A Clear Blue Sky

by Jonny Bairstow

  We were off and running.

  The Test was acknowledged as a modern classic, as though drawn from the same vintage as 2005. What happened to me was this: Ian Bell and I racked up a half-century stand. I went on to make 37 in an hour and a half before I drove at – and missed – a full ball from Mitchell Starc, fuming with myself for doing so. In the second innings, on 15, I fell to the left-arm spin of Ashton Agar, a name that, as someone remarked, sounded ‘like a village in rural Somerset’.

  There was barely a slow moment in the entire game, which for those who saw it became the gift that kept on giving: 14 wickets on the first day … the obscure Agar, an 18-year-old number eleven who batted like a 30-year-old number four … the last-wicket partnership he shared with Phil Hughes in the first innings, bringing him 98 and Australia 163 improbable runs … a typically elegant Ian Bell century in response to it … and then a fluctuating fifth day of monumental tension.

  We were convincingly on top. So much so that it seemed the only thing even the most obsessive punter could sensibly bet on was the exact hour and minute of our win. Needing 311, the Australians were rocking and about to tilt over on 231 for nine, still a continent away from our total. In came the pace bowler James Pattinson, joining Brad Haddin. No doubt some watching at home switched off the TV and went into the garden to top up their tan, expecting the game to last a few more overs at best, unaware that Pattinson had previously made two Test fifties and come close to getting two more. We waited nonetheless for what we were sure was on the way: the nick, a mistiming born out of pressure, the momentary loss of concentration from either of them that would start our party. But then, picking off the runs, Haddin and Pattinson began to slice away at our lead one slither at a time, making the impossible suddenly look feasible for them. The runs piled up incrementally. I looked at the scoreboard, scarcely able to credit that we were straining to get them out. Australia began to close in on us, the deficit almost in single figures. I can sense the atmosphere of a match as it changes as surely as I can feel a wind that abruptly starts blowing in a different direction. I became aware of the quiet unease that had settled over Trent Bridge.

  Jimmy Anderson has bowled thousands of deliveries more accurate and accomplished than the one that came next. It wasn’t a peach at all. The ball was slightly wide, which made it slightly inviting as well. Haddin went after it. I was at backward point, close enough to hear exactly what the slips heard as he wafted loosely at it. The inside edge was no more than a scratch. The ball began to die, losing so much height as it travelled towards Matt Prior that he finally took the catch in front of his left toecap. Our shout was long and throaty, a plea as much as an appeal. Not out, said the umpire. No review is ever completed quickly nowadays; every angle from every machine is studied the way a pathologist studies a bloodstain. It felt as though half a day had dragged by before the decision of the third umpire eventually arrived. Hot Spot had found the smallest of white smudges. We’d squeaked home, the margin only 14 runs.

  You’re always being asked how you’d felt as a game or performance was in progress. It’s a natural question to put to someone, but it is a difficult one to answer coherently and with any sort of originality. You tend to stumble into platitudes, relying on words like joy or elation, fulfilment or satisfaction because immediately afterwards those are the emotions that are still coursing right through you, like a charge, and also because describing them can be as hard as describing the taste of water. I can only say – in the moment when we knew we’d won – that what I felt was something more intense than I’d ever felt on a cricket ground before. It was ecstasy, undiluted. You can see it in a series of photographs that were taken with a long lens from the Radcliffe Road end of the ground, each cropped into a landscape of most of the team. Put them together and turn each one rapidly, as if you’re thumbing the pages of an old-fashioned child’s flick book, and you’ll see us all dance and run and leap. There are seven of us in the best of these photos. At the back of the group Steve Finn, at 6 foot 7, looks as though he’s mastered the art of levitation – he seems at least four feet off the ground. Alastair Cook is seen side-on, jumping into the air and punching it simultaneously. Kevin Pietersen’s arms are aloft, like a boxer who’s got a unanimous title decision. The others – me, Joe Root and Stuart Broad – are already in pursuit of Jimmy, whose first reaction is to run off to wherever his legs will carry him; it doesn’t matter where. His head is back. He’s staring up at the sky. He’s taken another five-for. I’m closest to Jimmy, but I can’t slap him on the back or yank at his shirt to slow him down. He’s too quick for me.

