One not out, from seventeen balls

England were 286 for nine, chasing 359, when Jack Leach walked out at Headingley. Stuart Broad had just gone leg before to James Pattinson for nought. Seventy-three were needed. Ben Stokes had been on 60 at the drinks break two overs earlier.

Leach had made 1 in the first innings, bowled by Josh Hazlewood, in a total of 67. He was about to make 1 again.

The stand, in numbers

The tenth wicket added 76. Stokes made 74 of them, Leach made 1, and there was one extra. When the stand reached 50, off 37 balls, the card’s note on it reads Stokes 51, Leach 0.

Leach faced 17 balls in 60 minutes and scored from one of them. Stokes had taken 152 balls over his first fifty and 47 over his second, and from a hundred he went to 135 not out in another 20, with eleven fours and eight sixes in the innings altogether.

That is the ledger of the other end. One man scored at the rate of a run a ball in a Test chase and the other did not score at all, and both of them were required.

The review

At the sixth ball of the 124th over Australia reviewed for leg before against Leach. The card records it: umpire Chris Gaffaney, batsman Leach, struck down. It was Australia’s last review, spent on the man who was not scoring.

What followed is in the accounts rather than on the card. Leach took a single off Pat Cummins, and the scores were level, so England could no longer lose. Nathan Lyon then hit Stokes on the pad, appealed, and was turned down by Joel Wilson. Australia had nothing left to review with. The replays showed it would have been given out. Stokes cut the next delivery for four.

Full scorecard: England v Australia, 3rd Test, Headingley, 22–25 August 2019 →

What the one run was

It was the run that took England from a position where they could lose to one where they could not. Every one of Stokes’s 74 in the stand took England closer; Leach’s single was the one that removed the defeat. The winning runs came off Stokes’s bat a few balls later, and it is Stokes who is on the card as player of the match, for 135 not out and four wickets.

Leach is on the card as 1 not out, 17 balls, 60 minutes, no fours, no sixes, strike rate 5.88. It is the least productive line in a winning chase of 359 and it is the line the chase could not have done without.

The match around it

England had been bowled out for 67 on the second day, Hazlewood taking five for 30, and were following a first-innings deficit of 112 into a target of 359 that no England side had ever reached. Joe Root made 77 and Joe Denly 50 on the third day. Stokes was 2 not out at the close of it.

On the fourth day England lost Jonny Bairstow at 245, Jos Buttler at 253, Chris Woakes at 261, Jofra Archer at 286 and Broad at 286. From 245 for four to 286 for nine is 41 runs for five wickets, and the tenth wicket then made 76.

England won by one wicket. The chase stood as England’s highest until Edgbaston in 2022.

What the card holds

Everything about the stand except its meaning. The 76, the 74 and the 1. The review spent on the wrong man. Seventeen balls faced by a batter who scored once, and 219 by one who scored 135. What it cannot show is that the single and the sixes were the same event seen from opposite ends, and that neither man could have done the other’s job.

••••••

No. 11 in The Other Guy, a series of 24.

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