Tireless Robinson shakes things up for England with fitness and accuracy | Ashes 2023

Deep down, beneath the layers of mooching sang-froid, Ollie Robinson might have bridled a bit at Matthew Hayden’s description of his bowling as “124kph nude nuts”. He might have felt the pressure of becoming an improbable pantomime villain, cricketing Dracula, the embodiment of some discing quality of potty-mouthed medium-fast aggression that seems to have united Australia across the generations in its ire towards a slightly blank-looking 29-year-old from Margate.

It seems unlikely. Robinson has always come across as reliably impervious. Has any English sportsperson embodied quite so expertly the concept of “bloke”? Here is a cricketer who appears at all times to have emerged on to the Test match outfield from a mist of scotch eggs and energy-drink cans, who seems even in the middle of a nine-over spell of tireless short-pitched nihilism-cricket to be bowling in a pair of sliders and an old Metallica T-shirt. Here he comes, the Dude, dressing gown tails flapping, still taking his Test wickets, still demonstrating that doggedly insistent mastery of swing and nip and seam and angles at the crease.

England will most likely end up losing this Test match given the initially parlous state of their fourth-innings chase, and barring some act of god-like Stokes-ball defiance. Cricket is, as ever, outcome-based. Defeat will raise the temptation to draw unflattering comparisons between England’s short-pitch tactics with the ball on day four, the failure to take the new ball, which was thrown into relief by some startlingly fine swing- and seam-ball bowling from Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins when Australia bowled.

But then, Australia have a pair of hyper-fit 90-mph-plus 6ft5in fast bowlers at their disposal. Harry Brook isn’t Steve Smith. And Australia are, on the basic metrics, a stronger cricket team in such key areas as bowling, batting and wicket-keeping, the reality against which all analysis of the Bazball-verse must be set.

With this in mind, let us spare a thought for those three and half hours of cricket after midday, during which England did manage to conjure up something extraordinary, taking eight Australian wickets for 158 using tactics that have surely never been seen from any England team on any English ground.

There are many ways to go 2-0 down in the Ashes, none of them good, none of them free from backlash, legacy-shredding or a sense of some basic unravelling. But here England did bowl with genuine grit and skill, as Robinson produced a dogged, sui generis, agreeably strange spell of medium-fast short-pitched bowing, not so much chin-music as a chin-dirge, chin-balladry, unceasing chin-reggae.

Whatever the outcome here, it was a genuinely fascinating period of Test cricket. That first hour after lunch on a gruelling high summer English afternoon, when the world just seemed to fall asleep under the weight of the air as England’s search for new forms and new shapes landed on the idea of banging the ball endlessly into the middle of the pitch. And for a while England just killed the game, killed time, killed cricket, stuck a needle in its arm and watched its eyes loll back into a swoon.

What was this thing? The colours and shapes looked the same. But someone seemed to have done something to the role of the stumps as for two and a half hours England bowled 97% of their deliveries in their own half of the pitch, digging for victory in the London clay.

We asked for smart, adaptive Bazball. Well, this was something else: death-ball, desert-cricket, a session of parched and airless old-ball bowling.

It worked, too, as England took seven wickets with the short ball (no surprise: they only bowled the short ball). In the Bazball evangelist style they didn’t just bowl short, but bowled shorter than any team has bowled since ball tracking began. Bazball: always turning it up to 11. Because 11 is, as we all know, one more than 10.

It was after lunch that the Robinson hour really struck. Sixteen of his opening 18 deliveries after the interval were bouncers. Loopy sub-80mph bouncers, but still bouncers. Cameron Green dipped his knees and ducked nine of his first 11 balls which is, if nothing else, a decent workout.

It would perhaps have been a slight on the baggy green to call this “intimidatory bowling”. But with Stokes doing the same at the other end, Australia just couldn’t score. And an hour into this Robinson struck, luring Green into his first and final attempt to play the hook shot, and seeing Ben Duckett take the catch.

The first ball of his next over, another short ball, was fended by Carey to short leg. The wickets came with the 28th and 29th bouncers of Robinson’s spell, by the end of which he had the remarkable figures, off the reel, of nine overs, six maidens, two for seven – a fine feat of accuracy and also, significantly, fitness.

Robinson has been the best of England’s seamers in this series, with 10 wickets now at 25; with the sense, somehow, of always pulling his figures out of the fire, although in fairness he gets a very high ratio of top-order batters out.

England may well be sliding to the edge of this series, driven into ever-more extreme versions of how to rescue it from here. But Robinson, under huge pressure, deserves a little credit for that spell of death-ball after lunch, another shade to this endlessly surprising Test series.