SAM MORSHEAD AT EDGBASTON: As first Steve Smith and now Burns have shown, it doesn’t matter if you look like an accident on the chiropractor’s bench or a frog trying to escape from a frying pan while you're at the crease
Remember all those net sessions you endured as a youngster, trying to perfect your technique?
Remember the barked orders of the coach, demanding symmetry between shoulders and hips?
Remember being told to keep your eyes front, backlift straight and never to wander across your stumps?
This was the only way to succeed, you were told. This is how you do it right. This is how you make sure you score runs; it’s what the manual says.
What a willow-wanging waste of time that was.
If we have learned anything from events at Edgbaston this week, textbooks might as well be upcycled as coffee tables, and every cricket teacher you ever learned under hauled in front of a tribunal and told to explain what on earth they were playing at.
As first Steve Smith and now Rory Burns have shown, it doesn’t matter if you look like an accident on the chiropractor’s bench or a frog trying to escape from a frying pan while you’re at the crease.
Rory Burns scored his first Test century at Edgbaston
If you have the eye, if you have the application, if you have the attention to detail and if you have the survival instinct, you have a chance.
For Burns, as much as it had been for Smith, this century came at the end of a long personal journey. The two had got to Edgbaston via very different paths but their emotions at reaching three figures were much the same - relief, exhaustion, fulfillment and joy.
Burns does not have the controversial backstory of his Australian counterpart, of course, and he does not have the added pressure of 20,000 or so hostile fans in his ear from resumption to close, but he was certainly under scrutiny.
Rightly or wrongly, the Surrey captain’s place in this England side had been questioned by many after double failure against Ireland. Another poor score here and we all know how quickly the selectors tend drop the guillotine on opening batsmen.
After today, though, the dissent will be minimal.
Having sought the advice of his long-time coach Neil Stewart, who has worked with Burns since he was six years old, and "buried his head" from media comment between Tests, he came to the wicket on Thursday in bullish mood.
He cut and drove well, refused to be psychologically downtrodden during passages of play when the ball fizzed and ducked past the bat at speed, and saw his team close to parity at the end of a draining day of Test cricket.
He did not buckle despite finding himself in the nineties longer than Noel Edmonds’ hairdo, wore blows to the body like badges of honour, and adapted well to the spin of Nathan Lyon.
Analysts will tell you in the hours to come that it was among the scratchiest scores of substance by a Test cricketer in quite a while, they will quote false shot percentages and the number of times the ball whistled aerially through vacant fourth or fifth slip.
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But what is an innings of this sort of duration without a little luck? And what is a batsman like Burns without this sort of innings?
For however ugly it might have been - and Burns’ stance does make him look a little like an OAP waiting impatiently for the bathroom - this was a knock which will have given England’s opener both confidence and the conviction that he belongs.
It has not been a vintage year for Burns, a man for whom runs have come in their bucketloads for more than half a decade.
He is averaging 37 in the Championship for Surrey, and around a third of his domestic first-class runs came in a single game - against Somerset in mid-May. Last week against Ireland, he was out twice in worryingly similar circumstances - feeling for the ball well outside off stump, where really he ought to be allowing it to pass on through, against bowlers operating at speeds well below the likes of Pat Cummins, James Pattinson and Mitchell Starc.
It would be wrong to say Burns arrived at this series on a low, but he was certainly not in the kind of nick which brought him hauls of 1,000-plus runs for five campaigns in a row leading up to last year.
Indeed, with the exception of that game against Somerset, he has not spent a great deal of time at the wicket. By his exceptional standards, anyway.
In the two-and-a-half months between May 17 and today, for both Surrey and England, Burns had just one stay at the crease which lasted in excess of 100 deliveries. For a man who has developed a reputation as an accumulator, a consolidator and an occupier, it could be considered a lean streak, the sort of trend which might weigh heavy on the minds of other cricketers.
Burns played a stubborn innings against Australia
As it happens, however, the 28-year-old is not prone to over-analysing his game, particularly when it comes to statistics.
He accepts the quirks and eccentricities of his technique - the hunched back, crooked hip and wink at midwicket, a strategy borne out of a conversation with an optometrist, who first suggested the then-teenage Burns might be left-eye dominant - and prefers to spend his preparation time with bat in hand in the nets, or watching videos of oppositions bowlers, over too much technical scrutiny.
He works with sports psychologists and he keeps a ‘batting diary’, scribbling down ideas and inspiration as and when they take hold.
That is not to say Burns willingly ignores the numbers - last September he was celebrating Surrey’s title victory in a south London pub when he stumbled across an analyst who had highlighted his supposed weakness against spin, and asked there and then to see the burden of proof - but his attitude towards them is such that he is unlikely to become a slave to spreadsheets.
And so he pitched up in Birmingham this week, not drowning but waving, relishing the opportunity to bat for his country in an Ashes series.
That he should have been out early on - pinned lbw by Nathan Lyon, only for umpire Joel Wilson not to raise his finger and Australia captain Tim Paine to keep the review in his back pocket - should be noted. As too should the number of times he played and missed at Australia’s quicks; in one over from Pat Cummins in the final session, with Burns into the nineties, he prodded and wafted at four in succession.
But further focus on the flaws should come later.
Tonight, only one thing matters. Rory Burn is an Ashes centurion, warts and all.
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