England hopeful Moeen might be ‘able to go’ for Headingley Test
England are hopeful that Moeen Ali‘s spinning finger has healed sufficiently for him to play a full half within the third Ashes Test at Headingley, which begins on Thursday.
Moeen split the skin on the highest knuckle of his spinning finger throughout the first Test at Edgbaston, his first red-ball look in 21 months after Jack Leach’s lower-back stress fracture prompted England to ship him an SOS name. He returned figures of three for 204 in 47 overs.
His omission for the second Test at Lord’s owed partially to a inexperienced pitch at a venue that hardly ever fits spinner, however Ben Stokes admitted: “It would have been a completely different conversation if Mo hadn’t had his finger issue that he did last week.”
Along with Rehan Ahmed, who was added to the squad for the second Test as cowl, Moeen bowled on a follow strip on the sting of the sq. on every of the primary three days of the Test, watched carefully by England’s spin-bowling coach Jeetan Patel. “It’s the best I’ve ever seen him bowl,” Patel stated.
“Fingers crossed that in the next couple of days, he gets to rest it and he gets to Headingley and he’s ready to go,” Patel stated. “It was pretty disgusting at the end of the Test… we’ve tried to look after it as much as we can. It’s looking in really good shape; it’s healed really, really well.”
Moeen’s harm owed to the prouder seam on the purple Dukes ball than the white Kookaburra utilized in limited-overs cricket, in addition to the sharp spike in his workload. “Mo hasn’t bowled 30 overs [in a day] in a while and that was always going to be part of the risk of bringing him in,” Patel stated.
“But we knew that and he knew that – and he still said yes, and we still asked him. Is there a way to look after your fingers? Just bowl. It’s probably the only way to do it: bowl regularly. He bowls four overs a game so he’s probably not used to it and he hasn’t bowled with a Dukes for two years.”
Another England bowler, Olly Stone, lasted solely three balls on his comeback from harm on Friday evening earlier than strolling off the sphere. “Hopefully he is OK and will be fine for our last match on Sunday,” Shaheen Shah Afridi, his Nottinghamshire team-mate, stated.