BALL DETERMINED TO BOUNCE BACK
Pace bowler eyeing redemption next winter after agonising 2017 Ashes
JAKE BALL is in Australia, the place where his career began unravelling, contentedly putting it back together and targeting a blue- riband return later this year. ‘With how the last Ashes went, it’s a goal for me to get selected on the next one, and face those demons,’ he tells Sportsmail. ‘To say this is where my problems started, and this is where it’s going to finish with a Test recall. That would be the perfect cycle.’
Since his fourth and most recent Test appearance at the Gabba in November 2017, the 29-year-old plumbed the depths to the extent Nottinghamshire overlooked him for selection during a wretched 2019 Championship season which delivered only 15 wickets at 58.53 runs apiece. That autumn, he was not considered to be in the country’s top 120 white-ball cricketers when the inaugural Hundred draft took place.
‘That was one of the darkest half-hours of my career. To be playing international Twenty20 cricket 18 months previously and not get picked was quite a big fall. It was a line-in-the- sand moment for me,’ he says candidly, at the end of a training session with Sydney Sixers.
Talking about this is not something Ball had previously considered, but doing so provides succour. He credits girlfriend Harriet, and his Notts coaches Peter Moores and Paul Franks, for encouraging him to open up.
‘I don’t speak about my feelings a lot. Previously, I wouldn’t even put things out there to close friends and family, but getting stuff off my chest made me feel so much better,’ he continues.
‘It became obvious that I am not the first person to go through it and won’t be the last. It’s just one of those things in professional sport. For me, it all stemmed from coming out here for the Ashes in 2017. I was on the top of my game and ( England coach) Trevor Bayliss came out after the first warm-up game and said how impressed he was with me.
‘Unfortunately, I did two ligaments in my ankle in the next warm-up game, then had 10 days off my feet, followed by four days to prepare for the first Test.
‘I wasn’t ready, but I was put in. I felt like I bowled OK but no better than that. I was asked to bowl a lot of bumpers at Steve Smith and didn’t really do a lot of what had got me into the England team in the first place — it wasn’t my style of bowling.
‘I got dropped straight after that game and didn’t play again until two and a half months later, in the last one-day game of the series in Perth. I’d spent the time between in hotel rooms stewing on things without really realising it had taken a big toll on me.
‘At the end of that tour, I sat down with Trevor and asked what he wanted from me. He told me to go back to county cricket to show what I could do.
‘I took 25 wickets in the first four games of the 2018 summer but I didn’t get picked in the squad for the first Test. They went for someone who had been playing in the Indian Premier League for two months (Mark Wood) instead and after that I was like a balloon. I was just deflated, asking myself how I was going to get back into that side if what I’d just produced wasn’t good enough.
‘Then I got a stress fracture of the back with about two months of the 2018 summer to go and went about six months without bowling. I probably would have gone on the one-day tour to Sri Lanka that winter had I been fit, but after I came back from injury I didn’t look like getting anywhere near the England side. ‘I lacked a bit of trust in my body. A big part of my bowling is the snap I possess at the top of my action and I wasn’t snapping through in my delivery. I was dragging the ball down a little bit. ‘I wasn’t bowling as quickly as I wanted, and was also trying to swing it too much. I kept trying different things. Things snowballed from there and got out of control.
‘What I should have done was strip it back to basics and look to do the things I do best: stand tall in delivery and snap through the crease. It was as simple as that, but when you are going through a tough time, your decision-making gets fuzzy. Thankfully, it’s what I went back to the following year.’
Ball began 2020 with a clearer plan and a clear head. He moved in with Harriet at the start of the first lockdown and, by the end of a domestic campaign that began with him being passed over for England’s 55-man training squad, he’d won a second Twenty20 title, finished as the Blast’s leading wicket-taker and was back on the international radar as a Covid reserve on the limited-overs tour of South Africa.
Confidence restored, his response to hearing Tom Curran was pulling out of his Sixers contract with bubble fatigue was to instruct his agent to court the Big Bash champions.
Fourteen days holed up in a Brisbane apartment was made more bearable by regular live screenings of his beloved Everton in the early hours, and once out of quarantine the Sixers reaped the benefits of his newly developed knuckle ball in a parsimonious first couple of overs on debut — a victory over Adelaide Strikers.
His death-bowling, the facet of his game for which he is renowned at Notts, has not been as precise but he hopes that develops with match sharpness.
Miss your length on these pitches and you disappear into moderately populated stands. Unlike the behind- closed- doors nature of UK sport, Australia has welcomed back spectators.
‘It was nice to have a crowd again, you miss it a little bit. Over here, they really like the English too,’ he says dead-pan. ‘Whenever you are fielding on the boundary, it’s a constant barrage of abuse. With my last name being Ball, it normally revolves around the male genital area. But if anything getting abused makes things feel a bit more normal. Just like the last Ashes tour.’
He would also like to be subject to similar in the 2021-22 series, such is his determination to improve on his haul of 26 top-level victims. ‘I feel like I’ve got a lot of unfinished business, certainly in the Test side,’ he continues.
‘ From my debut against Pakistan at Lord’s in 2016, when I felt like I bowled really well, to two Tests in Chennai and Mumbai, places that don’t really suit a fast bowler who likes to nip and bounce it, to Brisbane where I wasn’t match-fit, I don’t think anyone has seen the best of me in an England shirt.
‘And I’ll keep fighting and fighting to get myself back in because I don’t want to be that person who’s a little bit bitter about things at the end of a career, saying, “I could have played 20 or 30 Test matches for England”.’