For somebody who has yet to make a championship appearance, Bashley-Rydal’s Tom Barber carries quite a reputation.
He fractured the thumb of England’s white-ball captain Eoin Morgan in Middlesex training two weeks ago and recently broke Stuart Meaker’s record for the fastest delivery in testing at the national performance centre at Loughborough, writes Simon Wilde of the Sunday Times..
When Daniel Vettori, the county’s Twenty20 coach, watched him play for the second XI at Uxbridge last summer, he rated him as being as gifted a left-arm speedster as Mitchell Starc at the same age, and in last month’s North-South series in Barbados, watched by Andrew Strauss, he had batsmen ducking for cover.
He could be London’s most dangerous Barber since Sweeney Todd.
Given Middlesex’s intention to rotate their deep pace-bowling resources, with Barber and Steven Finn sitting out the opening game against Northants, Kevin Shine, the ECB’s lead fast bowling coach, says he would be happy for Barber, 22, to play six to eight championship matches this summer, but it will be interesting to see how he fares in white-ball cricket, where there is such a premium on wicket-taking bowlers at the top of the innings.
Amid talk about a new generation having less interest in the long-form game and seven England fast bowlers being at the IPL rather than playing four-day cricket with their counties, Barber says he wants to represent Middlesex and England in all formats.
“Yes, for Twenty20s, you practise yorkers and slower balls, and in the championship it’s about line and length and hitting the top of off stump, but if the ball’s coming out at pace and swinging back in, that’s what you want, whether you’re playing championship or opening the bowling in T20s,” he says.
Barber has two assets that will interest England’s new selection panel over the coming months and years: one is his pace, the other his angle of attack.
The sterility of four right-arm seamers of similar pace operating together as they did in the Auckland Test cannot be repeated, and if George Garton of Sussex is likeliest to become the first left-arm fast bowler to appear in a Test for England since Ryan Sidebottom in 2010, Barber may not be far behind.
Barber has long possessed the knack of propelling a cricket ball at high speed but his ambition was spurred by the sight of England being blown away by Mitchell Johnson in Australia five years ago.
“That was a series where I thought, ‘I want to do that. I want to be that guy who runs in and really intimidates batsmen’. Mitchell Starc is the left-armer I look to most now.
He’s a similar sort of bowler to me in that he’s tall, bowls high pace and swings the ball back in. He’s the one I want to emulate.”
Barber, who is 6ft 3in, did not get here without a struggle. Born and raised in Dorset, he started as a professional at Hampshire but it didn’t work out and he was recommended to Middlesex by Paul Prichard, Dorset’s head coach. Richard
Johnson, their bowling coach, agreed to spend the winter of 2016-17 working with him on an action in need of refinement.
The challenge was to ensure he used all the power he had — using his front side more, being balanced at the crease and bowling as quickly as he could while retaining control. “I’d got into some bad habits and was just using a quick arm,”
Barber said. “It was difficult at first. Now, I’m seeing the effects. I’m a different bowler. I didn’t know which way the ball was going. Now, I know I can swing it in, push it away, and set up a batsman.”
A few weeks after Vettori watched him at Uxbridge, Barber made his Middlesex Twenty20 debut — against Hampshire — in front of 22,000 spectators at Lord’s.
He took one wicket, got the speed gun up to 92mph and cracked Rilee Rossouw on the head. The
speed he recorded at Loughborough was 90.6mph on a system different from the ones used by TV companies and reckoned to be about 4mph slower.
As championship cricket vies with Twenty20 for the attentions of the modern cricketer, it is likely to be fast bowlers who are most conflicted. Why bowl 20 overs a day in one when you can earn more bowling four in the other?
Alan Richardson, who commands at Worcestershire a strong group of fast bowlers, including the promising Josh Tongue and George Scrimshaw, reckons one of the main issues is that limiting age-group cricketers to five-over spells means educating them about how to construct two or three longer spells a day is something
that has to be taught much later, by which time the urge to pack a variety of tricks into four or five overs is already ingrained. “We have to instil patience,” he said.
On the plus-side, white-ball variations can be introduced selectively to the longer formats and could help
future England teams win Tests away from home. Lancashire’s Saqib Mahmood, who like Barber shone in the North-South series, is among those who could take this route to the top.
