SaqWelcome to Hull. The question posed to England’s new Test debutant before the end of the series was: are you ready for this? Are you ready for the step up? Can you, Josh Hull, handle white heat in its purest form? Brace yourself. We’re flying towards the sun here.
In case it helped, what the two teams served either side of lunch on day two was something closer to a beer match, or one of those YouTube compilations that explain why people in Australia think the County Championship is basically something along the lines of cheese rolling or hay bale throwing.
The ball runs and the misplays followed one after the other. A slight counter play meant that Chris Woakes bowled four balls with an off-spin effect that cannot, I repeat, go unnoticed. Earlier, England had lost six for 35 playing like drunken lords at a picnic.
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Midway through the game, Hull were pushed back by Asitha Fernando, who is a foot shorter than him, who sent something in that landed near hip height, a rare example of a ball becoming small on you.
Watching this game, you almost expected to see a wicketkeeper fall over while invisible hands flashed laughing and crying emojis in the sky, or for Alastair Cook to appear and start doing bowler impersonations. Josh Hull? Welcome to the kill zone.
Fortunately, Hull played his part well, coming on at 2.28pm with Sri Lanka 70-2, and showing courage, heart and a great deal of skill. It was, in its own way, an extraordinary moment. Has a fast bowler ever come into an England team with so little to back him up?
One could – and some will – call Hull’s selection the most damning statement of thanks but no thanks ever made to county cricket. To pick him is literally to say there is nothing to be gained from success in this area. Instead, we will pick a 20-year-old with 16 wickets at 62 because we like the way he looks. How are you supposed to feel about that if you are a 27-year-old with hard-earned county numbers, winning games every week, running through pain, dreaming of a bigger stage?
On the other hand, elite sport is supposed to be ruthless, a hierarchy not just of numbers but of possibilities. And Hull is a choice of ingredients. It’s a choice based on optics. It’s about looks, height, levers.
Bowlers can be built and shaped if the raw clay is there. Hull is 7ft 1in and has rugby player lines. The outline is good. Even when he bowled a mid-day pass, with his crocodile hands, there was a sense of “yeah, well, that’s long, size 10 shoes, what’s the weather like up there”. English cricket loves big objects. The feeling is that we’ll do well if we have big objects. Big objects are the weapons we’ll fight with and if we don’t quite beat Australia, then at least we’ll make Australia respect us (for our big objects).
And of course, when England talk about Hull as an “investment” and a two-year project, they mean they need a big bowler for the Ashes. In that vein, they also want a left-hander, because the numbers and the sentiment tell us that left-handers in that clear white southern sun, the bouncing pitches, the massive blue-green outfields, well, it all seems to work.
Left-handed bowlers have taken 78 wickets for 18 in the last three Ashes series in Australia, or rather the two significant Mitches have. If that sounds simplistic (Mitch Johnson in 2014 was a generational terror, left-arm or otherwise; Josh Hull has bowled just over 1,200 balls in first-class cricket), then the sport is often simple. Simplicity works. And also, he can bowl. You could feel the necks craning when Hull took the ball after lunch. His run-up is unusually long. He seems to appear on the distant horizon like an iron man emerging from the sea. He runs with his hands low and his wrist bent, not so much the perfectly balanced 2.00m sprint of Mitch Starc as a purposeful run, like a siege tower being set up.
His first ball was bowled at 82 mph and hit hard to cover. His second was back out of hand. His fourth was hit at mid-off for four. But it looked good. There’s a certain slingshot in it. The front knee is braced. The bowling shoes were pleasantly grey and unpretentious. It’s all very simple, feet straight, ball thrown sideways, looking behind the arm. Rod. Titch. Big Bird. Hullsy. Steel braced. It looked good.
The fastest ball of the period from Hull was 85mph. There was movement to the right-hander but nothing far. And two and a half overs into the big moment came, a ball bowled at 82mph, seam scrambled, perhaps an unintentional cutter. Pathum Nissanka was drawn into a drive which he almost directed to extra cover, where Woakes took a fine diving catch.
The England players raced towards Hull like penguins swarming around a lighthouse.
There will surely be harder days than this one. But none, perhaps, where everything seems so open and so fun.
Saq
