No one really knows why a cricket ball swings. It is a problem that foxes the finest scientific minds, as much of a conundrum as the true size of the universe, the life-span of a proton and quite why James Hildreth has never been picked for England.
Oh, the mechanics of the movement are clear enough. That is all to do with what they call laminar flow, the way the air passes over the two sides of the ball. But the when and the where of it, why one ball should swing and another not, why certain grounds should be especially conducive to it, whether the weather has any effect or what that effect might be – all that is a mystery.
Cricketers say it is to do with how hot and humid the day is. But a lot of scientific studies have been done to determine just how much difference those two things make to the trajectory of a ball and the answer is none at all. The most recent one, at Sheffield Hallam in 2012, concluded that, if the atmospheric conditions do have anything to do with when and whether the ball swings, it is not because of the humidity but something else altogether. “It is proposed that new avenues for investigation should focus on how differing levels of cloud cover may affect localised air turbulence.”
Which sounds like academic for “we don’t know”. England did not come any closer to an answer on Friday morning. They spent a lot of the day wrestling with the swing problem and did not come any closer to solving it than the engineers and scientists at Sheffield Hallam. Pakistan’s novice attack made the ball hoop around on Thursday. They have 40 caps between them. Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad have played more Test matches here than that, never mind in the rest of the world. The conditions were similar, thick, sticky and still, but they could not get the ball to move nearly so much as Pakistan had.
England expected it to swing. Broad and Anderson tried to do it. Anderson was hit for a couple of fine drives by Haris Sohail as he floated the ball up full to give it every chance to do its thing. He got so fed up with it all that he banged the next ball in short and hit Sohail in the ribs.
England did a lot of that as the morning wore on. Once they realised the ball was not swinging they quickly decided to switch to plan B, which meant peppering the batsmen with bouncers and pestering the umpires to switch this ball for another, one that might move in the air.
The plan worked on the batsmen better than it did on the umpires. Mark Wood softened Sohail up with a couple of bouncers from around the wicket before he had him caught at slip off a ball that moved away down the slope. Ben Stokes bounced out Asad Shafiq, caught at slip, Sarfraz Ahmed, caught at fine leg, Shadab Khan, caught behind, and also forced Babar Azam to retire hurt by hitting him on the forearm. This is not exactly how play on a cloudy May day at Lord’s is meant to go.
It all meant that England’s new young spinner Dom Bess had a lot more to do in his first Test bowling spell than one might have guessed at the start of play. Anderson and Broad are a couple of old Eeyores but Bess, 20, is supposed to be full of Tiggerish enthusiasm for the game, which is good because he will have needed every last little bit as he wheeled through plenty of thankless overs on Fridayafternoon, without so much as a sniff of spin to work with. Bess has played 16 first-class games and none of them was at Lord’s. He has not done much bowling outside Taunton, where the wickets tend to turn. So it felt as if England were asking an awful lot of him here.
Bess went about it all enthusiastically enough. He has a busy run-up. He makes a brisk, determined march to the crease, cocked forward at the waist, like a geography teacher cutting through the playground to break up a fight on the far side of the yard. He works his wrist as he goes, as if readying it to grab one of the boys by the shoulders. There is a lot going on before his delivery, then, but less after it. Anderson and Stokes at least found a hint of swing from the Nursery End as the day wore on but Bess did not get a single ball to turn off the straight. It did not fizz so much as float.
Bess stuck at it, though, from over and around the wicket. The Pakistani batsmen worked him this way and that and looked troubled by him only when they tried something too ambitious. Bess will hope he has more to work with in the fourth innings. The way the match has shaped so far, England will have to bat a lot better if he is going to get his wish.