Article reproduced by kind permission of the Sunday Times.
He fractured the thumb of England’s white-ball captain Eoin Morgan in Middlesex training two weeks ago and recently broke Stuart Meaker’s record for the fastest delivery in testing at the national performance centre at Loughborough, writes Simon Wilde of the Sunday Times..
When Daniel Vettori, the county’s Twenty20 coach, watched him play for the second XI at Uxbridge last summer, he rated him as being as gifted a left-arm speedster as Mitchell Starc at the same age, and in last month’s North-South series in Barbados, watched by Andrew Strauss, he had batsmen ducking for cover.
He could be London’s most dangerous Barber since Sweeney Todd.
Given Middlesex’s intention to rotate their deep pace-bowling resources, with Barber and Steven Finn sitting out the opening game against Northants, Kevin Shine, the ECB’s lead fast bowling coach, says he would be happy for Barber, 22, to play six to eight championship matches this summer, but it will be interesting to see how he fares in white-ball cricket, where there is such a premium on wicket-taking bowlers at the top of the innings.
Amid talk about a new generation having less interest in the long-form game and seven England fast bowlers being at the IPL rather than playing four-day cricket with their counties, Barber says he wants to represent Middlesex and England in all formats.
“Yes, for Twenty20s, you practise yorkers and slower balls, and in the championship it’s about line and length and hitting the top of off stump, but if the ball’s coming out at pace and swinging back in, that’s what you want, whether you’re playing championship or opening the bowling in T20s,” he says.
Barber has two assets that will interest England’s new selection panel over the coming months and years: one is his pace, the other his angle of attack.
The sterility of four right-arm seamers of similar pace operating together as they did in the Auckland Test cannot be repeated, and if George Garton of Sussex is likeliest to become the first left-arm fast bowler to appear in a Test for England since Ryan Sidebottom in 2010, Barber may not be far behind.
Barber has long possessed the knack of propelling a cricket ball at high speed but his ambition was spurred by the sight of England being blown away by Mitchell Johnson in Australia five years ago.
“That was a series where I thought, ‘I want to do that. I want to be that guy who runs in and really intimidates batsmen’. Mitchell Starc is the left-armer I look to most now.
He’s a similar sort of bowler to me in that he’s tall, bowls high pace and swings the ball back in. He’s the one I want to emulate.”
Barber, who is 6ft 3in, did not get here without a struggle. Born and raised in Dorset, he started as a professional at Hampshire but it didn’t work out and he was recommended to Middlesex by Paul Prichard, Dorset’s head coach. Richard
Johnson, their bowling coach, agreed to spend the winter of 2016-17 working with him on an action in need of refinement.
The challenge was to ensure he used all the power he had — using his front side more, being balanced at the crease and bowling as quickly as he could while retaining control. “I’d got into some bad habits and was just using a quick arm,”
Barber said. “It was difficult at first. Now, I’m seeing the effects. I’m a different bowler. I didn’t know which way the ball was going. Now, I know I can swing it in, push it away, and set up a batsman.”
A few weeks after Vettori watched him at Uxbridge, Barber made his Middlesex Twenty20 debut — against Hampshire — in front of 22,000 spectators at Lord’s.
He took one wicket, got the speed gun up to 92mph and cracked Rilee Rossouw on the head. The
speed he recorded at Loughborough was 90.6mph on a system different from the ones used by TV companies and reckoned to be about 4mph slower.
As championship cricket vies with Twenty20 for the attentions of the modern cricketer, it is likely to be fast bowlers who are most conflicted. Why bowl 20 overs a day in one when you can earn more bowling four in the other?
Alan Richardson, who commands at Worcestershire a strong group of fast bowlers, including the promising Josh Tongue and George Scrimshaw, reckons one of the main issues is that limiting age-group cricketers to five-over spells means educating them about how to construct two or three longer spells a day is something
that has to be taught much later, by which time the urge to pack a variety of tricks into four or five overs is already ingrained. “We have to instil patience,” he said.
On the plus-side, white-ball variations can be introduced selectively to the longer formats and could help
future England teams win Tests away from home. Lancashire’s Saqib Mahmood, who like Barber shone in the North-South series, is among those who could take this route to the top.
Article reproduced by kind permission of the Sunday Times.
