Lord’s doesn’t have a James Anderson End; you’ll find that a couple of hundred miles north at Old Trafford. But if it did, it would be the one Ollie Robinson was bowling from first thing on Sunday morning. Anderson has preferred the Pavilion End right through his 18-year Test career, and has likely got through more work from it than any other fast bowler ever has from any single end in the history of Test cricket. He had his back to it when he bowled here for the first time, against Zimbabwe in 2003, and more often than not it has been that way since, through 23 more Tests, another 5,699 deliveries, and 105 wickets.
On Sunday, though, Anderson wasn’t on at that end, or the other, but was fielding at mid-on. It was an odd place for him. The clouds were out, the air was damp and sticky, so it felt a good morning for his sort of bowling.
Especially when New Zealand were 62 for two, 165 runs ahead, and England’s last good chance of winning the match was by taking a rush of early wickets. But here was Robinson instead, beginning his easy, rhythmical run in to the crease. It felt like a recognition of how well Robinson has played these past five days. He was England’s leading wicket‑taker in this Test, and their joint second‑highest run scorer in the first innings, too.
More than that, it felt like a sign that Joe Root was willing to invest his trust in Robinson too, and that he wanted to give him the opportunity to prove himself in this game. Not to make right for sending those racist and sexist tweets in 2012 and 2013, that’s what his apology was for, but to begin the long, hard task of proving to everyone that there was more to him, to let him give us, and his teammates, something better to know him by. It could be his last chance for a while. It was an open secret that the ECB was going to punish Robinson, and it duly announced he had been suspended from international cricket pending the results of an investigation.
It would have been the right thing to do any time, but was especially so in a summer when English cricket is trying to redefine itself as a “game for everyone”, when it’s about to launch a tournament designed with the express aim of making it more accessible to a more diverse audience.
In the end, Root allowed Robinson to bowl on for another hour, stretching out the spell he had started the previous evening. On Saturday he had bowled nine overs, and taken two wickets for eight runs, one of the wickets Kane Williamson, the world’s leading Test batsman, lbw in a manner that wasn’t so different to the way Robinson said he intended to get him back before the start of the match. “It looks like swinging the ball away from him, setting him up, pulling him across and then using the crease with the nip backer to get him lbw looks like a solid option.” On Sunday morning, he got a third, the nightwatchman Neil Wagner, with a mean bouncer.
That made it seven for 101 altogether, the third best set of figures by a bowler on his England debut this century, after James Kirtley in 2003 and Toby Roland‑Jones in 2017. He’ll hope he has more luck in the years ahead than either of them enjoyed in their careers, given they only played another six Tests between the two of them. A better comparison might be with the two of the men he was playing with here.
Robinson out-bowled both Anderson and Stuart Broad in this match. He was more accurate than either (according to Cricviz’s analysis, 53% of his deliveries landed on a good line and length, which was the highest among the English bowlers by a distance), was as fast as both (his speed consistently up around 85mph), and seemed to find as much movement through the air and off the pitch as them, too. It was a masterly performance for a man on his debut, let alone one who has been through the sort of emotional upheaval you imagine he must have endured these past few days.
And he played a deft hand with the bat, too, first man in after England had lost three wickets in 21 balls without scoring on Saturday morning. He made 42, and only one man has scored more batting at No 8 for England in the last two years – Sam Curran, when he made 44 at Port Elizabeth in 2020. Again, Robinson took to the job in front of him with an ease, fluency, and authority that belied his inexperience.
Now I write it, that all sounds the wrong way round. Runs and wickets are a poor recompense. His remorse is more important. Robinson has a past, and it caught up with him in the past week. But judging by the way he has played, and the apology he gave, he has a future too.
