By Richard Edwards
TOBY Roland-Jones became the first cricketer with a double-barrelled surname to play for England since 1935 when he made his Test bow against South Africa at the Oval last week.
His appearance, though, was a throwback in more ways than one.

Bowling with an action that wouldn’t be far off a coach’s dream, Roland-Jones delivered the kind of back-to-basics performance that wasn’t sexy but was mightily effective.
It was left to Ben Stokes and Moeen Ali to steal the show in a Test that made England’s previous performance at Trent Bridge seem little more than a distant nightmare. Roland-Jones’ debut, meanwhile, was the stuff of dreams.

On a pitch that offered him assistance throughout, the Middlesex man put the ball on the proverbial sixpence and couldn’t have been better value for his match-figures of eight for 129.
At a time when more and more emphasis is placed on pace, he once again reminded the Test match lovers of this country that the rudimental skills of the great English seamer are as much a part of the summer as strawberries and cream and Royal Ascot.
No 90mph thunderbolts – just the priceless ability to jag the ball off the seam at a reasonable pace coupled with a nagging line and length that none of the South Africans ever looked comfortable against.

“Since 2005 we’ve focused a lot on pace,” says former England seamer Phil DeFreitas, himself no stranger to the qualities that are so abundant in the 29-year-old new boy.
“Yes, we had Matthew Hoggard who swung the ball and obviously Jimmy Anderson but there has been more of an emphasis on getting the ball down the other end as quickly as possible.

“Roland-Jones has decent pace but he moves the ball off a classic English length and that was what really stood out for me. He was always making the batsmen play.”
His Monday dismissals of Temba Bavuma and Vernon Philander were a classic illustration of the skills he has brought to this side. Both men were LBW, with Bavuma playing with his bat behind his pad to cover any away movement from the man whose hat-trick sealed the County Championship for Middlesex at Lords last September.

Philander was then all at sea against a fuller delivery first ball – a ball that was idiosyncratic of Roland-Jones’ relentlessly accurate approach from the moment he was thrown the ball by captain Joe Root in the Oval gloom on Friday night.

(The Independent)