“Blimey, Beef. Who writes your scripts?” Graham Gooch famously trilled to Ian Botham while the meaty and mulleted all-rounder was busy dispatching the then record for Test dismissals in August 1986. Returning after a 63-day suspension for admitting cannabis use to play New Zealand at the Oval, Botham memorably took a wicket with his first ball back to draw level with the record and then went past it in his next over by pinning Jeff Crowe lbw. Gooch was left to wonder aloud about whether some ballpoint-wielding higher power might be responsible.
“You couldn’t write a script like it” is one of sport’s most hackneyed phrases, of course. If Hollywood can come up with aliens bursting out of John Hurt’s stomach in outer space, then I’m pretty sure they’d be able to summon the creativity to imagine Bruce Edgar tickling a back-of-a-length delivery to second slip in south London.
Nevertheless, England’s recent showreel is directed by Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum, executive produced by Rob Key with Luke Wright as Best Boy. Between them they have created a side who beguile and confuse like a David Lynch noir and deliver high-octane thrills a la John McTiernan. This was the 20th victory of the box office Bazball era but in and among all the action, a slower but no less intriguing narrative was unfolding on the final morning in Multan, a slow-burning novel amid the strewn popcorn. This was the latest chapter in the story of Jack Leach.
The left-arm spinner’s international career has a swirling plot that John le Carré would be proud of and here he was bowling England to victory in his first Test since January. After a career plagued by injury, illness and having to suffer the ignominy of seeing younger, less experienced and, let’s face it, less good spinners given the nod in his place in the shape of former and current Somerset teammates Dom Bess and Shoaib Bashir, Leach was back in the fold once again, pouching seven of the 19 Pakistan wickets to fall in the game, offering control and prising out their batters.
Here was Leachy, England’s redoubtable slow horse, the spinner that came in from the cold. In from the cold but delivering in the heat once more – this was Leach’s 11th victory out of the 14 Tests he has played in Asia.
Leach has had plenty of ups in his 37-match Test career. He finished 2022 with 46 Test wickets, only Kagiso Rabada and Nathan Lyon sat above him in the world rankings at the end of the year (both notching 47). He’s played a decisive role with the ball in series victories against Sri Lanka (twice) and Pakistan (once and counting…) and scored that spectacle-wiping, soul-soaring one not out at Headingley alongside Stokes which saw him become a fan favourite.
There have been as many, or more, downs – he had a stress fracture in his back that ruled him out of last summer’s Ashes at the last minute, he suffers with Crohn’s disease, had a genuinely life-threatening bout of sepsis on a tour of New Zealand and was left concussed after colliding with a boundary hoarding in an attempt to impress his new coach.
Leach, of course, has never grumbled, never uttered so much as a single word of chagrin despite Lady Luck sometimes sneering at him and the sporting scriptwriters screwing up the page with his name on and tossing it in the wastepaper bin repeatedly. Quite the opposite in fact. He has been a poster boy for the Bazball era speaking openly and enthusiastically about how he’s never felt so good playing cricket as he has under McCullum and Stokes and offering nothing but praise and support to those who have seemingly usurped him.
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“[McCullum and Stokes] get you to almost feel as you did when you were a kid, when everything is very simple. You’re not worried about failing,” he told me last year. “You’re excited to play. It’s not, ‘What if this goes wrong? What if this happens?’ This is the freest I’ve ever felt in the professional game.”
The final two balls of the match in Multan were a fitting microcosm of the fortunes he’s had over the last five years. The penultimate delivery smeared for six into the stands by Naseem Shah. The next, Shah tried to launch another howitzer, Leach saw Shah coming and beat him in the flight to have him stumped. Leach delivering the coup de grâce to cap off another famous win.
In victory, his teammates mobbed him and his toothy smile stretched as wide as Harry Brook’s bat appeared the day before. After a lengthy time spent on the sidelines, Leach did what he always does. Dusts himself down and goes again. England’s slow horse enjoying a well-deserved canter.