  Anyone who wants to know how much the Ashes mean only has to look at this photo. All the evidence you’ll ever need is in it.

  The fight had lived up to the hype at Trent Bridge. Public interest in the series took off from there as though someone had flicked a lighted match into a box of rockets. And, on the first morning of the second Test at Lord’s, I saw a sight that I’ll never forget because of it.

  I went into the dressing-room loo, where I slid back a small window that gives you a view overlooking the Grace Gates and the road that runs along the high perimeter wall, which was built when W.G. was still in knickerbockers. For a long time I stood gazing at the scene below me. There were two rivers in London that day and one of them flowed outside Lord’s. The queue, three to four deep in places, ran from the entrance to the tall hotel that stands at the corner of St John’s Wood Road and Wellington Road. That’s a distance of almost 400 yards. The MCC membership was conspicuous, wearing blazers and hats emblazoned in that sun-bright egg-and-bacon livery or carrying bags on which the silhouette of Father Time always has his sickle slung over his right shoulder. I thought about some of them, getting up at dawn, their eyes still heavy with sleep, and then travelling mile upon mile to secure at all costs a decent seat in the pavilion.

  Again, we won the toss. Again, we batted. Again, I came in when we were in the mire – 127 for four. And again, Ian Bell was waiting for me. The Test is prominent in my scrapbook for two very contrasting reasons. The first owed everything to good fortune. The second was quirky and had nothing much to do with the cricket itself.

  I started comfortably enough, determined to build an innings that would last, while allowing Ian to do what he always did best, which was to impress everyone with a flourishing shot or two and shake up the Australians, who to me already looked worried about his form; he seemed to have carried it with him from Nottingham as easily as clothes in a suitcase. I’d made a not-bad 21 when I played around a full ball from Peter Siddle. It hit off and middle. Siddle wagged his finger in the air and the fielders gathered to hug him. I slinked away, cursing myself. I’d gone as far as a third of the way to the pavilion gate when the umpire Kumar Dharmasena shouted: ‘Wait there,’ as though he’d just found something I’d left behind at the crease and was about to ask me to go back for it. His colleague was checking the TV replay, he said.

  Only 18 months earlier, during our tour of India, I’d made a critical mistake. I’d immediately accepted I was out in Mumbai when my shot – off Pragyan Ojha – flicked the grille of Gautam Gambhir’s helmet at silly point before the catch was completed. I was unaware then that I had a Get Out of Jail Free card. The ball ought to have been declared ‘dead’ after touching the helmet. I took off my gloves and unstrapped my pads and went into the gym alone to go over my innings. I was angry with myself for the slackness of the shot. I was angrier still after Joe Root appeared, telling me that I shouldn’t have been given out. ‘We’ve seen it again on screen. You might still be in,’ he told me. Andy Flower asked the match referee to reverse the decision. He was told that, since I’d voluntarily ‘walked’, India would have to withdraw their appeal first. Their captain MS Dhoni refused, which I guess is the decision we’d have made in the same circumstances. I blamed myself. If I’d known the minutiae of the laws – as I should have done – I’d have refused to budge.

  At Lord’s my eyes had been pinned on to the bal
l. I was too busy watching Siddle’s hand to register where his front foot had landed. Also, after Trent Bridge – where the Australians had bowled 11 of them – the coach Darren Lehmann had almost made the no-ball a punishable offence for his attack. I didn’t expect a reprieve, merely confirmation of my departure, which hanging around in the crease wasn’t making easier. I stood there like a spare part, a man in the wilderness unsure of what to do or say. If you’d asked me to calculate my chances as a percentage, I’d have estimated them as ten or fifteen at best. But the all-seeing eye of the camera rescued me. The heel of Siddle’s boot was a cat’s whisker in front of the line – the margin of error so close that, before technology, no umpire would have spotted it. Even the TV cameras replayed it five times to be absolutely certain. Dharmasena beckoned me back. Siddle, his features gurning in an expression of abject misery, stomped away to his mark.

