The hard yards pay off for Tom Haines, mature beyond his years

It was, by any stretch, the most remarkable note on which to end a season. For three-and-three-quarter days at Hove, Tom Haines was on the field.

First, he lost the toss and paid the consequences, captaining a young Sussex side that had struggled all season to take regular wickets. Glamorgan batted for 106.2 overs in the September sunshine and a bleak County Championship summer for the locals looked like having a miserable, drawn-out conclusion. Only once a ninth-wicket stand worth 96 runs in 12.4 overs had finally been broken could Haines belatedly get to work.

Cricket has always been quick to nominate various skillsets as its toughest art – bowling leg-spin, catching a ball on the run over your shoulder, completing a difficult take unsighted down the legside – but there can be few things more mentally draining than Haines' marathon.

In Sussex's first innings, he carried his bat for the first time in his career, stranded with his county still 275 runs behind. He was unbeaten on 108. So, midway through the match's third day – and with Glamorgan at this point holding firm designs on a final-day promotion push – Haines was invited to follow on.

"Literally I just walked off, sat down, had a drink and went straight back out there," he tells The Cricketer.

He resisted the temptation to begin his second innings as he'd finished his first, instead respecting the fickle nature of the job against the new ball but benefiting from a body that was simultaneously knackered and in the groove. "Your movements are in a rhythm of doing things," he says, "so it's much nicer doing that than having a long break between. But you have to mentally refresh yourself and say you have a job to do for the team.

"It is tiring. You're constantly wired when you're batting, you're constantly in your zone. But it's something I really enjoy, just batting for a long period of time. I get great satisfaction from that. It's tough to have to back it up in the field as well, but that's where fitness levels and mental strength come into play."

^{Haines made two centuries in four hours on the penultimate day of the season (Warren Little/Getty Images)}

By the close of play, something quite staggering had happened. Frankly, you have never seen anything like it. Whatever job he believed there was to be done, it surely was not this. Four hours after running out of partners, Haines was not out on 121. At the other end, fellow opener Ali Orr, 21, had made his way to 185. Sussex were 312 without loss, had erased the biggest deficit following on without losing a wicket in first-class history, and Haines had hit two centuries in a session-and-a-half.

Even then, Orr's flamboyance meant he wasn't even the star of the show. "He's transformed his game this year," adds Haines. "The way he plays spin now is ruthless. He makes it much easier for me at the other end because he just piles the pressure on the spinners. So, they have to bring the seamers back."

For countless reasons, though, Haines' was an extraordinary, superhuman effort – not least as a feat of concentration that defied reasonable willpower in a dead rubber, but also because Haines missed a vast chunk of the season with a fractured metacarpal – an injury, caused by a delivery from Chris Wright that leapt and caught him, that kept him out between mid-July and the end of August. "Bloody painful," he says. "When it hit me, I knew." His hand was too swollen inside his glove to move it and he retired hurt in the next over.

When you know how much Haines loves batting – he is unashamedly a graduate of the Alastair Cook school, and Haines credits a peptalk from the former England captain during the curtailed 2020 campaign for his success since – it doesn't take much imagination to appreciate the agony that forced him to call time on his innings.

Cook's advice when they met after Essex had beaten Sussex in the Bob Willis Trophy was simply to hit more balls than anyone else. Haines took that onboard: seven of his eight first-class centuries (and nine of 11 fifties) have come in the 26 games since.

Against Middlesex in 2021 he pulled off a similar episode of defiance: after fielding for 161 overs as a stand-in skipper, he made 156 in 90.1 overs. His dismissal precipitated a lower-order collapse and 5.3 overs later the innings was over; following on, he hit 87 and only earned his first respite of the match on its fourth afternoon.

He averages 48.1 in the last two red-ball summers, compared to 24.5 before. The gradient of that shift has landed him an England Lions excursion to the United Arab Emirates, his first such involvement after missing out last winter. Then, some observers – perhaps hastily after a single profitable summer – bemoaned that he hadn't made the cut for a trip to Australia. The reality, though, is that one season's work is no sample size on which to be selected.

^{Haines is one of two openers on England Lions' training camp in the UAE (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)}

"I wouldn't say I was really down when I didn't get picked," he recalls. "I just knew to move on, have another good year this time and try to push my name forward for selection. That was more my aim."

