Another day, another England bowler injured. Having needed an injection in his back to get through his last game, Sussex’s Ollie Robinson did not reappear after lunch in their match against Glamorgan, raising fears that yet another pace bowler would be unfit for England’s one-off Test against Ireland on 1 June and the Ashes series a fortnight later.
Sussex’s initial diagnosis was that Robinson was nursing a sore left ankle. He will be going for a scan on Monday. With James Anderson nursing a groin injury – and Jofra Archer, Jamie Overton and Olly Stone ruled out of the Ashes already – Robinson had been inked in to open the bowling against Ireland. Now it looks as though England are down to the bare bones of Stuart Broad, Chris Woakes, Matthew Potts and Mark Wood, whom England will want to preserve for the Ashes. Far short of the eight seamers Ben Stokes wanted to deploy against Australia.
As so many of his rivals are hobbling, Potts, 24, who was excluded from the Test side last winter, has suddenly become a highly desirable asset because of his durability. Last season he took 20 wickets in his first five Tests. Overall he bowled far more red-ball overs than anyone else in first-class cricket, seamer or spinner, 564 overs, while nobody else bowled 500.
This season, after a slow start, Potts has been banging out long spells of accurate fast-medium once again. According to Alan Walker, Durham’s bowling coach, “he began bowling too straight in the championship. He was probably trying to hit the stumps, and getting picked off legside. A month ago it [the England call-up] would’ve been too early but it’s just right now.”
The one reservation about Potts last season was his lesser effectiveness when bowling round the wicket against left-handers. “Let him work it out for himself, that’s always the best way,” Walker said. And in Durham’s last match four of his eight Yorkshire wickets were left-handers, as were four of his first five Gloucestershire wickets.
In the profile of Potts as one of the Wisden Five Cricketers of the Year, the PA correspondent Rory Dollard recounts how his subject woke up last season with an “excruciating” pain in his back and side. It was the last day of the championship game against Glamorgan, and when Durham’s captain asked him how he was, Potts replied: “It hurts every time I move, now chuck me the ball.”
Potts proceeded through the pain barrier to record his best figures of seven wickets for 40 and to win selection for England by impressing Ben Stokes, who had just been appointed Test captain and was playing that game. “Stokesy said to me: ‘The moment you pushed through that barrier, I knew you had to play [for England], because it’s exactly what I would have done.’”
What makes these Durham bowlers tough? John Windows, the Durham academy director, said: “I’m sure Pottsy played loads of sports at an early age. They play everything round here, that’s probably a function of the region. They do not specialise too early – they can play cricket, football and rugby. We don’t stop them, there’s no line in the sand.” Athletic, therefore, and not bowling too much when too young.
“Pottsy was a tiny little kid when he first came to us,” Windows added. “He was a batsman till he was 15, when he started to grow big and strong. Even at Under-17 level he was batting at number three for us. We try to let players in as late as possible, when they’re almost fully developed – like Steve Harmison, Graham Onions and Woody.”
“I think with Pottsy he’s always had the desire, a good work ethic,” Walker said, “and he loves the gym, not in a negative way just to make his body look good. And one of his biggest strengths is he just loves bowling. He’s got a bit of that old-school macho thing about him – he wants to bowl the most overs, which you don’t always see now if people are worried about how many overs they’ve bowled and how their action is looking.”
“With Pottsy, he’s better for bowling all the time,” added Walker, who bowled his share of seam for Northamptonshire. “When he has a week off he always seems to take a while to get back into it, where I think he’s a bit old school, he likes to bowl, and once you get in a good rhythm you don’t want to be giving that up.
“Last season he developed this bouncer which he didn’t really have, and whacked it into the pitch and became more aggressive instead of pitching it up and swinging all the time. He’s still a strike bowler but he likes the workhorse type of thing as well.”
But whatever Potts is bowling, such is the current injury list, England cannot afford to be fussy.
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