Reprieve for Bairstow lets England find second gear

TALKING of walking and not walking, there was a fellow I played against in my Tewin Irregulars days who refused to walk when clean bowled. Twice. In successive years.

Jonny Bairstow

TALKING of walking and not walking, there was a fellow I played against in my Tewin Irregulars days who refused to walk when clean bowled. Twice. In successive years.

Normally when you hear the sound of falling timber you know that your batting time is limited. Not this chap. Had to be told where the pavilion was located.

Jonny Bairstow walked all right. He played a frankly rather Tewin Irregulars shot - the straight ball was always likely to do the job on Tewin Green - and clatter-bang, stumps all over the shop. It was a truly ghastly dismissal, and Bairstow set off walking with immense speed.

Reader, has God ever given you a second chance? We've all prayed for one at times: please make this not real and I'll spend the rest of my days looking after lepers in the Negev Desert. And then felt the terrible spinal-cord-of-ice moment when you know that's what's done is done and you will never escape the consequences.

But sometimes God is in one of his capricious moods. All right, have another go, but don't f*** it up this time (this is a robust and probably pagan God I'm talking about here). I once wrote a novel about the blessed second chance, although it had more sex scenes than Lord's offered yesterday.

And glory be, Bairstow was called back. Second chance.

Unfreeze that spine because God loves you, Jonny B, you personally. Come and bat again and try not to play round the straight ones. Peter Siddle had overstepped, it was a no-ball, it didn't count. Rebuild the stumps and see if you can't add to that total of 21.

This had been the sort of dismissal that makes people say you're no good, you can't play Test match cricket, those two fifties against South Africa were just youthful exuberance, you're not the man for the long haul, not the man for the crisis, you're a second-rater and it'll take something special to change our minds. It may not end a career, but it could certainly signal the beginning of the end.

And there he was, batting on and batting on, not quite able to believe his luck. Or was it luck? Ed Smith, a former England cricketer, wrote a book called Luck (no sex scenes, worse luck). He played three times for England and in his last innings he was given out legbefore, wrongly. No second chance.

End of international career. Luck, then, is something he has thought about.

No such thing as luck; you make your own luck. But you can't control everything that takes place in your life, and the bits you can't control you can, if you wish, call luck. But trying to control them by means of rabbits' feet, black cats, ladder avoidance, finger crossing and putting on the left pad first is just silly. Luck is, by definition, beyond your control.

You can't create good luck or ward off bad luck, but both happen. Bairstow wasn't bowled because Siddle overstepped, but the umpiring team were smart and accurate with the technology and he was rightly reprieved. It was an opportunity for Jonny B Goode, and he took it with appropriate gratitude.

At the other end was Ian Bell. Bell knows a bit about second chances: his later and more fruitful career is based on one. He was dropped after the debacle at Sabina Park in 2009, ordered to lose weight and add mental toughness. And of late he has made himself England's rock: a remarkable transformation from the elegant but diffident shot-maker who specialised in the sort of centuries that decorated a big occasion.

These days he is the safe pair of hands, the go-to man, the hard nut. Give him an innings to mend and he'll do the job. That's what he did in the previous Test to set up England's victory charge; yesterday, he came in at 28 for three and scored another hundred. There is a calmness about this late-career Bell. At long last he has confidence in his powers: knows he can play a long innings in difficult circumstances. His century was a thing of understated beauty and equally understated guts. Elegant responsibility, classic late-period Bell.

The thing about luck is to recognise the good sort when it happens, accept it's nothing you deserve and then hang on to it with everything you've got. Bell has made the most of his second chance. He was out yesterday when Michael Clarke, the Australia captain, had one of his fits of genius and brought on Steve Smith to bowl his part-time leggies at the end of the day.

The difference between Bell and Bairstow yesterday was that Bell was out to a good ball from Smith and Bairstow was out to a bad one. Bell has made the most of his second chance across his career; Bairstow didn't make as much as he should from his second chance across a single day. He was out patting back a full toss that he should have clobbered, after making 67.

At least he didn't miss it. That's 67 for two, if you like, Bairstow's second wicket having put on 46 when he might have hoped for, say, 79. Not enough for Bairstow, not enough for England. Thus a day that given up to the celebration of the glory of the second chance was bookended with disaster.

The Times