Gubbins shines as Compton searches for fulfilment

Middlesex 249 for 5 (Gubbins 82) trail Surrey 415 (Roy 110, Burns 88, Foakes 63*) by 166 runsScorecard

At 4.36pm on June 11 on a sun-drenched Lord’s day, Nick Compton trudged back through the Long Room at Lord’s. Compton had hit a trio of boundaries but, he knew, his 19 was nothing like sufficient to maintain the tenuous hold on his international career.

A few days after, Compton announced that he was taking a break from all cricket. The reaction was understandable. Few cricketers have devoted so much of themselves to getting a chance in Test cricket. Having been dropped for the first time, in 2013, Compton struggled for motivation at having his dream taken from him, on the brink of an Ashes series.

Yet he reoriented himself to returning to county cricket, moved back to Middlesex and, several thousand hours of hard work later, was recalled to the England side. A fine 85 in Durban helped to set up England’s series triumph in South Africa, but Compton’s Test returns deteriorated rapidly thereafter and, by the end of the series with Sri Lanka, to drop him from the side almost seemed an act of mercy.

Compton earned himself a second act in Test cricket but, given his age and an often painstaking style at the crease, there will surely be no third act. So if he is to find fulfilment in the shires, it will not come through rekindling his England ambitions. It will have to come, instead, from taking pleasure in county cricket for its own sake: thinking not about what he has lost, but what he still has.

And for all Compton’s anguish about the curtailment of his international career, he has still returned to a position of remarkable privilege: batting at No. 3, on his home ground of Lord’s, for the county best-placed to win the County Championship. It is not such a bad lot.

So at 12.37pm Compton entered Lord’s by the very steps he had walked up disconsolately 55 days …

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