.png)
11 hours ago
8
The winged elephant swoops down Deansgate towards the ship canal, its wings glowing neon orange, a feral roar rising and falling unevenly in volume. A black taxi drives the wrong way down a rain-moistened street. A menacing urchin child with a dozen fingers stands in front of a disused steampunk factory, holding an outsized Victoriana bat.
Now there’s a bowler, who’s actually a wicketkeeper, who may actually be Jos Buttler in batting gloves. There are three batters at the crease, one of them in white and the other two in red. Aiden Markram runs up and bowls sideways. There is no ball in his hand. “Red in the dark, blue in the sea,” a haunting voiceover sings. The sun is out. The floodlights are on.
Alas, this week the Manchester Super Giants took down their AI-generated season launch video due to overwhelming public derision, and so its terrifying contents now reside entirely in the recesses of our collective memories. Perhaps one day we will even begin to doubt what we actually saw. Did the kid really have 12 fingers? Was that John Malkovich wearing a Cinch-branded Crystal Palace top in the brief crowd shot? Did Sophie Ecclestone really bite the head off a shrew?
Most likely, of course, the video will simply pass unmarked into the dustbin of history, which was doubtless the point of it in the first place. To infer any intent or meaning is to grant it a far higher calling than it ever aspired to itself. It existed for no reason other than to exist, to percolate around the back of your ocular chamber for a few fleeting seconds and then disappear for ever. Which, in an accidentally perceptive sort of way, renders it an ideal analogue for the product and the competition it purported to promote.
And so to Lord’s for the start of the English international summer: a moment that always arrives stuffed with boundless promise and sunlit dreams. The months ahead stretch out before us like a beautiful green map: from here to the Oval in late September, gargantuan feats yet to be performed, marvellous adventures yet to be written. The grass is freshly cut. The stands are full. Jofra Archer is waiting expectantly at the end of his run-up. At which point – record scratch – it is probably worth informing you of a few minor alterations to the scheduled performance.
For one thing, the stands will probably not be full. Tickets for the first four days of the first Test against New Zealand are still available at the time of writing, competitively priced at about £110. The Oval will actually be hosting the second Test in a fortnight’s time. Archer, fresh off the plane from the Indian Premier League playoffs, is having his workload “managed”. As for the months of boundless promise: er, yes. About that.
In reality, England’s window of opportunity here – already forestalled by the ever-expanding IPL – shuts after just 47 days, at which point the schools go on holiday and the real business of the Hundred can begin. And of course this is a window they have to share with a football World Cup, a Women’s T20 World Cup and all the other succulent fruits of the British sporting summer. Never in my lifetime has this team felt like more of a sideshow, an irrelevance. And yet. Somewhere in north-west London, a pavilion bell rings hopefully. A round of applause ripples across the turf. Enter Ollie Robinson, England’s enfant manque, its unruly failson, and very possibly the man to salvage this Test summer.
It’s now more than 27 months since Robinson gingerly pulled on his England whites in Ranchi and gamely attempted to do a little light cricket. Desperately out of shape and largely adrift from the rest of his touring group, he trundled in and supplemented his diet of slow no-balls with some slower change-ups. He dropped a catch at mid-wicket and was largely hidden from view for the rest of the game, like an illegitimate royal baby. Even then, you couldn’t take your eyes off him: the leaden gait, the hangdog expression, the bleak awareness that he had done something wrong, but still wasn’t quite sure what.
In retrospect, Robinson’s dramatic decline deprived the Bazball era of one of its most temperamentally suited characters. Bundles of natural talent. A rebellious and vaguely scornful attitude. A gregarious, fun-loving character. A dislike of training and a habit of making outlandish statements near microphones that he was only partly capable of backing up. Really, he could have been a poster boy for the whole movement. As it is, his recall at 32 after a cautiously promising spring with Sussex, serves as a kind of final referendum, not just on his own international career but on the entire Stokes/McCullum project. One last staggering dance into the flames. A chance that none of them really deserves, but which we will all unapologetically hate-watch.
We are told Robinson has sobered and matured in the intervening years: county captain, father-to-be, a more reliable teammate. Personally, I believe this only to a certain extent. The thirst for drama simply runs too deep and too gratuitous. This is a guy who entered international cricket – entered! – in a flurry of historical racist tweets, who accidentally gave away team secrets on an unsanctioned podcast he set up with his golf influencer partner (which ended after five episodes), who got right into the nostrils of Ricky Ponting during an Ashes series he wouldn’t even finish. Who even at the start of this season disdained the notion of a disconnect between England and the counties, arguing that most county players are “not good enough for Test cricket”, and that “it’s hard for them to get their heads around that”. You can’t coach that sort of talent, and nor can you truly coach it out.
And in a team stuffed with Nice Young Lads, fighting for its place in the cultural conversation, as obsessed with engagement and dwell time as results, it may just be that Robinson holds the key to the entire enterprise. You don’t have to like him. You don’t have to despise him. But you definitely have some kind of opinion on him, which is more than anyone can say about Jamie Smith. Smith is a brilliant cricketer and a decent bloke, but he’s also what you’d get if you asked Google Gemini to generate an England cricketer. Surrey. Talented multi-sport athlete as a teenager. Scholarship lad, hits a long ball, gun fielder. Definitely gets ECB clearance before podcasting.
The walls are closing in. The future is already here. MI London has a marketing budget in the millions. The Delhi Gymkhana Club is closing after 113 years. A child with a first-class average of 17 is the best cricketer in the world. The IPL is poised to expand to 94 games in its next rights cycle and before long will have its own six-month window in the international calendar. Meanwhile the Manchester Super Giants will continue to feed us insulting machine gruel to sell its made-up product, because it now owns this space and you do not.
What do we have in response? A slightly chubby lad from Margate, perhaps the last guy on earth who can make 81mph red-ball seam bowling look iconoclastic and countercultural, maybe even a kind of forlorn last stand, a final attempt at making this thing look and feel real. Not the website bot who apologises for misunderstanding your search query, but the human operator who tells you to fuck off, you fucking prick. Robinson is nobody’s idea of a hero. But in a team besieged by indifference, in a summer pincered sharply at both ends, he may just have to do for now.
