England dominant as quiet man Atkinson makes right noises with bat and ball

Ask anybody who has played with Gus Atkinson and one word crops up: quiet. He is a young man of few words and of understated emotions, someone who sits quietly in the corner of the dressing room, soaking it all in. This season, though, his actions with bat and ball in hand have spoken as loudly, surely, as those of any new entrant to the England team in recent years.
Having taken 12 wickets on his debut in July, becoming central to a renewed seam attack shorn of the old sweats Stuart Broad and James Anderson, Atkinson has now made his maiden first-class hundred, joining Broad as the last man to do so in a Test at Lord’s. Within the space of two Tests, he has become one of only six players — Gubby Allen, Keith Miller, Lord Botham, Chris Woakes and Broad are the others — to have taken ten wickets and scored a hundred in Tests on the ground.
He has played a key part in this summer’s four consecutive victories and, after events on the second day, it is hard to see anything other than a fifth coming at some point over the next three days. This, despite a sparkling innings from Kamindu Mendis in the final session that brought some respectability to the Sri Lankan batting card, further burnished his reputation as a young player of immense talent and asked questions of his lowly place in the order.
Atkinson’s hundred helped propel England’s score beyond 400 in the morning, after which Sri Lanka staggered to 118 for seven, their top order failing miserably as it had done twice at Old Trafford. The follow-on loomed until Mendis took charge of matters after tea, shielding the tail as best he could — Lahiru Kumara contributed no runs to the ninth-wicket partnership of 42 — and launching three sixes in an innings of 74 that encouraged Ollie Pope not to enforce it.
This was a sensible decision, given the pitch has already shown signs of wear and tear for the spinners and given the seamers had spent 55 overs in the field. Without Mendis’s innings, Pope might have thought differently, but now his team will have to take the longer road, which will please the chief executive of MCC, at least, and those with fourth days tickets. England’s lead was 256 at the close, having lost Dan Lawrence to a catch behind off bat and pad in the seven overs afforded them.
If there were nerves before play, they were not apparent as Atkinson skipped through the 80s and 90s and to a memorable first hundred. The quality of the some of the strokes belied his status as a bowler, primarily, who, in the parlance, is “no mug” with the bat. He glanced his first ball of the morning for four and then hit five more boundaries, the fifth of them a glorious off drive, in moving from his overnight 74 to three-figures in 22 balls only. Not a man to show his emotions generally, he looked thrilled at the outcome.
Sri Lanka, worryingly for them, looked lethargic from the outset, much as they had at Old Trafford on the third morning when they let that Test slip from their grasp. Asitha Fernando eventually took all three remaining wickets to fall, the last of them to a fine, athletic catch in the deep by Milan Rathnayake, who flung himself in front of an appreciative grandstand to bring England’s innings to a close, but the damage had been done.
It was a puzzle why Fernando did not open the bowling, but was symptomatic of the kind of confused thinking that has characterised the visitors’ cricket in this series, and meant he became the second Sri Lankan after Rumesh Ratnayake to take five-wickets in Tests at Lord’s. England’s recovery from 216 for six to 427 all out once more justified the decision not to stiffen the batting or call up another all-rounder after Ben Stokes’s injury.
Two wickets fell to the new ball before lunch, but the start was not without error. Pope wasted a review in Atkinson’s first over, encouraged by Joe Root at first slip, who mistakenly sensed an edge from Dimuth Karunaratne. Root was not at fault in the following over, though, when Nishan Madushka, yet to score, edged Chris Woakes between ’keeper and first slip. The catch belonged to Smith, but the wicketkeeper was leaden-footed and motionless.
It was not a costly miss, as Madushka played on to Woakes shortly afterwards, although one felt a touch of sympathy for the young opener, who had just spent 102 overs in the field with his gloves on — not an easy task. His replacement, Pathum Nissanka, was almost run out immediately after sharp work at short leg from Lawrence, but survived, unlike Karunaratne, who chopped on to his stumps in the final over before lunch.
Olly Stone was the man to strike this time and the wide grin that greeted his second wicket immediately after the break was understandable, given the dark moments that must have accompanied his long hours of rehabilitation from injury. There was added context to the grin, too, given the deliberation with which Matthew Potts had been placed at leg slip and the unerring accuracy with which Nissanka found him.
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Potts was in action soon enough with the ball at the Nursery End, from where he has bowled so well in the past, notably on debut against New Zealand in 2022. The slope encourages the ball to move away from the right-hander and Potts’s opening spell of 7-3-12-2 was further evidence of the danger he poses from that end from the strict line he bowls. He dismissed Angelo Mathews with a fine ball that rocked back the off stump and then found the edge of Dhananjaya de Silva’s bat with another that moved late off the pitch.
This was the first time England had taken the field in a Lord’s Test without Broad or Anderson since 2007. Both were watching from opposite ends of the ground — Anderson in the dressing room, Broad in the commentary box — and the pair might have admired the reconstituted attack, with Stone, Potts and Atkinson complementing the enduring skill and excellence of Woakes, whose subtle variations were a pleasure to watch.
Of the four seamers, Atkinson was the least impressive on this occasion, but he did get Dinesh Chandimal caught in a leg trap and was on hand for the last wicket when Mendis, who had benefited from a bad miss in the deep by Root, was on the charge. In truth, Atkinson’s speeds were a little down on where he had been earlier in the summer. If that could be attributed to weariness, it is weariness of a very enjoyable kind.