Heads-up How Englishman marked his hundred in style

England balcony – another more resonant image was about to form.

With intense emotional strain pulling at his face, Bairstow craned his neck to look into a clear blue sky, which also happens to be the name of the autobiography he published this autumn. In that book, unbearably, he described the day he returned to the family home, aged eight, to find that his father, David, had hanged himself from the staircase. It was 8.30pm on a cold January night and a young life was altered forever.

“The following day was my mum’s 42nd birthday,” Bairstow wrote in memoirs. “Only a few Jonny Bairstow did not hold back in celebrating his century. After a leap in the air (left), he referenced his notorious ‘headbutt’ in a Perth bar (right), before looking to the sky in his honour of his late father. hours before he died, my dad had gone to a nearby town and booked a meal for the two of them. He’d also booked a babysitter for Becky [his sister] and me.

“That act makes what he did seem even more illogical to us. So did something he said not long before. After a friend of his died, also committing suicide by hanging, he’d asked my mum, disbelievingly: ‘Why on earth would anyone do that?’ So, instead of certainties, there are only theories, and always will be.”

Bairstow’s mother, Janet, believed there were “small bereavements inside” her husband. Janet, at the time of David’s death, was being treated for cancer.

The point of returning to this story is to contextualise Bairstow’s long look to the heavens after he had played an innings of great control and skill, swaying and ducking away from short deliveries and scoring classically when the chance arose. As evening fell on the Waca, he said of that gesture: “Naturally, you want people to be around, that’s just something that naturally happens. Yeah, it’s not something I necessarily think about, but it’s just a natural thing.”

Bairstow is a fine player anyway, but took this opportunity to make a