Shoaib Bashir’s preparation for this match was not exactly ideal. The early summer brought three games for Somerset in the County Championship in which he took a total of four wickets, but with the vastly more experienced Jack Leach at the club he was then left out of the squad and farmed out on loan. He still kept his place in the England side, having made his debut in India over the winter, but in the opening Test of the summer he neither bowled a ball nor scored a run. Between sessions at Lord’s the head coach, Brendon McCullum, repeatedly pulled together Bashir and Ben Stokes and jokingly introduced them: “This is Bash, if you haven’t met him …”
England were expected to beat West Indies here, and many will give them little credit for doing so. Though it has thrown up some extraordinary statistics – England had never in their history scored 400 runs in both innings of a Test – it was in many ways a pretty ordinary game. But the evidence it provided of the assimilation of Bashir, the nursing of this callow 20‑year‑old, so short of experience and recent sources of confidence, to the point where they could toss him the ball on the fourth afternoon with a Test in the balance and he would go and win it for them, that is something extraordinary.
Days such as this breed excitement, which Bashir may or may not eventually justify. He has so many stories still to tell. But for him just to look around this dressing room and the characters it contains – Stokes made his England debut when Bashir was seven; Joe Root was in the team when he had just turned nine – and not be utterly broken by sheer bewilderment is evidence partly of his own level-headedness but also of the environment that has been created. “He just loves being in the dressing room, he loves the fact he’s part of the group,” Stokes said.
And as a young bowler Bashir is not alone in that: in the two years since Stokes and McCullum took over the Test team five bowlers have taken five‑fers on debut – at Lord’s last week Gus Atkinson did it twice; in the previous decade there had been only two. This is not normal.
Stokes was aware that “it’s been a really strange couple of months for him since India”, and once the decision was made to keep him in the squad, made contact to talk it through. “When you’re going out on loan to just feel like you’re bowling some overs, that’s where communication becomes a very important part about being a leader,” Stokes said. “So I picked up the phone to him and we just had a good chat around everything.
“He’s such a confident lad, he backs his ability and he just couldn’t wait to get started. And even though he didn’t play a … I was going to say ‘a big role’ but he didn’t play a role at all last week at Lord’s, I think the performance he put in this week a lot of spinners would be very happy with. This was a week where myself and Jeets [the spin bowling coach Jeetan Patel] were just telling him to show off his skills. And you know, I thought he did that.”
Bashir said: “Ben’s just got a lot of words of inspiration, and he’s just so calm under pressure and even when we lost a few quick wickets he was all chilled in the dressing room. The team environment is just special. I’m the youngest in the team and it’s quite nice with everyone getting around me.”
In England’s entire Test history there have been five five-fers taken by bowlers younger than 21: Jimmy Anderson against Zimbabwe in 2003, Rehan Ahmed against Pakistan in 2022, and three now by Bashir. Here he benefited from coming on just after Woakes had dismissed Mikyle Louis and after a confident start West Indies’ run chase started to fray. Within three overs Bashir had found the edge of Kirk McKenzie’s bat, trapped Kavem Hodge lbw, and had Alick Athanaze caught at slip.
After the best part of four days hanging to a greater or lesser extent in the balance, this game was effectively decided in half an hour, with Bashir at the heart of it; a little later he took the last two wickets, including Jason Holder with his best delivery of the day, to finish the job.
Despite a positive forecast, a nicely poised match and £10 tickets, his performance came in front of large expanses of empty seats. But everyone loves a freebie, and the announcement in mid-afternoon that entry would be free on day five led to an online queue simply to reach Nottinghamshire’s ticketing website which eventually exceeded four hours. By the time late arrivals got a chance to buy a ticket there was no game for which to buy a ticket. England’s players have learned to grab their chance; it seems their fans are not quite there yet.
