Ireland’s Lorcan Tucker: ‘We’re learning Test cricket on the job’

T his has already been a big year for Irish Test cricket: having qualified to compete in the format by becoming full members of the ICC in June 2017 they played five Tests in the following five-and-a-half years, but at Lord’s this week they will play their fourth since the start of April. Their game against Bangladesh that month started fully 1,348 days after the end of their previous Test, also at Lord’s (in that time England played 49 Tests, India 36 and Australia 33).

Before this year no Irishman had scored a Test century since Kevin O’Brien in 2018, but then Lorcan Tucker broke the run in Mirpur – where Andy McBrine also posted the country’s best bowling figures of six for 118 – and both Curtis Campher and Paul Stirling followed him in Sri Lanka a few weeks later. They are yet to win a game, but they are looking more at home.

Still, this is unfamiliar territory. At 26 Tucker, Ireland’s wicketkeeper-batsman, has played only 18 first-class games, most of them in Ireland’s inter-provincial championship and, including last week’s warm-up against Essex, only five since 2019. “Sometimes it feels more natural than others,” he says of building a first-class innings. “You’re kind of plodding along, trying to figure it out as you go. In Sri Lanka we fielded three days in a row – I don’t think it’ll get much harder than that, in 40-degree heat – and with wicket-keeping the high concentration’s required every ball and that is definitely a challenge.

“But when I was a kid we always used to watch Test cricket. It’s great now to be able to play and have that experience and it’s pretty special to be a part of history – white-ball cricket is new and fresh and exciting, but it doesn’t have that long history that Test cricket has.