Finn seeks rhythm to end the blues

When Jonathan Trott was starting his career at Warwickshire, he used to tell journalists there was no point in trying to talk to him after he had scored a century.

“When I’m batting well,” was the gist of it, “there’s nothing in my head at all. I’m not thinking, I’m just batting. It’s when I’m not scoring runs you should come and talk to me. That’s when thoughts worm their way into my head.”

Perhaps Steven Finn could empathise with such sentiments? When Finn started his career, bowling was a gloriously uncomplicated business. Good enough to make his county debut while his school friends were taking their GCSEs, he used his height and strength to hurl the ball at batsmen with unusual hostility. Half-a-dozen years later, relying mainly on natural attributes and conviction uncompromised by thoughts working their way into his head, he became the youngest man to claim 50 Test wickets for England.

Somewhere along the way, though, life became more complicated. Maybe it was the attempt to re-model his run-up, maybe it was a complication of trying to avoid running into the stumps, maybe it was an attempt to improve an economy rate that saw him fall behind the likes of Chris Tremlett and Tim Bresnan in the pecking order in England’s four-man attack, but somewhere along the way, Finn’s natural skills became diluted.

He was still a decent bowler. But that pace and hostility that made him special had largely gone and, as much as he tried to reinvent himself as a typical English-style seamer, that was never his unique selling point. There are dozens of decent fast-medium seamers in county cricket; there are very few tall fast bowlers capable of offering what Finn once had. Between July 2013 and July 2015, he didn’t play a Test.

It looked, for a while, as if he had made a breakthrough. He bowled brilliantly, and with impressive pace, in his comeback Test at Edgbaston last year – claiming eight wickets in the match, including a haul of 6 for 79 in Australia’s second innings, and being timed as quicker than Mitchell Johnson – demonstrating not just the welcome return to hostility but an new-found ability to swing the ball.

It wasn’t quite a false dawn – he bowled terrifically without much fortune in South Africa – but it wasn’t his new normal. …

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