Nathan Lyon is Australia’s most ‘Bazball’ player

Nathan Lyon is a predator dressed as prey.

First, you see the generously daubed sunscreen and the specialist sports shades, built for function long before fashion. Then it’s the thoroughly depilated scalp and rodent-like features, like Stuart Little if he was a mouse in human form rather than the opposite. Finally, there’s that apparently average off spin, not so much jagging as hopping off the turf.

This is not something to fear, your intuition wrongly informs you. It doesn’t look impressive, so why should I be impressed?

The Harry Brook first-innings fiasco? Somewhere between desperately lucky and village-level farce. The Joe Root stumping? Cheap as chips. The one bouncing over Jonny Bairstow’s sloppy reverse sweep? A budget dismissal that would’ve lost players their starting spots under previous regimes.

But here’s the thing with Lyon – he doesn’t care you think his wickets are cheap. He deals in cheap. Cheap has made him the third-highest Australian wicket taker ever.

Lyon scavenges scraps, abuses arrogance, both enforces and punishes faults. When he eventually retires, his 500-plus Test wickets will look immensely like his 495 do now – like an absolute barrel load of poles. As we will eventually come to realise as Erling Haaland breaks the men’s all-time goalscoring record from less than six yards out – aesthetics can be crushed by the insurmountable weight of statistical strength.

As underrated as he continues to be, Lyon’s numbers are undeniable. He is the eighth-highest wicket taker in Tests and the fourth-highest spinner. In England, he averages 29.36, 109 wickets in 29 matches at an economy of 2.78. He has the fifth-most Ashes wickets of 21st century players.

Before the series began, Brook identified Lyon as the easiest point of attack in the Aussie bowling corps.

“If he bowls a good ball, I’m going to respect him,” he said. “Other than that, I’m going to try to take him on… If it is a bad ball I’m going to try to hit it for four or six.” When the Yorkshire boy wonder trudged off the turf having been dismissed by the Mighty Mouse for a second time, maybe he got the message.

At surface level, Lyon appears so old-school, so traditional, an off-spinning office manager whose hobbies may include philately and hiking. Yet he is also Australia’s most Bazball player.

Forget Travis Head’s retro moustache and run-a-ball tons, Lyon’s role in this series is to counter Bazball by being Bazball, prioritising wickets above all else. He can go for 229 runs as long as he drags eight Poms down with him. He is a relic repurposed as the future – Depop eat your heart out.

Yet Lyon also means more than just the crucial wickets, beyond the overzealous sun protection and “nice one, Garry”. He represents trust.

To have Lyon to is to have stability, safety, an unerring constant. This is his 99th consecutive Test for Australia. In this Test, he’s bowled more than a third of Australia’s overs and taken eight of their eighteen wickets.

This is a stability England may realise they are lacking. Cold rationality – Lyon’s signature dish – can also be undervalued under the Ben Stokes regime. At least when Jack Leach and Ben Foakes were around it naturally crept in, there was somewhat of a sleeper cell of sanity.

Now those roles are occupied by Jonny Bairstow and Moeen Ali. Yes, of course Bairstow is an exceptional bat and his space in the squad is justified on that basis, but it can be argued his poor glovework cost England 77 runs in Australia’s first innings. As his constant chirping behind the stumps reminds us, Bairstow is anything but sane.

Then there is Moeen. For one glorious, fleeting day, he was a Test star reborn, Lyon with a bushier beard and meaner off-break. And then, as it so often does, logic returned and reality recalibrated. The value of durability rose once more, and Lyon is a majority shareholder. Moeen’s finger may appear the sort of injury that wouldn’t even draw sympathy from a particularly tender mother, but to brethren of his craft it is fundamental.

So, while Lyon managed more than 20 overs in each innings, Moeen has been relegated to bit-part spectator. An injury like his does not recover easily and certainly does not recover without rest. England may already have to replace their replacement, while Lyon continues metronomically on the other side.

On current form, Australia’s persistent twirler will pass 500 Test wickets at Lord’s in the second Test. Once more, the scavenger will scavenge, hiding his evil eyes behind shatterproof Oakley’s. He is everything England needs and will continue to remind them why they need him.