sport news How fit-again Ollie Robinson is sounding out Ashes enemy trends now
It is a sign of how Ollie Robinson’s status has changed over the past 12 months that he spent yesterday training at Hove after being instructed by his ECB employers to sit out the current round of County Championship action.
For it was in Sussex’s corresponding fixture against Leicestershire this very week last year that Robinson, desperate to explode myths that he did not care enough about representing his country, insisted on playing despite suffering from a bout of food poisoning and within minutes of sending down a solitary over found himself on a drip.
The rare piece of good news after several days of bad from an English seam-bowling perspective is that the 29-year-old is feeling fit and raring to go for the Ashes, despite reporting stiffness following career-best match figures of 45.4-10-117-14 versus Worcestershire last week.
‘It was just cramp in the right hamstring. Something I’ve never actually had before. I walked off the field thinking: “I don’t really know what this is”.
'Five minutes later, I realised it was cramping, there was nothing more serious and it was just me getting back into the workloads, really,’ said Robinson.
Ollie Robinson (centre) and Steve Smith (left) have been playing together at Sussex recently
The two are set to come up against each other during the Ashes later this summer
Smith has had a tough time of it at Sussex but is one of the best players in the world
‘Forty-five overs was the most I’d bowled for a while and you have to put your body through that sometimes to get it to the place that you want.’
Subsequent caution from the England team hierarchy towards a player who had a cortisone injection in his back on the eve of this season was understandable with Olly Stone and Jofra Archer both suffering set-backs this week that will prevent them being considered for either the one-off Test against Ireland from June 1 or the Ashes opener at Edgbaston 15 days later.
And a route they felt able to go down after Robinson shook off the rust of a single-wicket display against former club Yorkshire in his first outing of 2023, with two seven-wicket bags at New Road.
‘It’s obviously slightly different against lesser batters, the top guys wouldn’t get out to a few of those deliveries, but it was nice to feel in a bit of rhythm and it was coming out the hand nicely,’ said Robinson.
‘The little things that I do with my fingers and the pressure that I use to
