England 367-4 (50 overs). Hyderabad XI 114 (35.3 overs). England won by 253 runs
It’s not often that a young cricketer emerges on the scene and blows everyone away – especially when that cricketer is English. Ok, so yesterday’s match was only a warm up against a Hyderabad XI, but to score 104no off just 53 balls is a pretty special achievement in any form of the game. The ginger tornado has landed.
Maybe I’m just getting on a bit, but this new generation of England players look like schoolboys. We’re used to seeing Pakistani or West Indian players emerge in a blaze of glory and claim they’re just fifteen or something (even though they’re six foot two, have a full on beard, and crow’s feet), but with Jonny Bairstow it’s actually the opposite. He’s 22 years old, but looks like he’s about 15.
You could say that Bairstow is the antithesis of Chris Lewis, who claimed to be 22 when he made his England debut in 1990, but was over the hill by the middle of the decade. Some of his detractors claimed he was actually in his mid-thirties at this point. The walking stick, hearing aid, and impaired judgement (Lewis was arrested at Gatwick in 2008 for smuggling cocaine) were allegedly the telltale signs.
Of course, lying about one’s age isn’t as rare as you might think. At the beginning of the summer, Adrian Shankar pretended he was 26 to earn a contract from Worcestershire. When he turned out to be 29, the police investigated his conduct and he was sacked.
Meanwhile, not a lot of people know that Basil D’Oliveira was somewhat economical with the truth when he was first selected to play for England. He told people he was thirty, rather than thirty-five, because he feared the selectors would consider him too old to start an international career. See Not Cricket: The Basil D’Oliveira Conspiracy to learn more.
Anyway, I digress. It’s bloody refreshing to see so many (genuine!) youngsters impressing for England. Bairstow wasn’t the only star of the show. Durham’s Scott Borthwick took a brilliant 5-31 with his leg-spinners, and Surrey’s Stuart Meaker dismissed three batsmen in the same over and finished with figures of 3-30. Not a bad effort at all.
The team England fielded yesterday must have been one of the youngest on record. With the exception of Kevin Pietersen and Jonathan Trott, everyone was below thirty years of age. Cook, Bresnan and Patel are 26, Kieswetter is 23, Bairstow, Woakes and Meaker are 22, whilst Butler and Borthwick are just 12. Sorry, I mean 21.
The future’s bright, the future’s orange. Well, ginger to be precise.
James Morgan
You know, strangely, apropos of nothing really, I used to play against Chris Lewis’s brother when we were kids. We’re about the same age. When we were about fourteen or fifteen he was just an average kid, and I slapped his bowling all over the park. He turned up a year later and he was about 6’5″ and bowled at about 85 miles an hour, mostly past my nose. Maybe Chris was smuggling HGH as well….