Bair-force One: England should allow their keeper to breathe as well as shout
Breaking your ankle stealing an orphan’s puppy? Doing you meniscus playing ice hockey with Putin? There’s probably few ways to get injured that will garner less sympathy than by playing golf, even for someone as justifiably loved as Jonny Bairstow. Despite the slightly comic mystery that still surrounds that tee off catastrophe - maybe Trump isn’t the only one that seeks power to keep their crimes hidden - it was a hugely frustrating incident, coming how and when it did.
Still, Bairstow is back now and yesterday was brilliantly pummelling tiring attacks on the counter. It showed England were right to drop Ben Foakes. Today Bairstow was missing stumpings and dropping chances. It showed England were wrong to drop Ben Foakes. There’s legitimacy to both these cases, and they’re both put with considerable fervour, but what is certain is that the Surrey keeper is always hovering. Having Ben Foakes on your shoulder might be quite pleasant for many people, in a sort of Patrick Swayze assisting your pottery style way. For Bairstow it must be an added pressure despite the entire aim of Bazball being to eliminate the concept, though you suspect there was a probably a text exchange of congratulation and commiseration given the inherent decency of both England’s keepers.
Foakes’s beard and glovework may draw gasps of approval but Bairstow himself is an intoxicating exploiter of air. Today he flew through it to take a brilliant one-hander to complete Broad’s long-plotted plan to see off Labuschagne. He is also one of the great sighers in cricket, his huge, Honey Monster shoulders rising and falling like the tides. He huffs his way with purpose but mild trauma to the other end of the wicket like a man who’s finally resolved to tell his wife he’s accidentally mown over a rose while doing the lawn. He is whimsical, honest and engaging in the high number of interviews he always seems happy to give.
Mainly, though, Bairstow’s use of air involves it coming out of his mouth in an hurricane of encouragement to his spin bowlers, Moeen and Root. You wonder if slow bowlers always actually always want this. He’s just getting into his rhythm. He’s just finding a nice bit of drift. And then suddenly your accomplice with the mitts screams, "Come on Mo, come on pal, you're the man Mo, come on big man, be the man here buddy". Is this helpful? Hard to say, though I‘ve never seen a spinner silence a keeper, well apart from what Ashwin did to Tim Paine.
They say it's a one-ball game for batsmen, but it wasn't today for Green, Carey, Khawaja, who all benefitted from Bairstow’s jitters. That intense one-life jeopardy is also in some respects worse flipped on its head for the keepers, who can't retreat to privately maul a kitbag or smash a window but must instead wear their shame in public whilst immediately getting on with things. They don’t even get to sulk like fielders because, you know, they’re the ones that take it upon themselves to do the geeing up.
No one expects Bairstow to keep like Foakes. Particularly so after coming back from such an awful injury. But maybe, as is more Foakes’s style, he could do slightly less pumping up in a team already high on its own zeitgeist. There's obviously a place for adrenalin in keeping - that catch to dismiss Marnus was fuelled by it - but Bairstow looks a bit over-caffeinated at times. The result is iron gloves. Or five iron gloves, if you will.
There can be schadenfreude in seeing a keeper who has been running their mouth then put their own foot in it, but today I felt very sorry for the Yorkshireman. He looked understandably sheepish when he missed those chances but particularly so given how much his lungs had given for the morale of his side. The contrast between his hearty bellows and him having to coyly ferret about to retrieve the ball after it had bounced off his pad was writ all over his face. He looked momentarily a bit lost in a team where everyone knows, in a good way, their place.
We're grasping for the one per cent of the one per cent here in terms of improvement. Like, ironically, a golfer, Foakes gets that from training sessions involving hundreds of repetitions. Bairstow will never get to that stratospheric technical level but, amid the frenzy and tropical storm level energy of a Bazball Ashes, maybe he doesn’t need to be quite so exercised behind the stumps to his spinners. Root and Moeen are big enough boys, as are all the Australian batters, on whom bluffs and imputations that each ball is laced with arsenic are wasted. Kumar Sangakkara, who may claim some expertise in keeping, suggested it was Bairstow’s closed hip that was at fault for his stumping. For me, though, it was as much about his open lips, selflessly and relentlessly imploring his team mates on and trying to put his opponents off. England should tell Bairstow he is allowed to breathe as well as shout.