Only the stone-hearted – or perhaps the one-eyed supporter of the opposition – could begrudge Steven Finn the two wickets he enjoyed on his comeback to Test cricket at Edgbaston after a two-year absence that at one stage led him to shed tears in the away dressing room on this ground.
That reported occurrence, playing for Middlesex at the start of the 2014 season, followed his early return from the tour of Australia the winter before, when the one-day coach, Ashley Giles, described him as unselectable after deciding a plane home, rather than more self-flagellation in the nets, was the more humane option.
For some Giles’s words were an insensitive public appraisal but then the truth often stings the most and the skill that had come so naturally to the 6ft 8in Finn – propelling a five and three-quarter ounce cricket ball 22 yards at high speed – had morphed into something utterly foreign. His runup and action, once fluid, suffered a full mechanical breakdown.
Rebuilt from scratch at his county, Finn returned to one-day international cricket later that summer and, while never threatening to touch the heights hit in 2013 when he was ranked second in the world, he has enjoyed some success since – even if his hat-trick against Australia in the World Cup sits towards the more fortuitous end of the spectrum.
But here, on the first day of a pivotal third Ashes Test, having been preferred to Mark Wood, amid concerns over the young Durham seamer’s workload and 24 months since Brad Haddin hit him out of the longest form of the game in a nail-biting match at Trent Bridge, was the 26-year-old’s true opportunity to banish those demons.
Standing at the end of his mark in the whites of his country once more – for what Finn had stated would feel like a second Test debut – he had the world’s No1 batsman staring back down at him from the other end, fresh from peeling off a double-century in the 405-run shellacking at Lord’s.
England, through James Anderson’s pad-thudding sixth delivery to David Warner, had the early breakthrough and the question posed at the start of the series – how Steve Smith would fare against the brand new Dukes ball in seaming conditions – was now a reality.
Replacing Stuart Broad at the City End for the seventh over, Finn provided something of an answer with his sixth delivery, two balls after seeing his opponent play at fresh air. The right-armer extracted lateral movement from the much-discussed pitch, the edge of Smith’s bat was tickled and Alastair Cook held on low at first slip.
The jump of celebration, both fists clenched and with an audible roar, appeared more than a simple reaction to claiming the most prized scalp in world cricket but a personal moment of catharsis in which the hard and largely unseen work paid its most satisfying dividend. Finn’s second wicket, removing Michael Clarke for 10, was a dream-like follow-up, as a searing yorker exposed the tin-leggedness of the Australia captain and crashed the base of the stumps, in a high-speed replay of Steve Harmison’s ball to the same man 10 years ago during that most remembered of Ashes Tests.
Time will tell how far Finn, the gentle giant who attributes are indisputable, can climb back up the Test ladder but for now his 10 overs, two for 38, on day one at Edgbaston after a challenging two-year hiatus, represents one of the most satisfying stories in a summer that has, in the main, got English cricket smiling again.
