Centurion Strauss is back to his Test best
TYPICAL. You wait 50 Test innings and 18 months for one Andrew Strauss century, then two come along in eight days. Last week at Lord’s, the England captain hit a brilliant hundred in the first Investec Test against West Indies to destroy the very last vestige of a scrap of a crumb of a doubt that he deserved to carry on leading the side he helped drag from disarray to world dominance in little more than three years.
Yesterday at Trent Bridge, he followed his 20th Test hundred with his 21st, leaving him one short of the record of 22 held jointly by Walter Hammond, Colin Cowdrey and Geoffrey Boycott and, in the process, took himself above Graham Thorpe and Ken Barrington into ninth place on the list of all-time England Test run-scorers, his 102 not out taking him to 6,829.
At regular intervals during his faultless and increasingly inevitable progress to three figures, the giant electronic scoreboard beamed out the message ‘2013 — THE AUSSIES ARE COMING’.
And now all English cricket knows that, if Strauss carries on proving the old adage about class and form, the 35-year-old will not only be here to meet them but also, in home and away back-to-back series from next July to January 2014, he will have the opportunity to become England’s most successful Ashes captain of them all.
For Strauss, one of only three men to lead England to victory over Australia here and Down Under in modern times (Len Hutton and Mike Brearley are the others), it should be two wins down, two to go, to beat the latter on three Ashes series wins.
This victory was vital, coming as it did in response to West Indies posting a respectable 370 in their first innings.
England will resume today on 259 for two, still 111 runs short of parity, but having made sure all three results remain possible.
And what made this such a pleasure for Strauss’s supporters to behold was he looked like he was having fun again.
Furthermore, a measure of how much he entertained everyone else was that, for the majority of his unbroken third-wicket stand of 136 with Kevin Pietersen, who contributed an innings of 72 from just 100 balls that you could not take your eyes off, the strokeplay was just as inventive at Strauss’s end.
When off-spinner Shane Shillingford conceded 17 in one over, Pietersen’s blasted six over long on and a single were more than matched by two exquisite cuts from Strauss, the second almost too late for the naked eye to see.
When he pushed his 18th boundary through the leg side to bring up his hundred from 192 balls, the crowd rose as one and cheered. As well as Pietersen, Strauss also went past Graham Gooch and Barrington again for the number of Test tons for England and even those who felt he might have considered quitting the job before the start of this series must now accept there must be plenty more to come.
Now all he has to do is break the habit of making next to nothing the morning after sleeping on a hundred.
Strauss was able to bat for more than two session thanks to Tim Bresnan, who made sure West Indies, 304 for six overnight did not disappear out of sight.
Darren Sammy had completed the first captain’s knock of the match, making 106 before Bresnan surprised him with a bouncer for Pietersen to take the catch.
He then removed Marlon Samuels and Kemar Roach to complete a dramatic burst of three wickets for 10 runs in 19 balls, before Graeme Swann ended the innings by having Shillingford stumped all ends up.
A fortnight ago, at the time when his captaincy was still an issue, Strauss admitted: ‘When you are the centre of attention for the wrong reasons you need to find a way to make sure the attention goes elsewhere and the only way to do that is by scoring runs.’
How loud have his actions spoken since then?