The performance of the Lord’s pitch during its previous Test, against New Zealand in June, was so appalling that it was followed by an apology from the MCC and a scathing unsatisfactory rating from the International Cricket Council.
The MCC got ahead of the game in this Test by issuing a statement early in the fourth innings, reassuring us that “independent specialists” were “confident that there are solutions to improving pitch quality and performance”.
If the pitch being used for this game has not provoked the outcry prompted by its immediate neighbour earlier in the summer, it has still generated extravagant movement for the seamers, as well as occasional unpredictable bounce, and generally failed to silence the grumbling that has long soundtracked games here.
At least things now are better than they used to be. In 1859 Surrey turned up for a match, took one look at the pitch and left. Five years later Sussex did the same. That might not have been an option for Pakistan, but the kind of deliveries that did for Jacob Bethell against New Zealand and Emilio Gay in England’s second innings here are straight out of the playbook of 160 years ago.
“At Lord’s it was a common occurrence to have three shooters and the other ball out of an over of four bump right over the batsman’s head,” recalled Alfred Lubbock, who as well as being one of the finest batters of the 1860s won a bronze medal at the pole vault in the 1868 British athletics championships and played in the 1875 FA Cup final.
(The Lubbocks were a family of sporting polymaths: his brother Edgar also played first-class cricket, reached the third round at Wimbledon and won the FA Cup twice; another brother, John, went into politics and created bank holidays, originally called St Lubbock’s Days in his honour, as well as writing several important books about insects and coining the terms paleolithic and neolithic).
This has been a curious year for this ground, a summer of nationwide drought in which the two Lord’s Tests have been affected hugely by rain and in many ways just as well: without it the first match would have been over in two days, and this one perhaps in three. In between the two games it was announced that the World Test Championship final next year will be played at the Oval, because of concerns about Lord’s.
“Our ground is not alone in facing challenges around pitch preparation and the executive have had productive conversations with their counterparts at other venues facing similar challenges both within cricket and across the wider sporting world,” the MCC statement added, noting that “four to six leading experts with diverse skillsets and knowledge” were being sought to form an agronomy advisory group. Sometimes the old answers are the best answers: if in doubt, form a committee.
Some facts, then, about this summer: the dismissal of Saud Shakeel for 97 on Sunday means this was the 43rd year in which Lord’s has hosted two or more Tests, and the first of those in which nobody has scored a century (in fact only four batters have reached three figures if you add all their scores together, and three of them needed four innings to do it). The last year in which no names were added to the batting honours board was 1995.
Despite Shakeel’s efforts, the batting average at Lord’s this year, 16.57, is the lowest since 1958, when in the ground’s only Test Jim Laker and Tony Lock took 14 wickets between them as New Zealand were bowled out for 47 and 74.
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But if Kevin Oakley, the signwriter employed to add names to the Lord’s honours boards in gilded letters, has been able to ignore half of them he has been very busy at the others: the five five-fers recorded here in Tests this year has been bettered only once, when three games were played in 2010 (Pakistan were involved in two of them, losing convincingly to both England and, in a match that marked the Test debut of the promising young leg-spinner Steve Smith, Australia).
After four County Championship games, three men’s or women’s Tests, two List A matches, 11 days of T20 or Hundred action – several with two games – and assorted less highfalutin action, the ground’s summer is almost over. The MCC says it now intends to “establish Lord’s as a global benchmark for pitch quality”; it turns out Pakistan’s 389 was not the most unlikely target set in St John’s Wood at the weekend.