  After the injustice I’d suffered in India, I like to think a sort of cricketing karma had taken place. Ian Bell and I scored exactly 100 more runs before I was finally out for 67. Next morning, the Australians didn’t gripe about the decision to go to the third umpire, but did complain that Siddle’s millimetre misjudgement could cost them the Test, the series and the Ashes. Originally the claim came across as a bit screeching and melodramatic, but you can argue a case for it now. Our partnership bolted the middle order together – Ian finished on 109 – and we moved from a precariously dodgy position to a secure one. We gave our attack something substantial to bowl at and then we cleaned Australia up. We went on to win the Test – by a whopping 347 runs.

  And the quirky reason why the Test was memorable for me? Another photograph.

  Get picked for an Ashes Test at Lord’s and you know you’re going to meet the Queen. She arrived before the start and we lined up for inspection like the household cavalry on Horse Guards Parade. You make sure your hands and fingernails are clean. You think about what she might say to you, and also the small talk you might trade in return. You try to be casual about the experience. I was standing, hands behind my back like Prince Philip, at the end of the row between Ian, who is two inches shorter than I am, and Steve Finn, who is six inches and a bit taller than me. We looked like the gradual incline of an Alpine range. Alastair Cook, smart in his blazer, was a step and a quarter behind the Queen, introducing each of us. She held out her white-gloved hand to me, offering a ‘wonderful occasion’ and a ‘very pleased to meet you’. As she went past, her duty over, my eyes swivelled towards the ground to examine her shoes, which were quite high heeled, shiny black and with a long gold buckle. The colour matched her handbag. Someone snapped a photograph of me. In it – my head bowed and my gaze low – I look as though I am checking out her bum rather than her shoes. The camera lied, but no one would believe it – or my protests afterwards. Elizabeth I would have lopped off the head of anyone giving her a sideways glance that she hadn’t encouraged. Elizabeth II was more forgiving, politely ignoring the photo.

  At least as far as I’m aware.

  (© Reuters/Philip Brown)

  At 2–0 up we had enough canniness in the team to put down any Australian attempt to fight back. At Old Trafford, where we were well on top, we had to settle for a draw, the pouring rain impossible to beat. At the Riverside, which was a reasonably low-scoring affair, the match was finely balanced on the fourth day. Australia needed 131. We needed their last seven wickets. Six for 20 in 45 balls was how Stuart Broad turned the Test our way. And at the Oval we were so close – requiring 21 from four overs – when bad light fouled up our run chase, denying us what would have been a stonking – and unprecedented – 4–0 win in the series.

  I was only at the Oval briefly on the first day and then again for the last two. In between I ironically found myself back where that Ashes summer began, appearing for Yorkshire in the Championship at Trent Bridge. With the rubber won, and with a thought or two towards the forthcoming winter in Australia, England decided to make three changes. I wasn’t so much dropped as handed a leave of absence. One moment I was in the England nets, the start of the game barely two hours away, the next I was hurtling towards Nottingham. My mum and Becky were hurtling there too, travelling from Headingley with my Yorkshire gear in the boot of the car. Becky was driving because mum was too ill. When I reflected on missing out at the Oval, and also on the Tests I’d played in, I was annoyed only because I knew I’d done enough to go to Australia but hadn’t made the big score – a century or more – that would have established me properly.

  The winter tour would be the fourth Ashes series in four and a half years; we were getting to know the Australians almost as well as our own families. I’d been to the country only once before. In 2010 I had been chosen for the England Performance Programme. Like most long-distance travel, it’s slightly a surprise when you actually get there, but a month and a half spent in Brisbane and Perth sticks in the mind not so much for the cricket as for the friendship I forged.

