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Since making an impression for England’s under-19s in 2005, his style has evolved while he keeps taking plenty of wickets
The Sunday after the Lord’s Test in 2005, England’s under-19 team played a one-day game against Sri Lanka at New Road. It was a forgettable business except that Chris Broad’s boy, Stuart, was making his debut and the few spectators there were all chatting about it. He would have stood out anyway, since he was so big and had a shock of blond hair, but they were curious to see the son of someone famous play, someone famous who’d seemed to have stopped playing himself only yesterday. They said the boy had only recently taken up bowling, that he had been a batsman at Oakham school. And you could tell. He had the action of someone who had been taught by good coaches rather than learned for himself.
Broad bowled angry, short and fast and brutish, and he took the first three wickets in a burst. You didn’t need to know a lot about the game to guess that he had what it took to get ahead, especially when so many people who did know were saying it too. Andrew Strauss says that the first time he really noticed Broad was just a year later, when he worked over Ronnie Irani on Twenty20 finals day. Another year after that, he was playing for England. He made his debut on a tour of Sri Lanka in 2007, a late replacement for Matthew Hoggard, though not a like-for-like one. Continue reading...