UNLIKELY LAD BILLINGS READY TO SEIZE TEST CHANCE

SAM BILLINGS has insisted he has nothing to lose as he prepares for one of English cricket’s unlikeliest Test debuts in Hobart this week — but admitted he needed assurances he would not miss England’s T20 series in the Caribbean. After being only an hour or two away from boarding a flight to the UK on Friday night from Australia, where he has flourished for Sydney Thunder in the Big Bash, he is now set to take the gloves in the fifth Ashes Test. Finger injuries to Jos Buttler and Jonny Bairstow are one reason; the decision not to keep Ben Foakes in Australia after the England Lions tour last month is another. It all added up to a 500-mile drive from the Gold Coast to Sydney, a couple of PCR tests, and a 90-minute flight to Tasmania — just another few days in the life of an itinerant cricketer. It is hardly the first time England have raided left field: think Darren Pattinson, Simon Kerrigan, Scott Borthwick, Boyd Rankin and Mason Crane. But each might have reasonably expected to play again. With Foakes set to be available for the Test series in the West Indies in March, it’s possible Billings, 30, will remain a one-cap wonder. That, though, is for the future. For the moment, he must quickly make the transition from the hurly burly of T20 to the attrition of an Ashes Test. ‘I’m 100 per cent ready and I will give absolutely everything I can. You have got nothing to lose and everything to gain. My game is in a good place. It has been in the longer format for the last three years for Kent,’ he said. His decision to delay the long journey to Barbados, where England start a five-match T20 series against West Indies a week on Saturday, was not a straightforward one. And while he is likely to miss the first match, he told managing director Ashley Giles he wanted to play the rest. ‘I’ve done way too much running the drinks,’ he said. ‘So it was having that real clarity I wasn’t going to compromise that opportunity in the West Indies. Gilo agreed to that.’ The bartering is understandable. In 2019, Billings (left) missed out on a chance to be in England’s one-day World Cup squad because of a shoulder injury — an experience he calls ‘the hardest of my career, from a mental aspect’. But he refused to feel sorry for himself during the ordeal — ‘I don’t think that you’re owed anything’ — and instead he settled for the oldest cliché in the sporting book. He decided to take things a day at a time, saying: ‘The biggest thing for me was to just enjoy my career.’ Fast bowler Mark Wood is expected to be fit for Friday’s fifth Test despite suffering bruised toes on his left foot after he was yorked by Pat Cummins in Sydney.