Chris Woakes belongs to a select band of cricketers to have bowled the first ball in a World Cup final. He knows what it's like to have the eyes of the world boring into the back of his skull as he approaches his delivery stride and, when it comes to Test cricket, he even knows what it's like to marshal an unlikely run-chase from five-down for spit. But he's surely never felt pressure quite like his opening spell on the second day in Antigua.
As Woakes trotted in with that familiar arrow-straight approach, buzzing his way through the crease with the neat, incisive lines of a sawblade in a timber-mill, he would have known that he was about to be judged like never before in his international career. And by the time he trooped from the field with the bruised figures of 12-2-54-1, he might have been entitled to wonder if he'd been set up to fail.
An awful lot of platitudes have been trotted out by England's management in the weeks since they chose to dispense with James Anderson and Stuart Broad and their 1,177-wickets-worth of Test-match knowhow. But nothing has jarred with the evidence of a nine-year international career quite like the suggestion - voiced with little conviction by England's captain Joe Root - that a sustained run with the new ball was all that Woakes needed to transform his status from priceless team player to golden-armed attack leader.
The true reasons for Anderson's and Broad's binnings may never be publicly aired - are they really too old, or are they simply being challenged to fight for their places in the summer? Are the shadows that they cast too immense for others to flourish (the charge that was levelled at the women's captain Charlotte Edwards after her ruthless culling in 2016), or was Root's complaint about the lengths that they bowled in England's defeat in Adelaide the final proof that the captain and his star bowlers had reached a fork in the road?
Whatever the truth, this void in England's reasoning - and the inevitable speculation that it has caused - has been thoroughly and damagingly distracting. Even a throwback to that very 2021 chestnut, rest and rotation, would have been preferable to the death by innuendo that Woakes, and to a lesser extent Craig Overton, have endured in the series build-up. Woakes, after all, went more than 12 months - between August 2020 and September 2021 - without a single Test appearance despite being England's reigning Test cricketer of the Year. If this chance to lead the line had been presented as a reward for long service during lockdown, there might have been a few raised eyebrows, but surely a lot more understanding.
Instead, the reasoning has been so weird, even the player himself didn't really seem to believe he warranted it, after his six wickets at 55.33 in the Ashes had exacerbated the gulf between his home and away Test stats - 94 wickets at 22.63 in English conditions, and 31 at 52.38 overseas. Instead, it's as if the post-Ashes intention of the England management had been to rip the players out of their comfort zones, and expose them to the harshest sink-or-swim realities of top-level professional sport - and if that's the case, then fair play, they nailed the brief.
And so it came to that fateful new-ball spell - a Dukes ball, no less, Woakes' weapon of choice in his frequent excursions on home soil. In he charged, with conviction and with the occasional pretty-looking zip past the outside edge. But, assuming Kraigg Brathwaite and John Campbell had kept even half an ear to the ground in the Ashes fall-out, there was never going to be any mystery about his methods.
Full and fuller was the requirement, in a guilelessly gung-ho bid for hooping swing - a display, in fact, that served only to reinforce the wisdom of ages that England have chosen to dispense with on this tour. Anderson and Broad would never have put up with this nonsense, whanging an unresponsive ball into the blockhole time and again, to be drilled back down the ground at an initial rate of seven an over. They'd have dragged those lengths back - much as it seems they did, to Root's chagrin, in Adelaide - and conceded their runs at one an over while priming their orb for that display of reverse-swing that did, briefly, look like transforming England's fortunes in the afternoon session.
"It's obviously going to be talked about, Anderson and Broad, because they are legends but we just have to admit we didn't get it right to start with, and we'll be out to get it right next time," Mark Wood said at the close of play
"I don't think it's about being patient, we set higher standards than just being patient," he added. "We're out here to win. We're trying to get it right now but, as can happen with any bowler, we just didn't get it right to start. We maybe tried a little bit too hard, with the void of Anderson and Broad we wanted to try hard and prove we could do it, maybe that was it. But the way we came back showed good character as a group."
According to Cricviz's Expected Wickets model, England's new-ball effort was their third-least threatening of the past decade, a display outdone only by England's efforts at Melbourne and Sydney at the fag-end of the 2017-18 Ashes - the former on one of the most disgracefully dead drop-in pitches in history; the latter in an asphyxiatingly hot dead-rubber at the SCG, a match in which Root would later keel over with sun-stroke.
England's lack of penetration was exemplified by the 1.5 degrees of swing that their openers located - compared to the 2.5 degrees that West Indies had found in routing England for 48 for 4 on the first morning. You would not have believed that West Indies have been starved of runs in recent encounters as Brathwaite galloped to the fastest fifty of his career, and in the process added his team's first half-century opening stand … since they faced the same opponents in the final Test of their 2018-19 series win. In case Root was unaware, these guys tend to raise their game when England are in town.
England's lack of situational awareness was at times staggering. On the one hand, Root has clearly learned to treasure the pace and penetration of his last remaining 90mph bowler, Wood, and not bowl him into the ground as he did with Jofra Archer in 2019-20. On the other hand, limiting Wood to three overs out of the first 23, while West Indies galumphed to 95 for 1 with close to a boundary an over was another baffling misallocation of his resources.
When finally thrown the ball, Wood duly struck in the second over of his comeback spell, luring Brathwaite with the wide one after tucking him up with another off-the-peg display of sustained pace. That's the sort of lack of guile that pays dividends on surfaces as slow as this, not the sort of optimistic lollipops that Woakes felt obliged to fling at his opponents, as he strained for that elusive swing. By the close, his over-exertions had sent ten deliveries - or nearly one an over - sliding down the leg side, as well as one rank full-toss outside off that Jermaine Blackwood flicked contemptuously for one of the ten fours in Woakes' day's work.
At least Overton got the memo before it was too late. His own England credentials may be hanging by an even more slender thread than his new-ball partner's, but at least having been driven for two fours in his third new-ball over, he swiftly dispensed with the pleasantries when called upon again, and bombed out Campbell with a bouncer just when he was threatening to put the hammer down.
Overton later delivered a useful display of reverse swing as back-up to Wood and Ben Stokes - who was restored to being an actual bowler here, rather than that spurious bang-it-in enforcer who succumbed to a side strain in the Ashes. But as if emboldened by the start that they had been given, as well as the knowledge that all things must pass, Nkrumah Bonner and Jason Holder rode out the threat with broad-batted resistance to inch their side ever closer to parity by the close.
"Of course it's weird," Wood admitted, when asked what it was like to take the field with neither Broad nor Anderson. "They have been there every time. We can't compare ourselves to them, because we are not them. We have to bring what we can do. Unfortunately the best we can do wasn't that first bit. The second bit was a lot better. We have to bring our best next time, so we are on it."