The second they realised it was a no ball – and it took them some time to do it – a sense fell upon them and the entirety of The Oval. They knew. Everyone knew.
The moment was in the second over after lunch. England were 94-4, dazed and swaying, on legs of rubber. Jonny Bairstow, born on the front foot, chased a wide, full delivery from Wahab Riaz and drove it straight to point.
Yasir Shah held on and Pakistan celebrated. Big wicket. Big, big wicket – until somebody looked up at umpire Marais Erasmus’ outstretched arm. And at that point the only consolation you could have offered Pakistan was a counselling session to deal with what they knew would be the trauma of that missed opportunity.
You could actually see Pakistan deflate, could see Wahab slow in his stride, even see Misbah droop. It is the kind of effect a missed chance off Adam Gilchrist would once produce: to have worked so hard to get to him and to know that getting him out was the game, to go so high one moment and to fall so low the very next.
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This is the effect right now, in this purplest of periods, of Bairstow. He has had a record-breaking year, nearly a thousand Test runs already, with potentially seven more Tests to play; Andy Flower’s record for the most runs in a year by a wicketkeeper will not just fall, it will likely be obliterated (though, Indian pitches).
As much as the number of runs he has scored, it is the way he has made them that counts against the opposition. There is a case to be made that Bairstow is an intensely annoying player to have to deal with.
He is lippy. He has a wardrobe of glares. He thinks a smile is a code of conduct violation. He brushes off batsmen who ask him if he is OK after they have thwacked him at short leg, insulted that they would lower warfare to the levels of mere sport.
But unlike, say, Ben Stokes, to whom the aggression seems a natural extension of who he is and with whom comes genuine cheekiness, with Bairstow it seems a bit put on – as if he has gone to the Steve Waugh School of Mental Disintegration and learnt how to be like this (and you can be sure he was class prefect there). He is not a bully but has just learnt to be one.
In his batting, however, to which he translates this personality, it looks anything but manufactured. Which is why Pakistan were so downcast immediately after Wahab’s transgression. They knew this was coming and if we are being honest, we all kind of knew it was.
It was pure Bairstow too, bristling, bossing, annoying and solid as a rock all the while. He ran hard, hit his shots hard, bullied hard and never let Pakistan retain any sense of control – which is pretty remarkable given that he came in with England 74-4, Wahab and Pakistan rampant.
So to let him off the hook then was akin to letting the Test go – he is in that kind of form right now.
The day belonged of course to Moeen Ali, with what he thought was the best of his three hundreds. Moeen has hurt Pakistan over the last two Tests as much as Bairstow has and an alternative argument is that dropping him on nine was as, if not more, costly than the Bairstow reprieve.
But Moeen retains always a sense of vulnerability over the course of an innings. And he scores runs so beautifully, so languidly, with such little apparent effort that, as the opposition, you can almost forget his runs are hurting you: if a Moeen cover drive and a Bairstow cover drive were ideologies they would be as far apart as communism and capitalism.
As a bonus for England, Bairstow has shown already in this series that he can play another way, without sacrificing any of that rock-solidness. His second-innings 48 at Lord’s was of an entirely different hue, an attempt to save a Test ground out in well over three hours.
That innings looked actually to be a more natural posture of defiance, his back against the wall and a reply of honest toil, not bullying, but of resistance. Little does it matter what kind – he has been critical to England in this series and Pakistan know it better than ever.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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