interest in this New Zealand series is surely Ollie Robinson.

Robinson’s story probably already qualifies as ‘frequently repeated’. He is from a cricket family. His dad played for England over-50s, his mum has sufficient expertise to be nicknamed Richie Benaud and his mum’s husband is Paul Farbrace, who you no doubt recall from the putting together of a World Cup winning England team and also various post-play interviews after England Test batting collapses.

Because of Farbrace (and also because he was good at cricket), Robinson wound up at Yorkshire as a teenager. After much overnight driving to Kent to see his friends, he got sacked. Then he went out a lot for a few months. Then he got bored. Then he hired out a leisure centre and practised with his dad. Then he became the best tall seam bowler in county cricket.

We’ve kind of whistled through a bit of that being as he’s 27 now. But that’s the gist. Like Haseeb Hameed, he’s bounced back.

Robinson is an exciting prospect for an England fan for several reasons. Firstly, and most obviously, there is his first-class record, which is nuts: 279 wickets at 21.04 – and that average still seems to be coming down.

Then there is how he goes about taking those wickets. Robinson is famously not averse to revision. Jason Gillespie, his former Sussex coach – and a man who knows plenty about the taking of wickets – calls him, “comfortably the most researched fast bowler I have come across.”

He’s also 6ft 5in. That’s not freakish for a quick bowler, but it definitely puts him in ‘tall bowler’ territory and that’s a type of bowler teams generally want. (New Zealand will have the even-more-sizeable Kyle Jamieson in their team.)

England are freely admitting to Ashes monomania already, so they’ll see Robinson’s as a highly significant debut because increasing the height of the bowling attack is always a priority ahead of any tour Down Under.

In 2010-11, they took a wicket-taking Steven Finn and an in-form Chris Tremlett and both were fantastic. In 2013-14, they took a Steven Finn they no longer really trusted, a post back surgery Chris Tremlett and Boyd Rankin.

The first warm-up match that tour was billed as a bowl-off between the three. In the first innings they managed 0-88 (Tremlett), 1-92 (Rankin) and 1-123 (Finn) and they all went at over four an over (Finn went at over five).

Tremlett took 1-35 in the second innings and 0-23 in the next tour match and this was enough to earn him selection for the first Test.

Now a great many things didn’t go brilliantly in that series but the absence of a viable tall seamer did contribute to Australia setting England over 500 to win in each of the first three Tests. So let’s see how Robinson fares. There’s also the small matter of all these other Test matches to try and win in the meantime.