Chase’s bunny Burns fails to cash in again
Time was when a half- century by an england opener not called Alastair Cook would have been cause for national celebration. But the bar is higher now and as Rory Burns trudged off before tea on the first day of the deciding third Test, he did so as a man who knew he had missed out.
Burns is still comfortably in credit after scoring 390 runs in last summer’s Ashes — more than anyone other than Steve Smith and Ben Stokes. He unfailingly looks the part, despite a technique that suggests his bat and his head are being tugged in different directions.
And he has a Test average of 34, the same as mark Butcher, only one adrift of mike Gatting, two short of Allan Lamb and three shy of mike Atherton.
Not without reason do england have high hopes for a player who turns 30 next month and should be somewhere near his prime.
But Burns’ scores so far in this series have been 30, 42, 15 and now 57 — a tantalising sequence which feels more like promise than fulfilment. By contrast, his opening partner and former Surrey team-mate Dom Sibley yesterday made his second duck in four innings, but has still outscored him, by 170 to 144.
Sibley, nearly six years Burns’ junior, already appears better acquainted with the old opener’s wisdom: you’ll fail often enough against the new ball, so make it count once you’re in.
Few cricketers have been allowed to flourish in 2020 for reasons beyond their control, but for Burns the year has been especially frustrating. His final Test innings of 2019 had been a high- class 84 at Centurion against a South Africa attack led by Kagiso Rabada and Vernon Philander. Then, in a game of football on the Newlands outfield, Burns landed awkwardly on his left ankle. His series was over. Thanks to Covid-19, he would not bat again for england until July.
All the more reason, perhaps, to cash in, although in this series Burns has encountered another problem: the off-spin of Roston Chase.
Opinion is divided about Chase as a Test bowler. West indies rate him highly. england seem less convinced — he pays over 40 per wicket — but they keep getting out to him. And Burns is the guiltiest party.
At Bridgetown in January 2019, Burns was bowled by Chase for 84 on the stroke of the fourth- day lunch — the first of a now-fabled eight-wicket haul that set up a West indies series win. This summer, he has fallen to him three times in four innings, making Chase Burns’ official Test-match nemesis, and Burns Chase’s official Test-match bunny.
His dismissal here had a freakish element, with Rahkeem Cornwall sticking out a right hand at slip and doing his best not to look as surprised as everyone else when the ball embedded itself into his palm.
But Burns had chosen the wrong ball to cut — not wide enough, too full. That followed his secondinnings dismissal at the Ageas Bowl, when he failed to get over a cut off Chase and spooned to gully, and his first-innings dismissal last week in manchester, when he played outside one that didn’t turn.
He had played Cornwall, West indies’ other off-spinner, with relative ease, but Chase got his man with the fifth ball he bowled to him, and was then removed from the attack with figures of 2-1-1-1.
For West indies, it was job done. For Burns, the work lies ahead.