Jack Leach’s lucky England wicket showcases randomness of Test cricket

It was shortly before tea at a clammy, claustrophobic Headingley when Jack Leach stepped up to bowl the final over of the session. After a promising start Leach had begun to lose the thread a little, and so had England.

Henry Nicholls had dropped anchor for 98 balls; Daryl Mitchell had simply picked up where he left off at Lord’s and Nottingham; the partnership between them had lasted 20 overs and was slowly squeezing the air out of the day.

By now, you’ve probably seen what happened next. In a way, the virality of the moment – the way social media can beam it to a billion mobile devices within a matter of seconds – quickly eroded its effect. The thunderous straight drive by Nicholls, the evasive squirm by Mitchell at the other end, the looping deflection off his hanging bat, the simple catch by a disbelieving Alex Lees: as with all content, watch it enough times and before long it all begins to feel a little inevitable, almost predestined.

The closest parallel, perhaps, was with the freak boundary off Ben Stokes’s bat in the final over of the 2019 World Cup final. Of course, that won England a World Cup, whereas the stakes here were on a different scale entirely. Indeed, given that Nicholls’s dismissal simply brought in Tom Blundell, who insouciantly accompanied Mitchell to stumps and hauled New Zealand back into the game, you might argue it barely affected the course of the match at all.

And yet for the spectators at Headingley on Thursday you suspect it will be the passage of play they remember above all others; the one they will discuss around the dinner table; the one they will recount in years to come. For Leach, coming into this game short of form and nursing a poor record against left-handers, it may prove a