After climbing cricket’s highest peak, England face what should be their easiest Test in years: a four-day game, at home, against Ireland. One nation will draw on the accumulated knowhow of a thousand Tests; the other, only two. Then again, wouldn’t it be just like England to win the World Cup at Lord’s one week and lose to a bunch of relative novices there the next?
The match, which starts on Wednesday, ought to be a gentle warmup for the Ashes. Except that warmups have a way of biting big names on the backside. Lord’s is just down the road from Kilburn, a traditional Irish stronghold that will surely send some of its sons and daughters along to scoff at the English. If they fancy a flutter, an Irish victory is a tempting 25-1.
Ireland have already given England a scare once this summer, when Ben Foakes and Tom Curran had to mount a salvage operation in an ODI at Malahide. And it was not so long ago that Ireland left England red-faced in the World Cup. At Bengaluru in 2011 Andrew Strauss’s England batted perfectly well, making 327, only to let Kevin O’Brien turn a lost cause into the highest successful run chase in World Cup history.
O’Brien will be there this week, along with a few other survivors from that game. If Jimmy Anderson is passed fit, Ireland’s innings will shape like 2011 revisited, with the same opening bowlers (Anderson and Stuart Broad) taking on the same opening batsmen (William Porterfield and Paul Stirling). What’s eight years between friends?
For Ireland’s players, this game is a gift: they get to play at home and away at the same time. Their second overseas Test, following the defeat to Afghanistan in India, is happening on their doorstep, at the home of cricket, and on the sloping surface where their star bowler has been a fixture since 2007. A year ago, on his Test debut, Tim Murtagh had match figures of six for 100 against Pakistan. Now he finds himself playing in his first and probably last Lord’s Test, a month before he turns 38.
Lord’s is notorious for inspiring visitors from overseas with their eyes on the honours board. But there is another side to that story: it usually takes decades. Neither India nor Pakistan won a Lord’s Test until the 1980s, and New Zealand, who first turned up in 1931, did not taste victory until 1999. Sri Lanka are still waiting, after eight Tests dotted over 37 years. Bangladesh and Zimbabwe have played two Lord’s Tests each and lost the lot. Ireland will be doing well just to compete.
It could be a game of curiosities. England are going into a home Test without Alastair Cook for the first time since the day at the Oval, 14 years ago, when Michael Vaughan lifted the Ashes. With The Edge, the acclaimed documentary about Andrew Strauss’s team, in cinemas this weekend, the air is full of shades of the recent past. It will be a shock if Eoin Morgan, an England captain made in Ireland, does not do a lap of honour with the trophy, as he did during Middlesex’s T20 game on Thursday.
Both teams have sprung a surprise or two. Ireland’s selectors have already used 16 players in two Tests, as if determined to show that you can get a reputation for chopping and changing in no time. They look set to bring back Gary Wilson, the former Surrey wicketkeeper, and give a Test debut to Mark Adair, whose zip and bounce have brought plenty of white-ball wickets.
England have assembled a quirky squad, mostly consisting of first-choice batsmen and B-team bowlers (not that I can talk: you may have spotted that Vic Marks is taking a well-earned break). Ed Smith has summoned a couple of understudies – Somerset’s Lewis Gregory to swing the ball and Warwickshire’s Olly Stone to hit 90mph – and could have gone further.
“The more I watch of this game,” Mike Atherton wrote on Thursday, “the more I am convinced that freshness of mind is far more important than time in the middle or overs under the belt.” England, Atherton argued, should have given all the World Cup winners a fortnight off before the Ashes.
As it is, only Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler are taking a breather. After putting together two pressure-cooker partnerships in one evening, they have plenty of laurels to rest on.
Several other World Cup batsmen will be at Lord’s, adjusting hard. Jonny Bairstow will be trying to remember how to keep wicket, Joe Root how to captain and Jason Roy how to leave the ball. Even Geoff Boycott, no fan of top-order tonking, now feels that Roy could be England’s answer to David Warner. The question is whether his big-game swagger will show up at 11am on a sleepy Wednesday.
With the Ashes opener at Edgbaston 10 days away, Root could do with runs from Roy and Moeen Ali, who is promoted to Buttler’s slot at No 6 despite a difficult World Cup with the bat. And Rory Burns, charged with filling Cook’s shoes, needs to show that he can also fill his own boots.
Given Mark Wood and Jofra Archer are both nursing side strains, England are so anxious to avoid further injuries that they are threatening to play five seamers – most likely Anderson, Broad and Chris Woakes backed up by Stone and Sam Curran. Ireland’s batsmen could be facing the top two Test wicket-takers in Lord’s history (Anderson with 103, Broad with 83), plus a man whose Test bowling average there is 10.76 (Woakes).
All of which is a great incentive for the visitors to cause an upset. In politics, since 2016, the Irish have run rings round the British. This Test will be fun to watch if their cricketers can conjure something similar.
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