Rebuilding Jake Ball, England's forgotten man

NICK FRIEND: Over the course of half an hour, Ball is an open book: candid and brutally thoughtful as he recounts a sobering journey towards returning to the bowler he was when he first arrived on the international scene and enjoying the game again

Jake Ball is speaking at the end of the T20 Blast group stage, and life is good. Nottinghamshire dropped just four points in qualifying for the knockout phase. The strength in depth of their white-ball unit is laughable; Imad Wasim is batting lower for the county than he does for Pakistan.

Ball sits jointly as the highest wicket-taker in the competition, revelling in his role as de facto leader of an attack missing Harry Gurney to a season-ending shoulder injury. More importantly, he is enjoying his cricket once more because, for a while, the enjoyment and satisfaction disappeared.

And just like that, an interview initially set up to preview a quarter-final against Leicestershire takes a worthwhile turn. The last three years have been difficult: a potent cocktail of injury problems and a mental struggle that, at first, he kept to himself.

In the summer of 2016, he made his Test debut at Lord’s. Three months later, he took five wickets on his ODI bow in Bangladesh. The world was his oyster, until it wasn’t. The last of Ball’s international appearances came more than 800 days ago, a reality with which it took him some time to come to terms.

For the moment, his name is back on the shelf alongside many others who have found themselves discarded. He didn’t feature among England’s 55-man training squad at the start of this coronavirus-impacted season, a sign of how far his stock has diminished. “At the minute, I feel quite far away, to be honest,” he admits.

His record reads: three Test wickets at 114.33 apiece; 21 ODI wickets at 46.66; two T20I wickets at an average of 41.50.

“The numbers that you finish with are the numbers you’re going to look at for the rest of your life,” he says, “and I don’t particularly like my England numbers at the minute.

“I know I’m a much better bowler than what my England record says, and the rest of my record says that. It is a little bit frustrating but there have been loads of people over the years with hard luck stories.”

He is at pains to stress that his story is not unique, but that fact made coping no easier when a steep fall followed his initial rise.

“It’s been a tough couple of years, to be honest,” he reflects. “When you’ve played at the top of the game in international cricket, you want to keep going and keep pushing.

“Injuries stopped me and then eighteen months after playing international cricket, I couldn’t even get in The Hundred competition. That was another big blow. It does knock your confidence.

“But you have to put it behind you and start enjoying your cricket again. It doesn’t last long and you’re going to get setbacks.”

^{Ball's last Test came at the beginning of the 2017/18 Ashes series}

Ball traces the root of his own problems back to the winter Ashes series of 2017, when – short of full fitness after an ankle issue – he was picked to play in the first Test at Brisbane. A single wicket later, he was dropped; that was the only action he saw until the final ODI of the tour.

By the time that game arrived, almost three months later, he recalls feeling “mentally cooked” and “just ready to get home, unfortunately”.

“To play for England is unbelievable and you always manage to get yourself up,” he adds, “but I think having spent so long just staring at hotel walls and dealing with stuff the way I dealt with it, it wasn’t very healthy for me. By the time that game came, I was drained.

“When I left Australia, I was told to go back to county cricket, show what I can do and take wickets.”

In the first month of the 2018 campaign, he took 25 County Championship wickets at 15.76 apiece but was left out of the subsequent Test squad for the two-match series against Pakistan.

“At that point, my head got down a little bit,” he explains. “I was like: ‘What more could I have possibly done to get in this England side if that wasn’t good enough? What is good enough now?’

“After that, I spiralled a little bit and I didn’t enjoy my cricket at all in that season. Then, I picked up the injury, so it was quite a mentally tough year and a half.

“When I got selected for The Ashes, that was like the pinnacle for me. It was probably the best thing that had ever happened to me. Going into that game, I was definitely undercooked. I didn’t have nearly enough overs under my belt, and then to get dropped straight afterwards was a very tough time.

“When you’re away in Australia and the families weren’t there at that time, to shut yourself away in a room and deal with it yourself is not very healthy. I spiralled out of control from there.”

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There are parallels in what he describes with the summer just faced by England, where international cricket has been restricted to bio-secure bubbles which allow for little escapism.

He points to those on the fringes and the need for a “good, strong network around you – people that you can talk to and get things out in the open”. Given his time again, the 29-year-old would do things differently.

“I probably went about it the wrong way,” he says. “I tend to just brush things under the carpet and say that things will be all right. But I actually started opening up about it last year and I talked to people. I talked to Peter Moores about it. But until then, I did just brush it under the carpet as one of those things.

“Actually, when you piece it all together, it’s mentally quite a tough thing that I went through and I probably didn’t deal with it the best way. I thought I’d try to deal with it myself; that was probably something that was a step too far for me on my own.

“As soon as I started opening up to people and getting it out in the open, that’s when I started accepting it a bit more and I managed to get through it. That was a big step.

“Everyone deals with this stuff in different ways; I’ve learnt that I do need to start talking more when I’m going through a tough time. Now, I know that about myself. That’s one bit of advice I’d give to anyone going into that England side now: make sure that you’ve got a good, strong network around you because it really does count.”

A triple stress fracture that curtailed his 2018 season compounded matters – an injury that initially presented itself as side pain rather than a back problem.

Looking back to his battle for form in the summer that followed, he believes the two are psychologically intertwined; the fear of a reoccurrence, combined with a new-found tendency to worry over each and every niggle, subconsciously preventing him from operating at full throttle.

He took just 15 red-ball wickets in 10 games in 2019 at a strike rate of 98.7 as Nottinghamshire were relegated without winning a match – by a considerable distance, the least profitable English summer of his career.

