There’s a glitch in the pitchside hoardings at the Oval. Two of the letters in the message “BUY YOUR TEST SHIRT NOW” have been compressed so that for a large part of the third day’s play the word “SHIT” appeared to be written in 24-inch letters on the LCD screen that runs right beneath the England team’s balcony. It has been one of those weeks in English cricket. The optimism some people seemed to feel on the first day faltered on the second and foundered altogether on the third when they conceded a lead of 100 runs in the first innings.
It is already beginning to seem like one of those games that not everyone gets back from. At times like this the debutants in the England dressing room feel like rookie pilots reporting for a first tour of duty in a war movie: “I’ve got 150 hours of flying time, sir.” Of the last 10 men to make their Test debuts for England at the Oval, only three – Chris Woakes, Harry Brook and Dawid Malan – went on to play for any length of time. The others, Tom Westley, Toby Roland-Jones, Josh Hull and Simon Kerrigan, were last spotted somewhere over the English channel.
Maybe it’s James Rew’s high and tight hairdo, maybe it’s the sweep of ginger fringe, maybe it’s his smooth cheeks or his scarlet sun-blush, but he has the air of a subaltern airman who is last mentioned when someone’s asking about the empty chair in the mess hall over ham and eggs the next morning. He has had a brute of a week. He conceded 22 byes in the first innings, got himself bounced out playing a hook at a short ball moments after he had just been dropped off a similar shot in the minutes before stumps in the second, and dropped a crucial catch offered by Rachin Ravindra in the third.
New Zealand were 48 for two at the time, 148 ahead, and Josh Tongue was on a tear from the Pavilion End, three overs into a spell in which he’d already had Devon Conway caught at second slip and beaten Ravindra inside and out. Tongue served him two deliveries back of a length, then pitched one up full and wider to tempt him into a drive. Ravindra bit and the ball flew through off his outside edge low to Rew’s right side. He dived, stretched, the crowd roared, the ball thumped into his glove, and … fell out on to the ground.
Not all of this was Rew’s fault. The extras, for instance, were largely because England insisted on bowling so short that often as not the ball was flying well over his head, but you could feel the confidence seeping out of him as the match went on. Later in the innings he leapt for another edge when Jofra Archer caught Henry Nicholls on the glove with a short ball that flew high to Rew’s right. He got close enough to it to give everyone the impression that he ought to have caught it. The fielders visibly sagged as it flew through to the boundary. Archer shot Rew a filthy look and a few words to go with it.
It didn’t help Rew any that Tom Blundell did such a good job for New Zealand. It was Blundell who first came up with the tactic of stymying England’s attacking batting by standing up to the fast bowlers, during the Wellington Test in 2023, and he did it brilliantly again here. His looming presence was enough to throw off Joe Root and Brook, and his catch off Archer was one of the best little bits of wicketkeeping you’ll see, a magic trick in which, with inches to work in, he plucked the ball from the air as it shot off the outside edge of the bat.
England briefly tried to do the same thing by sending Rew up to the stumps to keep to Matt Fisher. The ball pitched, flicked off the ends of his fingers and shot away through his spread legs for four byes. Standing up to keep wicket to a man bowling 80mph is a hell of a difficult skill, but it is also, as any old salt will tell you, the measure of whether or not you’re really up to the job.
Rew is a hell of a batter for Somerset, the youngest man to score 10 first-class centuries in this country since Denis Compton in 1939. But England have Jamie Smith waiting to come back at Trent Bridge after his week of paternity leave, and another keeper, Jordan Cox, is batting at No 7 in this match. Rew could do with another of those hundreds in the fourth innings to fix the first impression he has made in Test cricket so far this week.
