Earlier this year Harry Kane spoke about how he somehow managed to be constantly criticised even as he approached the extraordinary landmark of 400 career goals. “It’s like when Ronaldo and Messi were throwing these crazy numbers out there and the next season they’d score 40 goals instead of 50 and it was like they were having a bad season,” he said. “People take it for granted and maybe a little bit with England as well … people just expect it so it’s not spoken about so much. Maybe people just get a little bit bored of what you do.”
For each of the past 11 seasons Kane has played at least 30 games and scored at least 20 goals, and perhaps this is how players are punished for consistency of performance and fitness. Because the opposite is also true: when players appear only rarely, when they play at a level that is seldom seen, well, that simply demands to be relished. Nothing is more cherished than the ephemeral. Nobody wishes on a static star.
As India’s first innings approached its conclusion at Old Trafford two very good bowlers were bowling very well. This is Test cricket, featuring two of the world’s top four teams, and nothing about that is or should be unusual. But this was Jofra Archer and Ben Stokes operating in partnership, and that is.
Six months ago these scenes were a distant fantasy. Stokes was in the early days of his recuperation from yet another operation, after bowling himself beyond breaking point in New Zealand at the end of last year. Archer was a player in semi-permanent convalescence, nearing the fourth anniversary of his last Test and with his one subsequent first-class game, in which he bowled what so many and for so long thought would be his final 18 red-ball overs, just a few months more recent. These are players who can only yearn for the luxury of being taken for granted.
And on an otherwise leaden Mancunian afternoon – clouds that eventually broke the moment England’s openers strapped on their pads – Archer glided through his overs, Stokes flowed once again through the refreshed bowling action that has allowed him to illuminate the summer, and not one person present considered it.
At Lord’s in the third game of the series they provided limited proof of concept, in very particular circumstances. Archer needed to do little more for his Test return to be considered a success than to be in one piece when it ended. Stokes concentrated his efforts at the end of the game and with a week off to look forward to; once it concluded he spent most of the next four days in bed and said his major achievement in that time was watching the entire nine hours and eight minutes of the Paramount series Landman.
“Bowling to win a Test match for your country on day five, if that doesn’t get you going I don’t know what would,” he said. Well, as it turned out, bowling to moderately improve your team’s position on day two.
England went into the game with four seamers: Chris Woakes and Brydon Carse were expected to shoulder much of the burden, with Stokes and Archer to make big impacts in short bursts. But here were Stokes and Archer doing both jobs at once, making big impacts while shouldering much of the burden, each of them across the second day bowling at least twice as many overs as either of the others, and sharing all the wickets between them.
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England’s time in the field was split neatly in three. Archer and Woakes, who was hugely unfortunate to end the innings with just one wicket, bowled 12 overs as a pair at the start of the day, a period when India’s batters led an extremely cautious and often charmed existence: sometimes they left the ball, sometimes the ball left them. Ravindra Jadeja was the only wicket to fall, edging to slip during an outstanding opening over from Archer. Stokes and the atypically disappointing Carse shared the next 10 before rain forced an early lunch, Shardul Thakur excellently caught by Ben Duckett along the way.
It was after the resumption that Stokes and Archer clicked: 9.1 overs, four wickets, all over. One can only guess what kind of impact the two of them might combine to have for England over the next couple of years, but if we have learned anything about them it is that it would be best not to try.
All that is certain is that for an hour or so here, a period of Test cricket superficially like so many others was rendered exceptional only by the appreciation that what we were seeing might never again be seen, and that it would be wise to luxuriate in this fact while we could. A period where two players who for so long could only be paired in the imagination turned into a dream team.
