David Bairstow - Yorkshire v Derbyshire, Benson and Hedges Cup match in 1982

The Random Cricket Photos Guy Guy | March 03, 2023

Chasing 203, Yorkshire were down in the dumps with the score at the end of 46 overs reading 9/123. A further 80 runs were required to win from the remaining 54 balls (it was a 55 over match). Nobody had scored more than Boycott's 31 in Yorkshire's innings when no. 11 Mark Johnson joined their wicketkeeper for the last wicket.

The following overs saw 9 sixes being hit, all from the bat of that diminutive wicketkeeper batsman who took particular liking for the slow left arm spin of David Steele and hit him 26 in an over.

Not only did he manage to eke out a 1 wicket win for Yorkshire with a 80 run partnership where Johnson's contribution was a mere 4 runs, he also ended with an unbeaten hundred against his name. In a result that not many had seen coming an hour ago, the match was over with 8 balls to spare.

That man also became his son's first cricket coach who told him, as he notes in his autobiography, "to pick the bat like an axe and grip it as though you're about to chop wood." He writes, "In knockabout games in our back garden, and especially on beaches as far flung as Barbados and Scarborough, he’d encourage me to give the ball a good tonk for the sheer joy of it. I’d swing my spindle-thin arms at a delivery, trying to belt a huge six to impress him." Although, the son stopped receiving those lessons from his dad after the age of seven, it seems they have stayed with him even now.

At 32, after a decade of being in and out of the side, Jonny Bairstow is playing cricket the way his father David would have enjoyed. The more you see the career of Bairstow progress, the more it amazes how far he has come and yet, how much in everything that he does, it's a journey towards becoming like his father, who he found hanging from the ceiling of his house when he was just 7.

His autobiography is way more than a cricketing autobiography and easily one of the most special that I have read in a long time. To grow up with the trauma that he did and the questions that remained unanswered, and yet choosing to take up the same path that his father did and play professional cricket for Yorkshire, it's been a long long journey for Jonny.

And finally, a decade after he had actually arrived, it seems now that he has finally arrived.

To win England a Test in which they were at 55-6 at one point with 233 runs from just 201 deliveries is just the kind of feat which would have filled David Bairstow with pride. After all, in Jonny Bairstow's own words his father, thanks to several such knocks he played for Yorkshire and even England, was 'the patron saint of lost causes – the more lost, the better.'

Jonny knows losses well and his career, especially his resurgence, is a monument to the heart required to come back from loss and succeed. He began it too in a style that was similar to David's when at the age of 21, he dished out a man of the match winning performance with an unbeaten 41 from 21 when his team needed 75 to win off 50 when he had arrived at the crease. But then, the system got to him and even though there have been multiple bright spots in his decade long career, you always end up feeling that he is capable of more.

That more, it seems, is now coming to the fore. Keep going, Jonny. Hopefully, soon, like so many of the good things that belonged to your father, the title of the patron saint of lost causes would follow too.

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