  I’d first come across James Taylor when we played opposite one another in a schools’ competition. We weren’t yet teenagers. Not long afterwards we faced one another again. He was scrum-half and I was fly-half in a rugby match. James is only 5 foot and a handful of inches, so with great unoriginality we called him Titch. He and I are similar personalities and we share almost identical interests, which enabled us to room together for three years. On tour you live in one another’s pockets and connect with everyone back home regularly on Skype. So I got to know his mates and also his family, and he got to know mine. We spoke a lot about everything, and so often were we seen in one another’s company that we became known as ‘Mr and Mrs’. In Brisbane, the two of us even shared an apartment. It turned out to be more men behaving untidily than badly. We split the core chores between us: I would cook; he would clean. This was a sensible division of labour. I’m no chef, but I soon learnt Titch’s culinary skills were so rudimentary that he made me seem cordon bleu and multi-Michelin-starred. At one point, unsure about how to heat up beans, he whacked the tin in the microwave and switched it on. I’m not sure he even opened the tin first.

  I found I liked Australia the way my dad had done. He felt at home there and agreed with the view that most Australians are actually Yorkshiremen in disguise, our two tribes so alike that not much separates Skipton from Sydney or Mexborough from Melbourne except better weather and twelve thousand miles. We’re equally tough, equally competitive, equally stubborn and equally willing to talk to whoever is in the same bar as us.

  The forecasts for the series were good to very good for us. We felt we possessed the upper hand psychologically. We’d lost only two of the previous fifteen Tests against Australia. Essentially the same in-form team that had beaten them here was now going there and could afford to draw, if necessary. Our leading players had made almost 500 Test appearances between them. I thought we were a disciplined, tough lot and I sensed no complacency either. Most of those among us – Alastair Cook, Kevin Pietersen, Jimmy Anderson, Stuart Broad, Graeme Swann and Matt Prior, for example – knew what it took to win in Australia, having done it barely two years earlier when the sprinkler dance was born in celebration. We also had Jonathan Trott and Ian Bell and the pro’s pro, Tim Bresnan, each of them veterans of that 2010–11 triumph. There was Joe Root too. And age would hardly weary us. The gap between the Oval and the first Test in Brisbane was only 101 days, the first rubber to be held back to back with the previous one for almost four decades.

  The onus was on the Australians. And so was the pressure. The only strike bowler who could conceivably come in to strengthen them was Mitchell Johnson. It seemed like an awfully big adventure for us and a trial for them.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  CHAPTER 8

  ARE YOU HERE FOR ALL THE TESTS?

  The Ashes series that root themselves in the memory – even for those of us who weren’t there – almost always pivot around a bowler so devastatingly quick that he dominates it, his influence the difference between the teams.

  Y
ou don’t have to be much of a historian to know that, either. Go back as far as 1882 and the Demon Spofforth, the first man to seriously eyeball a batsman in an attempt to unsettle him. His gaze is supposed to have been as horrifying as the Gorgon’s. He finished with match figures of 14 for 90 at the Oval, reducing England to rubble. Think of Bodyline in 1932–33 when, against Harold Larwood, the Australians – including Don Bradman – were advised to kiss their wives and insure their lives before going out, as though heading into a war zone. The opener Bill Brown, about to face the MCC in a State game, remembered that he lay awake at night, wondering how he’d defend himself with a heavy bat and fearing that Larwood would kill him. Think also of Frank Tyson, who according to Richie Benaud ‘absolutely smashed’ Australia in 1954–55, taking 28 wickets. And think of 1974–75, that Down Under summer when Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee were petrifyingly fast.

  Since the grisly highlights of that series have been shown so often, we can recall in a flash the seminal image from them: Thomson attempting to rearrange David Lloyd’s genitals – the ball coming off the bare pitch, thumping into his box and then poor Bumble almost folded in half in pain so obviously excruciating that you almost feel it yourself. On that tour the infirmary became a regular port of call for the batsmen. There were broken ribs and pulverised fingers and thumbs, and also the sort of body bruising that you’d suffer after being beaten up in a back alley. In a postscript Mike Denness, the England captain, said candidly: ‘I don’t think the public or the media will ever appreciate what the players went through on that tour … we had encountered a new dimension in speed.’ Some batsmen, he added, went home ‘relieved’ to have avoided ‘fatal injury’.