‘I’m calmer, I don’t punch tables now’ - Behind Harry Brook’s newfound temperament

“If you’d have asked me that about four or five years ago, it’d have probably been a different answer,” Brook says. When he was playing under-19 cricket, he punched a table and broke his hand after being dismissed. He describes it as a turning point. “Ever since then, I’ve just sat back down whenever I’ve got out,” he says. “Put my bat and stuff away and cracked on.

“I’ve worked on that side of the game massively. To be a successful cricketer for a long period of time, you’ve got to be level-headed, if you’re up and down and all over the place, the game will swallow you up. So enjoy the good moments, but there could always be a bad moment around the corner. So don’t get too high or too low.”

The other way to banish anger at getting out is to never get out, and Brook has made a solid attempt at that too. The 24-year-old has this winter become a T20 world champion and scored more runs in his first nine Test innings than any other man - 819 balls for 809 runs, with four hundreds and three fifties. This by a man who in 2019 told The Yorkshire Post: “I’d probably count myself more as a white-ball player than a red-ball player.”

It has been, Brook understates, “a good year”. “I’ve just tried to live life the same as I was before,” he says. “Just try to play as much golf as I can.”

He flew home from New Zealand via the United States and a stint with St Louis Cardinals, now that he is a Major League Baseball ambassador.

It may still be the case that he is more of a white-ball player, and he is long on opportunities to demonstrate as such. Brook will make his IPL debut next month, bought by Sunrisers Hyderabad for pounds 1.3 million. He is a certainty for England’s 50-over World Cup defence later this year despite having played only three ODIs (such is modern cricket).

There is also the prospect of a first full Test summer, with Ireland and Australia the visitors. Last year’s World Cup win is the highlight of his career - for now. “We’ve got the Ashes coming up this summer, if we get a win there that could be a close contender,” he says.

Brook’s first taste of international cricket was a dampener: a 13-ball ten in a T20 pursuit of 225 against West Indies in January last year. By September, he had still never played a Test or an ODI, and had a high score of 28 from four T20 appearances. His blistering start to the first-class summer - 916 runs in ten innings - was compelling, but England stuck with Jonny Bairstow, who blitzed four hundreds and a fifty in a sparkling run of form.

When Bairstow broke his leg playing golf, Brook came in at short notice to face South Africa at the Oval for his Test debut. “It was such a weird week that on my debut I can’t really remember much of it,” he says. He started with 12, was player of the series in seven T20s in Pakistan, became a world champion, and then smashed 153 from 116 balls in the first Test in Rawalpindi. Now he is undroppable, and when Bairstow returns it will be in place of another.

England’s tactic, Brook says, is simply about putting pressure on bowlers, and he has become the poster boy for their swashbuckling batting. “I don’t feel like I’m leading at all, I’m just following orders,” Brook says. “Stokesy [Ben Stokes] is leading at the minute. The way he’s going out and playing his cricket is so good to watch.And it’s not like we’re just going out and slogging, there is method behind the madness.”

It is fitting that Brook is leading the charge for Stokes and his fearless brand of cricket, given his story of an injury caused by frustration. Stokes missed the 2014 World T20 because he broke a hand punching a locker. “Stokesy’s definitely leading from the front,” Brook says. “There’s been a few dodgy dismissals but if the captain’s getting out in funky ways as well then it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Being run out by Joe Root without facing a ball in Wellington is fairly funky, if not Brook’s fault. “I was shocked more than anything that it just happened,” he says, “and I was walking off the pitch. He said sorry and we had a drink after.”

For the foreseeable future, Brook is going to be a constant on the biggest occasions in English cricket. As he developed, he was seldom able to watch them. On the day Stuart Broad took eight for 15 against Australia at Trent Bridge in 2015, Brook was playing for Yorkshire Under-17 against Derbyshire. When pushed for any Ashes memories that defined him as a youngster, he comes up short. “I don’t think I watched that much,” he says. “I was always out trying to get in the nets and play with my mates, and playing in the nets with my dad.”

He still strives to outdo his father, David. Brook took stumps at 184 not out in the first innings in Wellington, and said he had his eyes set on 210, David’s best score, but he added only two runs.

Familial records are not the only ones on Brook’s mind. He admitted at Mount Maunganui, when he was out for 89 off 81 balls, that Gilbert Jessop’s England record for the fastest red-ball hundred was on his mind. In Brook’s second Test, he came up four balls shy in the first innings and was out for 87 off 65 in the second. He had never heard of Jessop before that match. “Who did he get his hundred against?” he asks. He is told it was a 1902 Ashes Test at the Oval. “Jeez. Were there no fielders?” It sometimes feels that way when Brook is batting, and he will surely grace an Ashes Test at the Oval soon.

- The Times

Originally published as ‘I’m calmer, I don’t punch tables now’ - Behind Harry Brook’s newfound temperament