Liam Dawson stood at his mark, ball cradled in his hands, forearms level to the ground, elbows splayed, sunglasses – completely unnecessarily – in place. There was nothing bright about the situation on this grey Mancunian afternoon except the 35-year-old’s immediate future. Eight years after his last opportunity, Test cricketer once more.
Many players give umpires items of clothing to look after while they bowl; Dawson’s habit was to hand Ahsan Raza something to take care of while he didn’t. Those sunglasses were required only when he had the ball in his hands (and eventually, late into the last session, it became so dark he let Raza keep them). Batters seeking some kind of clue as to his thinking were certainly not going to learn anything from his eyes, not if he could help it.
On a day when one recent England spinner, Jack Leach, took the last five wickets of a six-fer in Somerset’s win against Durham, another, Tom Hartley, almost doubled his career-best first-class score with 130 for Lancashire against Gloucestershire, and a third, Rehan Ahmed, trumped them both by following a century with six wickets for Leicestershire at Derby, the current pick had to make do with more high-profile but less eye-catching results. There was very little turn as Dawson made his big return, but still he eked out one great moment.
Before the game his new teammates had repeatedly mentioned being struck by one particular aspect of Dawson’s character. “He’s willing to always fight for the team, he’s very competitive,” Harry Brook said on Monday. “I know the cricketer he is, but I think what does go under the radar is his competitiveness,” Ben Stokes said on Tuesday. And it was there to be seen after the first ball of his second over found Yashasvi Jaiswal’s edge and Brook’s hands.
Not in how he sprinted to his right, yelling and punching the air before exchanging high fives and 10s with his colleagues (he has a habit, after delivering the ball, of wheeling away with his arms outstretched, albeit briefly and quietly, even when nothing interesting has resulted at all). But in the swiftness with which he broke from the celebratory huddle, thoughts already on the next challenge. By the time anyone else realised that the man of the moment was no longer among them Dawson had paced out his mark and was preparing to bowl round the wicket for the first time, to the arriving right-hander Shubman Gill.
There is a pleasing air of certainty about Dawson, a player experienced enough to know precisely what he is doing and where all of his teammates should be positioned to benefit from it. On this day it was a quality Gill could only admire enviously. Half an hour before play began the India captain was asked, after losing the toss for the fourth time this series, what he would have done had the coin fallen in his favour. He replied that it was just as well he lost, because: “I was actually confused”. And he probably said something very similar about his dismissal a few hours later, after he left a Ben Stokes delivery that, had his pad not got in the way, would have clattered into middle and off.
Gill had spoken before this game of his belief that fortune has not favoured his side in this series. “Hopefully,” he sniffed, “in the next two matches the luck is going to be with us.” Maybe in the circumstances the result of the toss, unfortunate as it initially appeared, was the kind of break he was seeking.
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Particularly given the decision Stokes made after winning it. As captain Stokes has already been responsible for 40% of all instances of England winning the toss and choosing to field in Tests at Old Trafford, something he has done both times the coin has fallen in his favour here (and all other English captains in history three times out of 38). Just another way in which he cocks a snook at tradition, though India will not be reading too much into the oft-quoted statistic about bowling first here – that no side in Test history has ever chosen to do so and won – given it would almost certainly have fallen had rain not when Australia visited in 2023.
But India’s luck, such as it was, was not to hold, on a day that saw freak damage both to one of Jaiswal’s bats and, much more meaningfully, to Rishabh Pant’s right foot. The main difference between the incidents was that with India’s vice-captain, unlike their opener, nobody could run out from the dressing room with four new ones to choose from, the similarity that both were caused by deliveries from Chris Woakes. The 36-year-old is not normally known as a destroyer either of men or ligneous hardware, but though he is one of the least heavy metal cricketers around this was one of the more appropriate days for a beloved son of Birmingham to rip a bat in two.
