BARNEY RONAY: Wood is the fastest bowler in the world. Probably he's the fastest bowler England has ever produced
In the novel The Information by Martin Amis the main character writes a piece of fiction so tedious it induces feelings of sickness, eye-strain, bleeding noses and lost sleep in anyone who tries to read it for more than five minutes at a time.
It would of course be facile to compare this dark literary cloud with England’s Ashes tour squad announcement. For a start, the England Ashes squad is only 36 words long. But it is also a weirdly enervating read in its own right.
Scrolling down that list of names, you keep expecting some kind of spark, a genre twist, a flash of redemption: the top-order dasher; the quick bowler made from gunpowder and elastic bands; the noble, doomed leg-spinner beaming out of the team photo like a wing-collared teenage conscript off to bash Kaiser Bill.
It’s not a bad squad, or the wrong squad. These are, on their current underwhelming records, the best underwhelming England Test players available. But it also feels like an affront to the grandeur, the chanciness, the doomed glory, of trying to win the Ashes in Australia. It is only eight years since England travelled south with the plan of ‘Winning by Being Tall’, a grand, daring folly that ended with Boyd Rankin flailing in at Sydney like a giraffe startled by a stun dart.
And now we have this, death by worthy right-arm fast-medium. Plus a sense, as your eyes flit over the names, of possibilities shrinking, an existential nausea settling in: futility, constriction, Dom Bess, Craig Overton, a grey mid-afternoon of the sporting soul.
So no pressure then Mark Wood. Because there is of course one genuine note of edge in that tour party. This is not simply about being ‘suited to Australian conditions’, which Wood may not be as a skiddy bowler rather than a bounce merchant. Australian pitches are no longer that quick anyway, no longer those gleaming slabs of throat-singeing reverse-colonial punishment. Perhaps the right-arm medium thing – control, nibble, nagging – really is the way to go.
'Wood is the fastest bowler in the world. Probably he’s the fastest bowler England has ever produced'
But then Wood is not defined these days by his ability to offer raw speed. He is, along with Chris Woakes, England’s best all-format bowler, with 85 wickets at 25 since his breakthrough in 2019, and the new-found ability to bowl long accurate spells. Plus, of course, and still a little overlooked: Wood isn’t just a notch up. Right now he is the fastest bowler in the world. Probably he’s the fastest bowler England has ever produced.
No doubt there will be snorts of horror at the suggestion Wood is quicker than Fred Trueman or John Snow or men called things like ‘The Terror of Tonypandy’ who smoked and played in two stones of heavy flannel. But since guns came in no England bowler has matched the 97mph that Wood hit consistently this summer. And cricketers are just fitter, stronger and more physically efficient now. Nobody has been better, older than James Anderson. Evidence and simple logic suggest nobody has been quicker than Wood.
It has certainly been a winding path to this point, through three ankle operations, moments of doubt and fear, changes of action, the temptation to slow down and accept the limits of his body, not to mention a period in 2016 where Wood almost gave up completely after suffering spells of anxiety.
And yet somehow he has flipped the normal journey on its head, getting quicker with age, growing more not less physically resilient. He turns 32 two days after the Sydney Test. An Ashes tour spot should not be seen as a gamble on a point of difference. It is an opportunity for Wood to have a moment of his own, to ennoble his Test career, to cash in that late-breaking physical brilliance. Although, of course, It might just break him at the same time.
From December into January England are scheduled to play Test cricket 25 days out of 41 at the height of the southern summer. It will be brutal. If they can get the best out of Wood, rotating others around his needs, not treating Anderson-Broad as the sole defining axis of this attack, there is another ending available here.
Whatever the end result, Wood remains an impossibly likeable figure, a fidgety, fun, engagingly open cricketer. Every Ashes tour has its popular hero, its soft spot. Australia will take to Wood, and not just because he is a physical marvel to watch, with a touch of the circus tumbler as he catapults himself through the crease, his speed located in that extraordinary flex of ankle and knee. A little under the radar, away from the celebrity glare of the age of Stokes-Root-Archer, he is a genuine sporting phenomenon.
This article was published in the November edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game