^{Jake Ball is the top wicket-taker in the T20 Blast this season}

“When you’ve been out for so long and you don’t want it to happen again, every little thing you feel worries you,” he explains. “If you’ve got one little niggle, you might hold back a lot more than you normally would if you knew that you were fit and firing, thinking: ‘Oh, I hope it’s not a stress fracture; I want to stay fit this year.’ It’s things like that.”

It all led to a personal nadir at the draft for what was meant to be the inaugural edition of The Hundred. He sat and watched the drama unfold, hopeful of collecting one of 120 spots across eight 15-man squads. Only, his name was never called. Gradually, minute by minute, the reality hit home.

“I had quite a dark half an hour afterwards,” he recalls. “It was probably the lowest moment.”

Despite struggling in the County Championship, he had enjoyed a decent Royal London Cup campaign in the months beforehand, taking 14 wickets in eight games – hardly bad going at a ground as batsman-friendly as Trent Bridge.

Just 15 months previously, he had been a key member of Eoin Morgan’s white-ball unit and until his back problem ruled him out of the white-ball leg of England’s tour of Sri Lanka in the winter of 2018, he had been included in every ODI squad since his debut two years earlier, with one eye on a home World Cup emerging over the horizon.

Under Morgan, England often speak of operating in cycles. While David Willey has been cast as the unlucky man to miss out on the 15-man party, it is worth remembering that Ball, too, had been a regular feature until his body let him down; between 2016 and 2018, he played 18 ODIs and held a white-ball central contract. And although watching his teammates emerge victorious was a thrill, he admits that he struggled to avoid reminiscing of what might have been.

“There were elements that were definitely hard,” he reflects. “It was quite a tough time. Obviously, it was unbelievable winning the World Cup and I was as happy as anyone in England for us to win it because I’d played a part in it, but there was always that little bit in your head thinking about if I hadn’t got injured the winter before.

“Would I have been in the squad? Obviously when it came to it, David Willey missed out, so it might not have worked out like that, but you always have it in the back of your head – that it potentially could have been me if I’d gone to Sri Lanka and performed well.

“That was another tough time, but I don’t think you can dwell on it. You just have to look at what that World Cup win has done for cricket in England.”

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Looking back now, Ball believes being able to put his England experience behind him has helped in overcoming “a barrier that could have quite easily spiralled out of control”.

He adds: “There’s definitely pride in having come through it. I was at a definite crossroads, where if I had another season like I had the year before, I’ve got one year left on my Notts contract and you’re thinking: ‘If I perform like that, then they’re not going to want to keep me.’

“I look at how I’ve come out the other side of what I’ve gone through with a lot of pride. It would have been quite easy for somebody to crumble and say: ‘Nah, that’s it – I’m done.’

“Whereas I’ve dealt with it now and I certainly feel a lot mentally stronger than I ever have. Having come out the other side, I feel like I can deal with most things.”

There can have been few more pressured roles as an England cricketer in recent times than as a tall, spritely seamer, given the weight of expectation and breadth of discussion around the need for sheer pace.

Ball touches on the challenge of slotting into a side featuring James Anderson and Stuart Broad, complete with 1,114 Test wickets between them and the inferiority complex that can accompany rubbing shoulders with two all-time greats of the game. “As hard as it is, you almost need to try to out-bowl Jimmy and Broady,” he laughs. “I know not many people have done that over the last ten years.”

He wonders, too, whether it might have turned out differently had circumstances allowed. Of his four Tests to date, two came in Mumbai and Chennai, with another in Brisbane – hardly grounds notorious for their assistance of young seamers. He doesn’t offer this as an excuse, but merely as another example of his thoughts in the years since.

“It can be mentally tough that way,” he adds. “I didn’t feel like England saw the best of me because I didn’t play on pitches that suited me. I was doing a role that wasn’t me at all. I think you have to have a little bit of luck in where you get your games as well.

“And then, you don’t get back in and people look at your record and say that you were terrible. But the numbers don’t always tell the full story. That’s a thing that you have to live with and put behind you.”

^{It is easily forgotten that Ball was a prominent member of Eoin Morgan's white-ball side until a back injury ruled him out of a 2018 tour to Sri Lanka}

Scrolling through his Twitter feed after struggling at the Gabba is another memory. “I looked at stuff until probably the third day,” he remembers, “and it was not very nice, to be honest, what people were writing about me, especially when I knew that I wasn’t at 100 per cent fitness.

“But I think people are allowed an opinion and they’re allowed to voice it. It goes with the territory of being an England cricketer, and even at Notts we get people messaging you on Twitter. You just have to deal with it and laugh it off at times. As long as you know in yourself that you’re happy, then that’s all that matters to me now.”

Over the course of half an hour, he is an open book: candid and brutally thoughtful as he recounts a sobering journey towards rebuilding himself as the bowler he was when he first arrived on the international scene.

He thinks he’s there now. “I’m probably bowling the best I’ve ever bowled,” he says. Certainly, this year’s T20 Blast record would suggest so: 14 wickets in seven games, a victim every 10.7 deliveries – not to mention 10 wickets in three Bob Willis Trophy appearances.

“But there were probably people when I was in the England side who felt that they should be in the England side and they felt far away. Everyone has been in that position.

“We’ve got some great young bowlers; obviously, Craig Overton is absolutely tearing it up in four-day cricket, Ollie Robinson as well – people like that are quite rightly ahead of me, but if I did ever get an opportunity again, I have to be ready to take it.

“If it comes sooner rather than later, it would be a good thing. But if it doesn’t, then so be it. As long as I’m enjoying my cricket, that’s the main thing for me this year. I’ve started enjoying my cricket again.”

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