This has been a series full of batting collapses for West Indies. Seven wickets for 54 runs on the first day at Lord’s, five for 43 in their second innings there, eight for 52 in their second innings at Trent Bridge, five for 39 and five for 58 in the first innings at Edgbaston. This time their last six fell for just 29, the last five for 19, the last three for four in the space of a single over – and they could hardly be blamed.
Before this game the talk had been of Mark Wood bowling at 100mph; in the end he got nowhere near, but when the ball is moving and the bowler is full of confidence and whatever extraordinary fuel he had been fed at lunch it hardly mattered.
“I’d much rather have him in my team rather than having to have my helmet and pads on facing him as an opposition,” Ben Stokes said on Thursday, and for an hour on Sunday he was simply stunning to watch and a grisly nightmare to face. If Rob Key, England’s managing director of men’s cricket, was not too distracted by the crisis meeting he had scheduled with the white‑ball head coach, Matthew Mott, he might have viewed the action with particular satisfaction.
This was a day when the three‑year central contract Wood was handed last October, a few months before his 34th birthday – sending a few eyebrows steepling upwards like a 96mph short ball – felt like the canniest of long‑term investments.
At the end of the morning session West Indies were 151 for five, and had just 24 runs still to score. Two balls into the afternoon Wood swung one in to Kavem Hodge, eliciting a loud appeal but no review; two balls later a yorker to Joshua Da Silva prompted a more muted appeal but an unsuccessful review. Wood was just getting started. Still wicketless at that stage, within half an hour he was walking off, ball in hand, to a standing ovation, having secured a fifth Test five-fer.
For most of the two games he has played in this series Wood has been extraordinarily unlucky – somehow he ends the series fifth on the wicket-taking list – but if the cricketing gods had not previously been on his side, here they were helpless to intervene, and most likely cowering in terror. After lunch he bowled six overs for nine runs and took five wickets, figures no more extraordinary than the bowling that produced them. The delivery that did for Alzarri Joseph was perhaps the pick, by an enormous margin too good for someone with a Test batting average of 12, swinging in on an irresistible path towards middle stump.
All of this left England’s other bowlers not so much in the shade as full-on pitch darkness. Gus Atkinson’s three overs in this period, while Wood wreaked carnage at the other end, were barely noticed – sometimes even spectators need a bit of time to recover. This had not been his day, and even with seven wickets to take and a series to wrap up it took a while for England to hand the ball to their most effective bowler of the series. Though it did not take long for him to reward them when they did.
It has been an extraordinary breakout series for Atkinson. He has taken more wickets in these three games than he had in any previous first-class season, and considerably more than the 14 he took in his five games for Surrey in this year’s County Championship (he was controversially instructed by the England and Wales Cricket Board to miss their season opener for reasons of workload management, despite it coming almost four months after his last first-team appearance in any format, a decision which seems a little wiser now than it did at the time).
On this third day at Edgbaston, Atkinson stood unused in the outfield for most of the morning while Shoaib Bashir bowled 10 overs, Wood five, Ben Stokes seven and Chris Woakes a couple. Bashir was thrashed into the stands a couple of times by Mikyle Louis but was bowling with impressive discipline and canny variations of pace, and meanwhile the ball had started to swing and everyone wanted a go. Atkinson, not for the first time in his career, had to wait his turn.
Eventually it came. After four dot balls Hodge scored a single to bring up his half-century off 56 deliveries (he had scored 49 off his first 50 but was eventually dismissed having added just another six off 26, illustrating not so much a loss of fluency on his part as the viciously hostile environment Wood, eventually with Atkinson’s assistance, created). Atkinson swung the final ball of his first over of the day into Jason Holder, rapping him on the pad around the knee roll. Holder reviewed – at 6ft 7in when the ball is still rising as it hits him on the knee, it wouldn’t often be going anywhere near the stumps – but was not reprieved.
It would be Atkinson’s 22nd and final West Indian wicket – only three England players in history have ever taken more in their debut series.
That this was Wood’s day should not obscure Atkinson’s impact, nor his contribution to the optimism surrounding a bowling attack that just over a fortnight ago, already a distant era, lost their greatest of all time.
