Middlesex is my focus but I’d love a Test recall too, says Roland-Jones
TALK to those who know Toby RolandJones best, and they will tell you his personality reflects his cricket. He’s solid and steady, reasoned and reasonable. Given the way his summer of 2017 ended, it’s a damn good thing he is wired that way.
Roland-Jones played his first four Tests last summer, and England won the lot. They lost two of the three he missed, and his seat on England’s plane to Australia was all but assured.
The idea was that Roland-Jones would act as a hybrid of Tim Bresnan and Chris Tremlett in the triumph of 2010-11; hammering away back of a length, making life awkward and roistering away with the bat down the order.
But eight days before that squad was due to be named, he pulled up, four balls into his 11th over, on the first day of Middlesex’s crunch match against Lancashire, having felt a twinge in his lower back.
He wanted to carry on but played no further part in that game, although over the following days optimism rose that it was not serious until a scan revealed that he had a stress fracture.
Many, like recent examples Jamie Porter and Mason Crane, do not realise they have such injuries, but RolandJones really felt his. Oh, and the following week, Middlesex were relegated by one point in a dizzying defeat on a Taunton turner. A very special summer had become “bittersweet”, he says.
The timing was brutal. Roland-Jones’s long spells, and longer run up, are renowned, and he is a famously durable cricketer. He had not spent a long period out injured since 2012, when he had issues with his knee. Just as his biggest winter loomed, his body let him down.
“September and October was a really tricky period. It was a double blow, and that was tough to take,” he says. “As hard as playing cricket is, it’s tougher sitting out and being unable to change anything.
“I pride myself on going above and beyond in my job. As I’ve developed, I’ve tried to charge through tough periods and tackle them. It’s tricky then, when the chance to do that in an Ashes series, it is taken away from you and you’re not able to bowl. The competitor in you feels frustrated, but it’s fuel to the fire this time. It means I start the season fresh and firing.”
Roland-Jones remained typically sanguine, consoling himself with the knowledge that, with his international career coming about so quickly, the tour would have been a bonus.
“At the start of last summer, I wasn’t targeting the Ashes, I didn’t expect to be there,” he says. “I watched it the same as I would have before, as a fan, just watching some guys you’ve got to know quite well over the summer. I was desperate to be out there, but still cheering them on.
“By the time the Ashes began, I was at peace with not being there, I wasn’t clutching at what could have been. I was dealing with reality and looking at how to get fit and get back. I was targeting the Lions trip in February and the tour of New Zealand.”
He made the Lions tour, but New Zealand came too soon. Now, with places up for grabs and credit in the