What’s eating Jonny Bairstow? And whatever it is, can we have some more please? Preferably in large doses by the middle of next week.
On a lovely soft summer day in Chester-le-Street England’s opening pair were once again the difference. At 10 o’clock Eoin Morgan had won the toss and chosen to bat. From there it took just 18 overs of regal, muscular violence against the hard white ball from Bairstow and Jason Roy to all-but decide this de facto World Cup quarter-final before the scoreboard clock had passed midday.
Just like the previous time England played the most important ODI in their modern history – also known as last Sunday – it was Bairstow who seized the moment and wrenched it his way, scoring a second brilliant hundred to set up a 119-run victory.
He did so with feeling. But then this is a man who does everything with feeling, for whom there is no sense of breaking point being reached, because every point is breaking point. Often with elite sports people success is a moment of fulfilment or beatific peace. For Bairstow success comes as a kind of rage, those sublime achievements born out of galvanising adversity, real or imagined.
As he reached his hundred at the Riverside, a brutally carefree innings from 95 balls, Bairstow did not smile or cheer or look bashful. He shouted and flexed his neck muscles, looking not so much overjoyed as vengeful.
Possibly this was motivated by the former England captain Michael Vaughan. A minor spat between the two had bubbled away in the build-up. Here, at a moment to be enthroned in his personal highlights reel years from now, to crown his rise as arguably England’s finest ODI batsman ever, Bairstow chose to rub the top of his head in celebration. Vaughan is known for his work advertising a wig-maker’s franchise. Whatever it takes to get you through the moments.
New Zealand were hindered at the start of play by the absence of the rakish Lockie Ferguson, either suffering from a hamstring injury or piloting a twin-propeller plane to save a sacred Inca statue from the Nazis, depending on whom you believed.
The left-arm spinner Mitch Santner took the new ball, a tactic designed specifically to play on the batsmen’s nerves. The only problem being, Bairstow and Roy have no nerves. Santner was carted to the fence and England were off.
Tim Southee replaced him and was clubbed hungrily over cover by Bairstow. It had to be Southee here. The cycle of this England team demanded it. It is four years and four months since Southee provided the definitive full-stop on England Mk1, his seven for 33 in Wellington at the last World Cup crystallising the sense of a team that found in the white ball nothing but fear and pain.
Bairstow did not play in that game. He had made his ODI debut four years earlier, played six games and never got past 41. He came back post-Southee, at the end of that first heady summer of McCullum in 2015. Since when it has been more or less as it was here.
England had made 44 after five overs. Bairstow’s own high-grade fifty came up with nine fours from 46 balls. He waved his bat pointedly to the dressing room, once again silencing the media critics (who all like him). The 100 partnership arrived in the 15th over, bowled by the mournful Colin De Grandhomme. Some bowlers bound to the wicket as though approaching some vital point of destiny. With De Grandhomme every day is the retreat from Moscow.
New Zealand bowled too short or too full or too slowly. Bairstow ran like a maniac or stood still to hit with stunning power. At 176 for one in the 28th over he waited, let the tension leave his shoulders and lofted Southee over mid-off for a six on to the black tarpaulins to move to ninety.
Next over Southee sent down, perhaps the worst ball Bairstow will receive at this World Cup, a 75mph slower ball half-tracker. Two balls later he topped it with a floaty hip-high full toss. Bairstow steered both through square-leg to reach three figures.
He took off his helmet, rubbed his hair and took in the warm swell of applause around the Riverside stands. There is a violent kind of beauty in Bairstow’s batting when he plays like this, not so much arrogance or swagger as a physical assurance given only to the most natural of athletes.
Perhaps that multi-hatted cricketing existence has also disguised the through-the-roof brilliance of his ODI batting. Since May 2017 Bairstow has scored 2,277 runs at 54 with nine hundreds. No other England ODI batsman averages over 45 with a strike rate above 100. Twice in five days he has won defining generational games for his country. The argument as to whether Bairstow is England’s finest could simply start with the question: who has been better?
Just maybe don’t tell him yet. The rest of the order scrabbled a little to reach 307. Chris Woakes and Jofra Archer once again knocked the top off the chase. Chester-le-Street cooked gently in the late afternoon sun, with a wonderful feeling of space and light around those low stands. England will travel from here to Edgbaston next Thursday, still hitting from the front, still led by their own oddly spiky white-ball giant; and two steps now from a kind of cricketing heaven.
