Even as Jimmy Anderson was running in to bowl at Kraigg Brathwaite, Steven Finn was taking a seat in the bar at Brondesbury Cricket Club in north London, 4,300 miles away. He was there to promote a series of club open days, designed to get more people playing the game. A good cause, and one close to his heart. But there is no doubt he would rather have been in St George’s, taking the new ball for England. “It is,” Finn says, “the first Test tour I’ve missed since I started playing for England in 2010, so it hurts not to be there.”
The selectors did not give him a good reason why they dropped him. “To be honest they said that ‘there’s not a lot you are doing wrong, but you are in a pack, you are not one of the stand-out bowlers at the moment.’” He has become part of what he calls the “supporting cast to Jimmy and Broady”. But then, they didn’t really need a good reason. Finn knows he hasn’t been bowling well enough. He says he “wouldn’t have done myself a disservice” had he been on this trip. But he does not dispute what the selectors said. “I am in that pack and other guys got selected ahead of me for this tour so it is up to me to try and turn that around.”
It is a little depressing to hear a man who is only 26 talk so much about his own past. Since the World Cup, Finn has been spending some time at the National Performance Centre in Loughborough, watching old clips of himself in action. A match for England Lions against Pakistan A in 2010, another for Middlesex against Worcestershire that same year, when he took nine for 37, a third, for England at Lord’s against South Africa in 2012, when he took eight for 149 in the match.
Six months after that match, things started to go wrong. Finn had that bad habit of clipping the bails at the non-striker’s end with his knee. He wanted to find a fix. Then, while he was away with England in New Zealand, he decided to shorten his run-up. “That’s what cocked me up really,” Finn says. “Coming off the short run made everything short, made everything tense, and made me force trying to bowl quick.” The odd thing was, it actually worked for a time. “Out there I troubled good players on flat wickets, but in the long run it wasn’t for me. The short term fix wasn’t a fix to the long-term problem.”
Maybe Finn should have stuck with it, but he says he never felt at ease. So he decided to switch back. Problem was, he couldn’t do it. “I came back to England and had to realign everything and lengthen everything out. But it’s not that easy once you’ve grained and grooved bad habits. It took a long time to lengthen everything out.” He is still working on it now, which is why he is watching all those old films. “When I was a carefree 21-year-old I just legged it to the crease, and it was natural, and I bowled quickly consistently.” So he has been “trying to unravel back to the way it used to be”.
The fact is, Finn says, since he joined up with England he has lost “something”. The very same something, you suspect, that Finn says the selectors told him was missing this winter. “The guys at Loughborough did studies on it. My pace hasn’t particularly dropped since I played for England, but I haven’t been bowling those spells where it was 92, 93mph.” This, Finn says, is “no one’s fault but mine”.
He is old enough now to know that “coaches only ever want to help you out. No coach in the world has bad intentions.” So “it’s up to the player to filter that”. That, Finn admits, is “my responsibility”. He says he was “overthinking things”. Until now. In his first championship match of the season, he took only two for 96 against Nottinghamshire. But despite the figures, he insists he “felt really good”, that he “bowled nicely” and with pace. He is not worrying about the first home Test of the summer, against New Zealand starting on 21 May. He just wants to keep that easy, unthinking, feeling in his bowling. Fans will hope he is right. England need him.
This summer more than a 1,000 cricket clubs will take part in Club Open Days, supported by Waitrose – register your club at www.ecb.co.uk/clubopendays
