The last Test, then, and the inevitable sense that we’re getting to the end. There aren’t too many pages left to turn in this story. It’s always like this at the Oval, of course; it’s where series finish and another summer of Test cricket ends. This year it’s two months earlier than usual, so the schedule is out of kilter with the seasons. But the weather was autumnal, and so was the cricket. It was a cold, cloudy and floodlit day’s play between two tired teams, all loose shots and sloppy drops, jaffas and long hops, as if everyone was getting by on whatever dregs of adrenaline they had left after playing all these Tests in the past few weeks.
As always, there are questions in the air about whether the Test summer is going to take one or two of the players’ careers on its way with it. These are two old teams – 15 of the 22 players are over 30 – and as long as they go on these days, it seems likely that a lot of them will have quit Test cricket by the time Australia play here again in 2027. Moeen Ali, called out of retirement for this one last job, is almost certainly done. Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad both seem to want to go on a little longer yet, but it does feel like a decision they’re going to have to make all over again every time they wake up in the morning.
You wonder, too, whether Jonny Bairstow’s body is going to let him go on keeping wicket for long. And then there is Ben Stokes, who was reduced to delivering a long spell of off-spin in training the day before the game because he still isn’t able to come in off his long run. He is considering whether or not to have another round of knee surgery so he can get back to being an all-rounder. This generation of players seems to have reached the point that comes in the end to every group of male friends, when the large part of their WhatsApp chat involves taking turns to relate their various ailments.
Stokes seemed to touch on some of this in his remarks after the draw at Old Trafford, which were unusually reflective. “I want this team to be a legacy team. And regardless of what happens over the next period, this 18 months will go down in history as one of the most exciting and proactive teams to go out there and represent England.” His team play in such a hurry it’s always felt a little as if they know they are running out of time. Their determination to make the most of the present moment carries with it an implicit acknowledgment that they’re too far along in their careers to be entirely sure what the next one holds.
Which is why it was so interesting to watch Harry Brook go about his batting. If Stokes’s team has a legacy, it will be in the influence it has on him and his contemporaries Zak Crawley and Ollie Pope. The three of them are going to shape England’s Test cricket for the next decade.
Brook is one of those rare players who has the talent and technical expertise to play this game pretty much any which way he chooses. An alumni of the Yorkshire school of batting, it’s easy to imagine that in another era, and one not so very long ago, his batting would probably had a very different, altogether more diligent, character.
But Brook has only ever played under Stokes, and so he looks like a natural-born Bazballer. In the 10 months since he made his debut against South Africa last September, Brook has run up some extraordinary records: his 85 here was his 11th score of 50 or more in 12 Tests, and takes his overall tally to 1,174 runs at an average of 65 and a strike rate of 92 per hundred balls, which is quicker than Shahid Afridi, and Virender Sehwag, and Adam Gilchrist. Quicker, in fact, than any of the 579 other batsmen in the history of Test cricket who made at least 1,000 runs. At this point, Brook is better than anyone faster, and faster than anyone better.
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His innings here wasn’t as cool as the 75 he made at Headingley, or as composed as his 61 at Old Trafford, but was more audacious than either. He came in to join Moeen at 12.15pm, when England were 73 for three. By the time they went off for lunch 45 minutes later, England were 131 for three. The two of them had put on 58 runs together, and Brook made 48 of them. Moeen looked slow and sensible in comparison, the silent partner in the business of rebuilding the innings, while Brook blazed away at the other end. He took 10 off two balls from Mitchell Marsh, with a drive for four followed by a pick-up six, and 14 off three from Mitchell Starc, with a drive, a cut and a pull for six to finish.
He made it all look like the most natural thing in the world, as if it wouldn’t have occurred to him to play any other way. Australia should get used to Brook. He is the future of English cricket, playing, for the moment, right alongside its past.
