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Edgbaston's post-match celebrations were a couple of drinks deep when Jack Leach came out with the line that best sums up England’s revolutionary new approach to Test cricket.
Rival teams might be better, he told a delirious dressing room, but none would be braver, after they transformed a record run chase of 378 into a seven-wicket cruise in defeating India.
‘It was the realisation from me that India played a lot of the cricket in that game. For three days, we had been outplayed,’ Leach tells The Mail On Sunday.
‘They’ve got a great team, it feels like they’ve got all bases covered, but that mentality we seem to have at the moment allowed us to go and be daring, to play in that way. Our way. That’s what we are capable of.
‘Sometimes the only people stopping you playing the way you want are yourselves. I think I’d had a beer and started chatting a bit of rubbish but I guess the game of Test cricket is played so much in the mind, and that’s what I wanted to get across.’
England's Jack Leach talks about the ups and downs of playing test cricket for his country
Leach celebrates with his England team-mates during England's test match against India
As did Ben Stokes, the on-field orchestrator of England’s jeopardy-facing Test cricket strategy, who borrowed Leach’s words during post-match media commitments to explain the attitude necessary for a team who have gone from being unable to buy a win to one who gamble the house on it and hit the jackpot.
But as Leach explains, ahead of an attempt to win a fifth straight match of 2022 against World Test Championship leaders South Africa this week at Lord’s, the daring nature does not come naturally.
Particularly for Leach, whose modus operandi in establishing himself as England’s first-choice spinner was risk averse, testing opponents’ patience with metronomic accuracy. Therefore a request from the think-tank of Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum ‘to bowl more attacking balls for a longer period of time,’ has taken some getting used to.
‘There are times when I want to revert back, when I want to stick mid-on or mid-off back and I’m probably leaning towards that safer way of going about things,’ he says.
‘But when Stokesey tells you, “No, you’re having the man in”, I know that’s OK because then if the batter comes down the pitch and whacks me for six he’s clapping me.
Leach and England captain Ben Stoke have a close relationship and has backed his bowler
‘It’s not about the end result, it’s about the process in this team now and that message is something that’s really easy to follow. Some days that is going to go really well for you and on others it won’t come off but as long as we have a way of doing things and trust it, we believe it will work more times than not, and that’s really exciting.’
Never in international cricket have things come off as well for the Somerset slow left-armer as they did in the third Test against New Zealand when, bowling to fields that challenged the opposition to hit him over the top, he joined Graeme Swann as only the second England spinner in 50 years to take a 10-wicket haul at Headingley.
It highlighted a drastic transformation in fortunes for Leach. Until then, he had not taken a wicket on the first day of seven previous home Tests. In the second innings, in keeping with Stokes’s fondness for the unconventional, he was thrown the new ball. ‘I’m learning to love these things,’ he says with a chuckle.
Typical of his England career to date, though, a
