Mark Wood bowling donkey overs in dead rubber is short-sighted foolishness
Mark Wood is a national asset. Like a Holbein or an original copy of Magna Carta, he should be treasured, not carted round the country to be exhibited at every meeting of the Rotary Club.
It is debatable whether England’s fast bowling reserves or the remaining North Sea oil reserves are more precious. Jofra Archer and Josh Tongue have been ruled out of red-ball bowling for the rest of this summer, leaving Wood as the only express. Why not give him a break until a Test or two in the autumn series against Sri Lanka, instead of flogging him on an Edgbaston featherbed in a dead-rubber Test against West Indies (and sending him in as nightwatchman)?
The strength and conditioning coaches have their graphs that plot Wood’s biorhythms through the year but from the outside there would appear to be a strong case for giving him a few weeks’ break, provided he can bear to miss the Hundred; to bring Wood back for either the October series in Pakistan or the December series in New Zealand, but not both; and build towards the peak of his career when he could sway both next summer’s series against India, and that winter’s Ashes, England’s way.
England’s management are being inconsistent. Their rationale for pensioning off James Anderson was that they had to build a new pace attack for the next Ashes in Australia in 16 months’ time. Fair enough. Yet fielding a pace attack of Chris Woakes aged 35, and Wood, 34, and Stokes, 33, leaves space only for Gus Atkinson to grow. Bring back Anderson as a spinner instead of Shoaib Bashir and it could be called a mature attack.
What Wood was required to do on the Edgbaston featherbed, or flattie, was not simply to do hard yards but the hardest of all yards on a cricket field. When Jason Holder and Joshua Da Silva stood up – a couple of prefects in the school playground after the fourth-formers had been sent inside – the ball was ageing and softening, the clouds high and the pitch bare.
Instead of finding out what Dillon Pennington is made of – at best a heavy-duty seamer who can work up a sweat in long spells – or whether Matthew Potts has gained a yard, Wood was given the job of bowling bouncers from round the wicket to break the West Indies’ sixth-wicket century partnership. A Bodyline field left Wood without the option of pitching the occasional, less back-breaking, ball up.
At the end of this spell, suffice to say, Wood could barely haul himself up the pavilion steps. It was only five days ago that he was breaking Kevin Sinclair’s hand. At least, after returning to the field, he did not have to bowl again. Atkinson did the mopping up; Wood had to be content with the wickets of Kraigg Brathwaite, gloving down the legside, and Kirk McKenzie, overwhelmed by a ball that was pitched up and swung in. Wood, among nature’s gentlemen, would not have given the wretched McKenzie the Fred Trueman send-off: “it was wasted on thee.”
Working Wood so hard this year – he had to do the T20 World Cup as well as three Tests in India – is to risk him doing less next year, which with luck and good management would be the climax of his red-ball career.
England supporters must hope that Archer is no analogue. After he had scared the daylights out of Australia in the 2019 Ashes, he was sentenced not only to 42 overs in one innings of the Mount Maunganui Test, and 40 more overs in the Hamilton Test, but also to bowling in the nets before the start each day, like an old-time medium-pacer, instead of turning over his arm a few times before the start, as had been his wont.
From that day to this, Archer has played seven Tests and taken 18 wickets. If Archer has been Barbados’s once-in-a-generation bowler, and Wood has been England’s, it has been a lamentable waste that the number of Test matches they have played together is the grand total of one.