Five long summers on, Hameed’s return ends in embarrassed silence
As Haseeb Hameed sat on his wooden chair, looking out of the opened double doors of the England dressing room and awaiting his time to bat, it is unlikely that Wordsworth sprung to mind, but surely the gist would have done.
“Five years have past,” Wordsworth wrote on his return to Tintern Abbey. “Five long summers, with the length of five long winters!” Yes, it was back in 2016 that Hameed had played in his first – and last – Test series for England.
No England batsman’s Test debut could have been more brilliant than Hameed’s had been in Rajkot, in his ancestral home of Gujarat. It was he who, at the age of 19, had batted like the senior partner, not Alastair Cook. When England needed quick runs it was Hameed who skipped down the pitch to straight-drive Ravindra Jadeja for six.
In each of his three Tests, one of Hameed’s innings had lasted for three hours or more. That 82 on his debut was followed by a vigil of infinite patience when England were trying to block out for a draw in Visakhapatnam; then that dazzling strokeplay in the last-wicket stand at Mohali, when he came back after breaking the little finger of his left hand. Somehow Hameed drove – middle of his bat, against Mohammed Shami – a four along the ground to where fly slip would have been.
These hand injuries – he broke the same finger again the following year – have healed at least to the extent that Hameed waited to bat yesterday without any bandages, even if, while fielding through India’s total of 364, his hands had been swathed.
Hameed stayed in his chair, watching and waiting, until England had reached 16 without loss, which consumed 11 overs. He stood up and stretched, and played a few shadow forward defensives, little realising (why should he?) his physical similarity to an earlier occupant of the dressing room at Lord’s – someone of the same age, from the same ancestral home. Action photographs did not exist when Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji was young, but a cartoon sketch depicts a cricketer as thin, whippy and lithe as Hameed.
When Ranji represented MCC at Lord’s in May 1895 against Gloucestershire, he stepped up to score 77 not out and 150. “A finer display of perfect batting could not have been wished for,” reported The Daily Telegraph.
The cricket correspondent of this newspaper between the wars, Colonel Trevor, once observed: “In Ranji’s hands a bat appeared to be a lighter tool than a tennis racquet looks in the hand of a Wimbledon champion.” The same with Hameed as he came down the pavilion steps, practising more of those forwarddefensives, and sideways-on.
Hameed took guard for the first time for his native country since November 2016. If his two championship hundreds at Worcester had been made on the deadest of pitches, his century against India in their warm-up game had been valid evidence that he could be recalled.
Five long summers, with the length of five long winters, to be followed by a first-baller. A former England batting coach observed that Hameed does not normally play across the line as he did against Mohammed Siraj. Hameed’s front foot did not move sufficiently, and the bottom hand must have taken over as he made his nervous prod.
Hameed walked back to an embarrassed silence. MCC members averted their gaze. What could they or anyone else say? Nothing except perhaps echo the words of Col Trevor about Ranji: “In the matter of charm his batting stands alone.”