
On Tuesday the screen at Headingley was showing Sonny Baker’s bowling speed. They were impressive figures – 87, 86, 88mph – and you wonder if the bowler himself caught a glimpse. Probably not. Big numbers emblazoned in pixels probably felt like the runs he was leaking.
England’s newest one-day bowler bore the pummelling with good grace, even as South Africa’s Aiden Markram levered him for sixes behind square on the offside and over deep square leg in his second over. Happily, Baker is a phlegmatic sort, because the one record a box-fresh paceman doesn’t dream of achieving is his country’s worst ODI bowling figures on debut.
In Jimmy Anderson’s first T20 in 2007 Matthew Hayden came at him so hard in his first over he nearly decapitated him with a straight drive; Adam Gilchrist took him for three consecutive sixes. Australia set a then record total and Anderson held the worst bowling figures for a T20 debutant for a full 14 years until Serbia’s Michael Dorgan knocked him off top spot (having been knocked around by a Bulgarian called, appropriately, Aravinda de Silva).
It was only this summer that Anderson slipped to third on the list, after Ireland’s Liam McCarthy shed 81 runs from four overs against Shai Hope’s West Indies. Anderson played just 19 T20s; not a bad trade-off to become the most wicket-taking pace bowler in Test history.
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Other reasons to be cheerful? Well, Baker’s disastrous figures may rank as the second-worst ODI bowling debut of all time – but it isn’t even the worst debut in the past 12 months. That honour belongs to Jediah Blades of West Indies, the 23-year-old left-armer who was given the chance to open the bowling with Alzarri Joseph against Bangladesh last December.
Joseph removed Tanzid Hasan and Litton Das for ducks in St Kitts, rendering the visitors nine for two; Blades’s contribution was to give away 29 off his first three overs. His final figures were 6-0-73-0; happily for him, West Indies still overhauled Bangladesh’s 321 with four overs to spare. Last month Blades played his second and third ODIs, and took his first (so far only) wicket.
Given the brutality of modern batting, perhaps it should be no surprise to see newbie bowlers breaking unwanted records. There’s an ever-growing community with catastrophic stories – and Baker can know that he is merely part of a lineage spanning Syd Lawrence to Simon Kerrigan, Jeff Thomson to Shane Warne. The most important part, as everyone knows, is what you do next – and Baker has always been a try‑and-try-again kind of guy.
When he was interviewed in 2022, as a 19-year-old joining Somerset, he said cricket wasn’t even his first choice of sport as a young kid. When he couldn’t get into his primary school football team as an outfield player, he tried to be a goalie. He didn’t make it. “I tried tag rugby and that didn’t go down too well either. So I gave cricket a go.”