Matt Parkinson gets rare chance to give England leg-spin at Lord’s

By three o’clock in the afternoon the match was just starting to drag. This first day and a half of the Test unspooled at such a frantic pace that the burgeoning stand between Tom Blundell and Daryl Mitchell made everyone feel a little restless and uncomfortable, like Lord’s was caught in an awkward silence that had stretched on too long.

They’d only been going an hour, which would have been routine business in almost any other Test, but this one’s run in fast forward. The way they’ve been going at it in this match has made playing Test cricket feel like trying to ride a Victorian bicycle: it’s essentially familiar, and yet somehow all very different to how we do it now.

It was at this moment Ben Stokes finally decided to bring on Matt Parkinson. Lord’s ruffled. You could hear the crowd mutter and shuffle as neighbours prodded each other in the ribs. “The leg-spinner’s coming on.” There are periodic comets that come around more often. The Lord’s crowd saw (and promptly forgot) a couple of fleeting overs of it from Joe Denly in the Ashes Test back in 2019. Before that, you have to go all the way to the summer of 1996 to find the last time England bowled a leg-spinner in a Test here, when they played Ian Salisbury against Pakistan. You’re more likely to have seen the Queen here in the last 25 years than you are an Englishman bowling a leg-break.

Parkinson is a bristling little bowler, whose hunched shoulders and mean glare make him seem a bit like he’s just popped up from underneath a bridge to nick a wicket off a passing batsman. He got through six overs for 21 runs in his first spell. They were a rich mix, with the odd full toss and long hop among some lovely deliveries that drew shouts and sighs from the close fielders,