Red Wood’s hard yards rewarded
IT WAS not so much a celebration as a sigh of relief. When Mark Wood trapped Dinesh Chandimal to end a stand of 117 with Angelo Mathews across 42 draining overs, he looked ready to collapse into the dirt and dust. Who, frankly, could blame him?
This was Wood’s first Test wicket in 302 deliveries, going back to July when he bowled West Indies’ Shai hope at the Ageas Bowl with a beauty that seemed to bode well for the summer. Instead, he spent the rest of it carrying drinks, before hurling himself into the fray in the first Test against Sri Lanka.
By the time he did for Chandimal — pushing him on to the back foot with blows to the helmet and glove, then pitching one up — Wood may have been wondering whether he and Galle were stuck in a relationship that just wasn’t working out.
‘My head got redder and redder,’ he said. ‘That told you how knackered I was. There was a lot of relief when I got the wicket. I felt I bowled well in the first game, but I was joking with Jon Lewis, our bowling coach, that I’d be here until 2054, still bowling from the Fort end, and have none for 3,000. It might just be one for 3,000 now.’
The moment of catharsis came amid the kind of spell that the injury-prone Wood, playing only his 18th Test in nearly six years, is not supposed to bowl.
In a series where Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson have understandably confined themselves to spells of four or five overs in the heat and humidity, Wood sent down eight in a row after tea — his longest burst since his debut in 2015. After the seventh over, a team-mate could be heard congratulating him on the stump mic: ‘Unbelievable, Woody, well done.’ A spell which returned one for 16 on a thankless first- day surface was nothing less than heroic.
It helped, of course, that Wood and his captain Joe Root know he will not be needed for at least the first two Tests in India, as england look to manage their resources in a year of endless fixtures and biosecure bubbles.
But Wood has also missed so many matches in his career that he is not about to look the other way when england are in urgent need of a wicket. And while it was Anderson who made the early breakthroughs with the new ball, then struck again straight after lunch to remove Lahiru Thirimanne, the end of the Chandimal-Mathews alliance was the wicket england craved.
‘I think I was putting a bit too much pressure on myself,’ said Wood. ‘When you’re in and out of the side and trying to cement your place, and you know there’s people who are behind you, and people in front of you who aren’t here…
‘I didn’t play much during the summer, so I wanted to try to make an impact. When you leave a game with no wickets, you feel under pressure. It’s nice to get one on the board. I know it’s not matchwinning or a five-for, and I’ve got a bit of a way to go. But now I can relax into the game knowing that I’ve contributed at least.’
Perhaps the greatest compliment Root has paid Wood has been to keep him for the tough overs, when the partnership is set, the ball old, and the pitch dead. Some wickets are more equal than others — and without Wood’s efforts, a tough day for england would have felt even tougher.