Shai Hope has aged a lot more than five days in this past week. He started this match a kid but finished it a man. He made his very first Test century on Saturday and followed it, three days later, with his second. There is little new left for anyone to do in this game but this was something that had never been done before.
In the 127 years they have been playing first-class cricket at Headingley, no one – not Len Hutton, not Herbert Sutcliffe, not Geoff Boycott – had scored two centuries in a first class match here. Then, in the twilight of on Tuesday night, Hope squirted the ball away square off the inside edge of his bat and sprinted a single for his 100th run. He did not stop long to celebrate; there was still a game to win. Forty minutes later he had done that, too. He finished 118 not out, the last of them the winning runs.
So this Test doubled as Hope’s coming-of-age party at 23. His batting has been imperious, almost impeccable, his strokeplay dashing, his defence resolute. Last week West Indies’ new CEO said he was looking for players to build his team around for the next 10 years. Well, now he has found one. Or two, in fact, since Hope spent most of the day batting with Kraigg Brathwaite, just as he did on Saturday.
Brathwaite almost beat Hope to that Headingley record but was caught behind for 95, trying to drive Moeen Ali. He ended up on a different list, then, of batsmen who have made a hundred here and then got out in the nineties second time around. It is a lot longer than the one Hope is on. Not that Hope seemed too fussed by his feat. “Yeah?” Hope said when told what he had done, “Thanks for the news.”
At one point the two of them seemed to be racing towards the record. Hope sped to his fifty, scoring so fast he almost overtook Brathwaite, who had been at the crease for 20 overs already. It came from 70 balls and included seven fine fours, glorious shots most of them, stunning back-foot cover drives, fine leg glances, delicate sweeps and swingeing pulls.
Then, when Brathwaite fell, Hope was savvy enough to realise that his role in the game had changed. He slowed right down again. He spent more than an hour on the 10 runs that took his score from 60 to 70. Altogether the second half of his century took him another 105 balls. And towards the end of the innings he was even trying to calm down Jermaine Blackwood, who seemed hellbent on trying to win the game in sixes.
Five days ago Hope was exactly that, a boy with plenty of potential. He has been in the team for two years and had a batting average of 18. He had made a single fifty in the 11 Tests he had played before this. He has had to learn on the job. But his attitude to it was one of the things that most impressed the old hands, who agreed he was worth persisting with. “He’s always willing to learn,” said Richie Richardson earlier this summer. “If he got out a particular way, he would go into the nets and try to work on his weaknesses and I like that about him. He’s always willing to learn and always asking questions. He’s got a desire to work hard and to achieve great things.”
Hope was a good schoolboy wicketkeeper-batsman in Barbados, though nothing like as prolific as Brathwaite, who had made 30-odd centuries by the time he was 14. Hope’s game seemed to kick on when he won a scholarship to study in the sixth form at St Bede’s College in Sussex in 2011, where he was coached by the old Sussex batsman Alan Wells. In the summer of 2012 he scored four centuries in seven innings for the Barbados under-19 team. He made himself a reputation as a stylish stroke-maker and in 2015 West Indies gave him a Test debut as a reward for his form in the first season of the new Professional CricketLeague. He was 21 and had played only a handful of first-class games for Barbados.
Since then Hope has looked a little like a kid in adult cricket, his wicket easy pickings for the old pros. Mitchell Johnson got him three times in four innings when West Indies played Australia, Yasir Shah four in six when they played Pakistan. That was until now.
There have been a few young West Indian batsmen whose careers drifted away after they made early centuries. Only a few years ago Adrian Barath took a hundred off Australia on his Test debut but he played only another 14 games. But Hope, one guesses, will go on to great things. Collar up, sleeves buttoned at the cuff, he is going to become a very familiar sight in the next decade. Hell, England’s bowlers will be sick of him already.
– theguardian
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