And it's through that workaholic approach – Haines has already been back in the nets at Hove, batting against Ollie Robinson to prepare himself for the next month, with one eye on the Lions tour of Sri Lanka post-Christmas – that an opening will eventually come in the senior setup.

At 24, Haines might be Sussex's captain and heartbeat, but he remains a child by international standards, and it has been one of the failings of the last decade that so much responsibility at the top of England's order has been placed on the shoulders of youngsters still learning their trade.

For that reason, there is an excitement in Haines' voice at going into this training camp as a junior player. At almost any other county in the land, that would still be his job description. But Sussex's circumstances – running out of senior players and betting all their chips on youth – have forced him to mature quicker and further. In Haines at least, that gamble appears to have paid off.

"I'm thankful for the leadership roles I've had at Sussex," he says, "and I think it will help me in my long-term development. I definitely feel that captaincy has opened my eyes. It has helped me to mature as a player and a person as well. But it will be nice to go into a new environment in a different role. I'll be there as a guy on my first Lions tour. So, that will be a learning for me, as will fitting into a new group."

Two years ago, he was playing for his future, yet now is the captain in two formats and the fulcrum of all that is good about Sussex's red-ball cricket. As the curtain came down on a chaotic year that ended with the departure of Ian Salisbury for non-cricketing reasons, Haines – who only turned 24 in late October – was the county's only authority figure offering any public sign of leadership.

When finally dismissed against Glamorgan for 177 – Orr, who will be in an England Lions squad before long and has more than a hint of Marcus Trescothick about his game, had earlier been lucklessly run out for 198 – Haines had been on the field for 261.2 overs without reprieve, and Sussex – almost entirely off his own bat – had staved off defeat.

^{Ali Orr, Haines' opening partner, isn't far off higher recognition of his own (Harry Trump/Getty Images)}

The greatest frustration for Haines was that summer ended there. It's hard for most of us to imagine the feeling of scoring 285 runs in two days, let alone the feeling of knowing that you'll have to wait seven months for the next chance to capitalise on that form.

"It was weird," he admits, "because the month off in the middle refreshed me a bit. Usually, by that time in the year, you're ready for the end of the season – you're quite physically and mentally tired. But for me it was different, having that period of time off." There is an irony too in breaking his hand in this of all years as an opening batter, having slaved through season upon season on tricky green-tops, only to miss out on the chance to properly take advantage of 2022's summer of runs.

Haines laughs at that suggestion of injustice: "You can't choose when it happens, can you? It would have been frustrating, no matter what year. Injuries happen. It was just something I had to try and deal with."

For that, he took himself away for a week with his girlfriend but otherwise kept close to Sussex's scores and livestreams. The addition of Cheteshwar Pujara as overseas player through 2022 – he has re-signed for next year as well – gave him something else to do: pester him for wisdom.

You get the sense that Pujara – "an absolute legend of a guy" – was milked dry for knowledge and insight by the end of a summer in which he led Sussex to the Royal London Cup semi-finals in Haines' absence. His popularity – not to mention weight of runs – made him one of the circuit's best acquisitions, particularly for a youthful squad in need of direction.

"Someone who trains the way he does sets the standard for everyone else," he says. “When you're as good as he is on the field but you're still putting the hours in off the field, it doesn't give anyone else the excuse not to do that. He hits loads of balls, but his attitude is brilliant and he's a proper example for a young squad."

^{Cheteshwar Pujara's presence has been a huge boost to a young Sussex squad (Michael Steele/Getty Images)}

Haines puts some of his improvements against spin down to the influence of Pujara and their conversations, while the impact of Grant Flower as Sussex's batting coach has been a major positive; the chance to further hone that side of his game in the UAE is one of the practical benefits to being selected on the trip as the junior of two openers – Haseeb Hameed is the other.

More immediately, however, the main takeaways from his selection – via a phone call from Mo Bobat – are a feeling of vindication for the hard yards put in and a validation for the 2,117 first-class runs scored in the last two summers, regardless of the division in which they've come. (He is one of nine players in the 15-man squad who spent last season in Division Two.)

"Just to be selected shows that you've been rewarded for what you've done," he says. "I just want to show a desire to improve because that's one thing they want from people. I'm very keen to keep on doing that over the next few years as well.

"I'm really excited to be part of it. I can't wait to get out there and get going. It's an exciting time. It's nice to be recognised. I feel like I've had a decent couple of years as an opener, and I want to keep improving. That's all I want to do: keep impressing people, keep working hard at my game."

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