How Ollie Robinson, who has wickets of Virat Kohli and Babar Azam in his CV, can be England’s saviour at Ranchi

How Ollie Robinson, who has wickets of Virat Kohli and Babar Azam in his CV, can be England’s saviour at Ranchi

The first picture that Google throws up of Ollie Robinson, who replaces Mark Wood for Ranchi Test, captures his personality on the field too. He is turning back, has his index finger firmly on his lips, gesturing at a batsman, probably the one he has just dismissed, to shut up, his eyes cold and piercing, the end of his hair standing up.

His expressive, and often sweary farewells are famous. His expletive-laden send off after dismissing Usman Khawaja instigated Matthew Hayden to ridicule him as “124 kph nothing.” Australian broadcaster Fox Sports, referred to Robinson as the “No 1 Villain”. Robinson, typically, would defend himself, saying: “If you can’t handle that, what can you handle?” He would shoot on: “I think we’ve all seen Ricky Ponting and other Aussies do the same to us, and just because the boot’s on the other foot it’s not received well.”

Before that, in the series against India, he made Virat Kohli channel the old West Delhi motormouth streak of his. He, though, would confess in his column for Wisden: “I think in those big moments I sometimes forget where I am. And there’s a thousand cameras on me! I’m not normally an explicit sort of person when I get a wicket, it’s normally just a big roar, or my eyes go a bit crazy.”

Even in the nets, he reproduces the same bark and bite. He would unleash a barrage of bouncers on Ollie Pope on Wednesday; he targeted the ribs of Jonny Bairstow. Batsmen would keep coming and going, but he would keep on bowling, with undiminished energy. In one instance, an England support staff had to plead him to get the ball from his hands so that one of his spinners could catch some practice. Immediately, he would pad up and barge into another nets for some batting practice. In short, he might just be the injection of intensity and vigour that the tiring England might require. Even more so he had to wait for almost a month for his break to come.

He also had great success on flat pitches in Pakistan during England’s successful tour of 2022, removing Babar Azam twice in the Multan Test. The selection call isn’t just a reward for his patience. His height (6 feet 5) and release point could make a difference. Stokes could have weighed in India’s torment against tall bowlers like Kyle Jamieson and Marco Jansen.

The tools he brings are different to Mark Wood, the seamer he would displace. He is not as wickedly quick, but is far more disciplined and could produce seam movement, both into and away from the right-hander.

His dismissals of Cheteshwar Pujara, who would become a friend of his in Sussex, Virat Kohli at Headingley, and Babar at Multan offers a gist into craft. He nailed Pujara with a clever change of length. Until then he had bowled in the shorter side of good length, but here he pushed the length by a foot but not too full either. Most batsmen have a tendency to leave a tall bowler on his length, assuming that the natural height and hence the bounce would take the ball over the stumps. He slipped in a slightly fuller ball and Pujara shouldered arms, only to watch the ball jag back wickedly and blast the stumps off his pads.

Babar too had shouldered arms to a nipbacker that jagged back in from well outside off to take out the off stump. In the next innings, he went for a drive to a fuller ball that nipped back in through the bat and pad gap.

Away movement foxed Kohli. Kohli struck him for two gorgeous boundaries, a flick and an on-drive. But he produced one that jagged away off the seam after pitching. It bounced a trifle more than Kohli had judged. It’s another dimension of his, to make the ball leap off good length with his effort ball. Robinson doesn’t use bounce as his primary weapon, as most tall fast bowlers are tempted to, but an ancillary device. If the surface tends to abet variable bounce, he could turn into a lethal proposition.But subtlety of lengths is his calling card, and one that could revitalise England.

His Sussex colleagues call him badger, because he spends countless hours researching about the batsmen he would face. Jason Gillespie, his coach at Yorkshire and Sussex, would reveal to The Guardian: “I would say he is comfortably the most researched and well-prepared fast bowler I have come across in professional cricket. He does his homework and comes to team meetings just full of ideas. He watches footage, gets information and formulates plans for each batsman with either the new or old ball.”

The setbacks in different phases of his career–sacked from Yorkshire for multiple disciplinary breaches, banned from the national side for racist tweets–has, by his own admission, made him a mature and aware cricketer. England would want Robinson to channel all of these traits—the energy, aggression and relentlessness. A bit of verbal aggro and bloodshot stares would make for some theatre too, the lone missing ingredient of this series.

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