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Daily Mail
9 hours ago
- Sport
- Daily Mail
Haunted Harry Brook treads the fine line between greatness and sporting tragedy, writes OLIVER HOLT
In the corridors of the stand above the Kirkstall Lane End, Stuart Broad managed a wry smile when I told him I was trying to find Michael Atherton to ask him about the time he was run out on 99 against Australia at Lord's in 1993. 'I'm sure he'd be delighted to be reminded about that again,' Broad said. Atherton is a reluctant expert on the subject. He was also dismissed for 99, caught and bowled by South Africa 's Brian McMillan, here at Headingley, in August 1994. Only he and MJK Smith, among England players, have achieved the unwanted distinction of twice being dismissed one run short in a Test. I tracked Atherton down in the end. He was sitting on the back row of the press box, welcoming Harry Brook in print to the list of unfortunates who have fallen one short of cricket's magic number. Atherton was phlegmatic. 'You are consumed by the one you missed rather than the 99 you scored,' he said. It will be like that for Brook, whose batting had lit up a grey, blustery third day of this first Test. His crestfallen, horrified visage when he pulled a short ball from Prasidh Krishna straight into the clutches of Shardul Thakur at deep backward square, dismissed one run adrift of his century, testified to that. Suddenly, it did not seem to matter that he had just played an innings of savage beauty, that he had smoked the India attack all around the ground, clubbing its bowlers into submission with 11 fours and two towering sixes, dragging England back into this match. All that mattered was that he was out for 99. His dismissal made him the 81st player dismissed for 99 in Test cricket, the 14th Englishman and the first anywhere for three years since Travis Head fell for Australia against the West Indies in Perth. Jonny Bairstow had been the last England player to meet that fate, trapped lbw against South Africa at Old Trafford in August 2017. Brook's removal, by such an obvious, familiar old bowling trap, was part of a pattern of England players giving away their wickets unwisely here, and was made worse by the fact Headingley is his home ground. Maybe the chance to score a Test century here in front of fans that adore him will come again to a player as prodigiously talented as he is. Maybe it won't. A century is such a random target in so many ways. And yet the difference between three figures and two bestows greatness on an innings and falling one short confers sporting tragedy upon it, as if it would have been better to have fallen far earlier than to have just missed the mark. But cricket loves numbers. It obsesses about them. Not just in its statistics and its averages but in its staging posts. They say 111, a Nelson, is unlucky because it resembles three stumps. The Australians regard 87 with unease because it is 13 short of a century. Zero is never good, either. Ninety-nine, though, is cricket's number of the beast. Perhaps it is also because it gives an opponent so much succour. It is almost better than getting someone out cheaply. Getting a batsman out for 99 is a cause for unrestrained glee in the ranks of the opposition. It is as if there is great sustenance to be had from feasting on a player's crushing disappointment. It is as if a humiliation has been visited upon the batsman, even though he has just spent several hours getting the better of a group of bowlers. It is wrapped up in the idea that when the prize that is coveted so much was there for the taking, the batsman lost his nerve and showed weakness. Some find dark humour in the unfortunate's fate. When Shane Warne slog-swept a ball from Daniel Vettori into the air and into the hands of Mark Richardson at the WACA in 2001, Richardson bowed theatrically to the crowd and Ricky Ponting admitted some of the Aussies were 'laughing into their lockers'. Warne never did score a Test century. It is too early for Brook to see the light side of what happened at Headingley, though he may reflect that things could have been worse. It seemed briefly on Saturday that he had been caught in the deep for a duck before it became clear the umpire had ruled Jasprit Bumrah's delivery a no-ball. He rode his luck on Sunday, too. He was dropped twice. His aberration on 99 levelled things up, though Brook may not have thought of it that way as India's players rushed to congratulate Krishna and Thakur sprinted in from the boundary to join the celebrations. Brook's face was a mask of incredulity at the shot he had just played. He had watched the ball, first with trepidation and then despair, as he tracked its flight. When the catch was taken, he looked as if he could barely walk back to the pavilion. It is probably cricket's longest walk, the walk of the man dismissed for 99, and Brook's seemed to last an eternity. The word 'trudge' was made for Brook's walk. He looked like the embarrassed duck that Australian broadcasters flash up when a batsman is dismissed without scoring. At one point he even dropped his bat as he walked, as if he were losing his senses. Rishabh Pant, India's wicketkeeper, gave him a consoling pat as he ran to join his team-mates but Brook did not notice. Brydon Carse, the next batsman in, crossed with him near the boundary rope and half put an arm round him in consolation. Brook did not notice that, either. He is in the club now, like it or not. Clem Hill, the first man to be dismissed for 99 in a Test against England at Melbourne in 1902, scored 98 and 97 in the next Test at Adelaide. Good for the average, good for the team, but poison to that pursuit of three figures that consumes Brook and every batsman who has followed Hill to the crease since.
