Mark Wood and the long road back

Wood played a crucial part in the 3-1 series win in South Africa but things weren’t always this way. Vithushan Ehantharajah reflects on just how far England’s nice guy has come

Wood recorded career-best figures in Johannesburg when England needed him most (Getty)

Basingstoke, like many an English town, is an equal blend of quaint and innocuous. But for Mark Wood, it represents one of the lowest points of his career.

On a September morning in 2016, Wood woke up at his home in Ashington to a message from the ECB informing him of an appointment with an ankle specialist. It was billed, initially, as a precautionary measure.

In April of the same year, he had an operation on his left ankle - a second in five months. But he returned with a bang in the middle of the summer: four wickets for Durham in a T20 Blast semi-final against Yorkshire led to four ODIs against Pakistan and was followed by 35 overs of graft in a Championship match against Surrey. He was selected for the winter’s tour to the subcontinent and, following an appraisal, awarded a central contract for the Tests.

His ankle, though, was swollen by season's end. Those overs against Surrey produced four wickets in a 21-run win that kept his side in Division One. It proved to be in vain with Durham relegated weeks later for financial issues.

As a veteran of ailments to that part of his body, he has a good gauge on what exactly is wrong. This time, though, there was no initial discomfort. Even a scan showed no noticeable damage.

With the team due to leave for Bangladesh later in the week, the ECB set-up the consultation and organised for a car to take Wood on the six-hour drive from Ashington to where the specialist was based - in Basingstoke.

Knowing he did not want to be stuck in a car with a stranger for a 12-hour round-trip, Wood insisted he drive himself and picked up a friend in Newcastle to make a tense journey more of a road trip. The friend cancelled his day of work, spending it instead in the passenger seat, talking the sort of rubbish friends usually talk and reassuring Wood the consultation was going to be fine. It could not have gone any worse.

This particular scan, aided by a dye injected into Wood’s ankle, showed he had been playing the last weeks of the summer with a fracture. He was ruled out of the winter schedule then and there, and booked in for a third operation in 12 months.

Wood spent the drive back home laid across the back seat of the car, unable to drive because of the injections and too distraught to make conversation. Those six hours were spent in silence, right the way to back to Ashington which they finally reached at 4am. According to those closest to him, that day and the news it brought remains the lowest point of his career.

“Basingstoke” has since become a buzzword. A nod not just to that day but dark times when he thought his dream of playing Test cricket was over. He was never comfortable with the idea of specialising away from the red ball. Bowling in whites is all for England was all he ever wanted to do.

On Monday, dressed in those whites albeit scuffed up from a day's graft, he sat in a press conference alongside his captain, Joe Root, man of the match in the fourth Test at Newlands. A long way from Basingstoke, in every sense.

A career-best match haul of nine for 100 and feeling as buoyant as he ever has at the other end of back-to-back Tests. A crucial part of a 3-1 series win in South Africa that could push this team to bigger and better things.

The route from October 2016 to now featured as much worry and set-back as that drive. Four Tests and five wickets over the next two summers were false dawns. But it was in this period where Wood had perhaps his biggest epiphany.

The change of run-up, of course, has been a huge factor. The strain off his ankle allowing him to push through harder at the crease, maintain speeds above 90mph and, ultimately, pick up 18 Test wickets at 14.22 and become a World Cup winner.

But the reason Wood has emerged as the best version of himself is down to a change of mindset. Work with a psychologist has made him far more mentally robust. Accepts that injuries are just the lot of a fast bowler.

There’s no bravado or arrogance to the 30-year old, certainly relative to being an international who possess a skill akin to a superpower. Instead, there’s a quirky sense of humour and a degree of self-doubt. Invariably, the former cloaks the latter, but often too often that uncertainty was indulged.

After days in the field, he would read every match report and comment piece, good or bad, scroll through Twitter and even ask friends watching on TV what commentators were saying about him.

His maiden five-wicket haul in the Caribbean at the start of 2019 - regarded as one of the fastest spells seen by regular observes of English cricket - offered the only reassurance he needs. Now he consumes a lot less and has even deleted Twitter from his phone.

Wood was named man of the match for his efforts in the fourth Test (Reuters)

The body is also working with him now. He eats well, even if he did indulge his license to fuel on carbs during this last Test and treated himself to a burger. Not drinking helps, too.

Rehabilitation is no longer a chore, but as necessary as brushing your teeth and treated as such. A small fortune has been spent on ice machines to aid is recovery at home and he does his best to keep across the latest in trends around ankle support and other fads. Never again will he make the mistake of using the wrong insoles as he did in a Lord’s Test against South Africa in 2017 that resulted in damaging his heel and missing that winter’s Ashes.

Of course, the batting needs a mention. He was always a fit-for-purpose lower-order batsman and many believed he had it in him to be an outright all-rounder when he was younger. But it is unlikely any thought the 95 runs scored across three innings of this tour would have featured seven fours and eight sixes.

He credited net sessions with his father and wife for improving his hitting, though other friends felt hard done by to not get a name check.

Their involvement in his cricket is very much in keeping with Wood as a person. Success is shared with them, such as when he brought a few of them into the changing room at Trent Bridge after he’d taken the wicket to seal the 2015 Ashes. Those friends were there from the start and will be there until the end.

That loyalty and doing right by your mates is part of his personality and is why he has been afforded so much goodwill throughout his career. From Port Elizabeth to here in Johannesburg, players on and off the record have spoken of how pleased they are to see him back playing. Much of that is knowing what he went through to get to this point. But it’s also as simple as the enjoyment of seeing good things happen to good people.

“He’s been great for our dressing room,” beamed Root, looking over at Wood in the press conference. “He’s always full of energy whenever you’re looking for someone to pick the group up, he’s normally the man to say the right thing or tell the wrong joke or whatever it is that gets us in the right space to go out and deliver in these conditions. So it’s great to see him back playing, enjoying his cricket, playing with a smile on his face and hitting a few sixes as well.”

Of course, if Wood was a bad bloke it would not make his story any less significant. The objective toils of emerging from the depths of professional misery, and doing so in the manner Wood has done, is worthy of praise regardless of a personable character.

But there is a sense with Wood that it all feeds in to what England finally have in front of them. A fast bowler of worth but without pretence. A cricketer fragile in frame but now using his inner strength to make himself sturider. The kind of teammate you’d want on your side of the fence and the dining table.

Johannesburg now joins St Lucia as two milestones on a new path for Wood. The hope is all the above factors will see him through to a first Ashes Test in Australia. Even for a player who has to take each game as it comes, Brisbane in November 2021 is now well in his sights. Basingstoke, now, a distant memory.