It was bright and loud when Sonny Baker came on to bowl for the first time in Test cricket. He hadn’t slept the night before, too many nerves, and had found, when he saw his parents at the cap ceremony before the start of play, that he was almost overwhelmed by emotion, and now here he was an hour later and the midday sun glaring off the glass of the big JM Finn Stand and the crowd all around roaring for Matt Fisher as he came in to bowl from the Vauxhall End. Baker was at mid-on and over at slip Joe Root was waving at him. Baker couldn’t tell exactly what it was Root was trying to communicate as he flapped his hands around.

Root replied in kind with a wave of his own. Root made another gesture. So did Baker. “I didn’t know whether he was trying to bring me up for that over or not,” he said later. The two of them stood a while, making frantic hand signals at each other, neither quite clear what the other was trying to sign to the other.

It turned out, as Root finally demonstrated with an emphatic stab of his finger, that he wanted Baker to come on right away. “I’ve probably got to work on that, to be honest,” Baker cheerfully admitted, “I think there was a period of time where I was in the wrong place three times in three balls because I couldn’t work out what Rooty was trying to tell me.” Baker has the makings of a Test bowler: he’s smart, sharp and skilful, but he is still a kid. He’s 23, but made his first-class debut last year, and has played only 13 games at that level. If you’re young and fast you can get an awful long way in this game without really learning how to play it at all.

At the start of his run Baker was so wrapped up in what he wanted to do with his next ball that he kept trying to deliver it before anyone else was ready. He started his approach with a cartoon skedaddle in which he pedals his legs as if he is running on the spot then shoots off with a big skip forward, only he arrived to find that the umpire still had his arm out to stop him from bowling. “I was like, come on, mate, please,” he said, “just let me get the first one out of the way.” He finally got off a back of a length delivery, which Tom Latham blocked. Sixteen overs later, he had two for 63, which was the story of the day. England put him up for media duties that evening.

“Woah,” Baker said as he walked into his first press conference.

You guess he slept better that night. But the next morning was a lesson, if he needed it, that Test cricket turns on you pretty quick. Root had decided Baker should open the bowling. His first ball flew high and wide for four byes down the leg side, his second shot away off the outside edge of Glenn Phillips’s bat for four more.

His second over started with a ball that was thumped through point by Kyle Jamieson, who bats, nowadays, like Paul Bunyan setting about a forest of Redwoods. The next was another boundary, slashed over the top of the wicketkeeper. And then Baker got him to pull one high out towards deep midwicket.

Baker threw his hands up in celebration at the catch, then dropped them again as he watched Ben Duckett fumble it. Just to rub it in, Jamieson took the single while this was happening, and Phillips carted Baker’s next delivery away square. At this point he had conceded five boundaries in 10 deliveries. The game was running away from him as if it was on a flywheel.

It was at this point Root decided to give him the new ball to use. Which was one of a handful of odd decisions he made in the morning, along with instructing Baker and the other bowlers to keep bowling short, bringing Jacob Bethell on as first change when the ball was only five overs old, and holding Jofra Archer back from the attack for 90 minutes, presumably because England were worried about over-bowling him. Watching Root lead the team, you couldn’t but be reminded of the way he used to speak about how much better Ben Stokes was doing it in the first few months after he had replaced him as captain.

“Look how we play now we’ve got a skipper who knows what he’s doing,” Root said, only half-joking after they beat India at Edgbaston back in 2022.

Well, a man’s got to know his limitations, and Root (and all the rest of us) got awfully familiar with his during the five years he spent as captain first time around. By the time Baker was finally done bowling on Thursday, maybe he had learned a little more about his, too.