Times
9 hours ago
- Sport
- Times
Tale of two games: one when Jasprit Bumrah was bowling, one when he wasn't
Crowds typically turn up to watch batsmen rather than bowlers, but they definitely make an exception for Jasprit Bumrah. When he has ball in hand, people stop to savour the sight of something extraordinary — just as they once did when Shane Warne was conjuring his magic, and as they still do when Mark Wood sprints in to hit speeds few bowlers have matched. Such entertainers turn cricket into pure theatre. Every ball is an event. Bumrah bowled seven spells during England's first innings, all down the hill from the Kirkstall Lane End and every one of them containing incident. He took five wickets, had each of the top three scorers — Ollie Pope, Harry Brook and Ben Duckett — put down by slip or gully fielders at a combined cost to his side of 110 runs, and also had Brook, who went on to make 99, caught off a no ball before he had scored. The genuine boundaries that were struck off him, as opposed to those that came off the edge, were so rare as to stick in the memory, the best of them when Brook came down the track to slap him disdainfully over extra cover in the manner of Kevin Pietersen in his pomp. There were two games going on: one when Bumrah was bowling, and one when he was not. Whereas Bumrah took five for 83 at an economy rate of 3.36 runs per over, India's other three seamers between them returned figures of five for 288 at a rate of 5.43 per over. No secret which game England's batsmen preferred. Like Warne, Bumrah has a habit of exploiting the passages of play that others neglect. With Saturday's final session extended to 7.15pm because of a rain break earlier in the day, Indian thoughts naturally drifted towards the close, and a chance to regroup overnight. Not Bumrah. He returned for a two-over burst and not only removed England's most prized player, Joe Root, but during an electric final over consisting of nine balls as he pushed the limits and strove for additional pace, he induced Brook into flapping at a short ball that was caught by the diving Mohammed Siraj, only for it to transpire that Bumrah had overstepped. Furious, Bumrah unleashed one of his finest yorkers, which Brook somehow managed to dig out before finishing the day with a ferocious bouncer that lifted Brook off his feet. Every ball is an event, but every ball is also an opportunity, however late in the day. If some people had headed for the exit by this juncture on what had been a swelteringly hot day, there were still plenty in their seats who relished the drama. In its way, the bouncer to Brook was every bit as spellbinding as Bumrah exploding Ollie Pope's stumps with a yorker in Visakhapatnam last year. Bumrah's methods are not only unique but of a sort that make life very difficult for batsmen trained to look for familiar cues, which with him are frustratingly absent. He does not run up in a conventional manner, ambling in over several yards at what is little more than a brisk walk, nor deliver the ball conventionally, a lot of the work being done by a braced front leg, a snap of the wrist and a late release. Please enable cookies and other technologies to view this content. You can update your cookies preferences any time using privacy manager. Steve Harmison, who has studied the methods of many fast bowlers and was one himself, can think of few who generated the sort of pace Bumrah finds from a similarly short sprint. He would put Simon Jones in this bracket, and also Wood before he changed to a longer run-up in the winter of 2018-19. As was the case with Jones, and Wood when he was using a shorter run, Bumrah has found himself vulnerable to injury, and after recent back problems it has already been determined that he will almost certainly play a maximum of three Tests in this series. On the evidence so far, England will fancy their chances in the two matches he misses — which may be the third and fifth Tests, at Lord's and the Oval, as they come hard on the heels of the second and fourth games. Harmison fears Bumrah may be prevented from racking up the stupendous wicket hauls of others because of the demands his action makes on his body, and the fact he is a multi-format bowler. As a result, he may not be remembered in conversations about the greatest of all time. Anyone prepared to look beyond the wickets column, though, will find plenty of evidence of his brilliance. No bowler with 200 Test wickets to their name has a lower average than Bumrah's 19.33 and only Kagiso Rabada has a better strike rate than his 41.8 balls per wicket. He is getting better, too. In his past 20 Tests dating back to early 2022, he has taken 103 wickets at an average of just 15.27. Bowlers in the modern game simply do not accrue figures like that. When Bumrah bowled Josh Tongue to claim his fifth wicket, he was mobbed by team-mates who appreciated his lion-hearted efforts and outrageous skill. He was handed the ball, wrapped it up safely in his cap and jumper and walked off smiling broadly. He should have had his five-for much earlier, but he got there in the end.
