he sun shone, the clouds came and went again, the grass grew, and Dom Sibley batted. Mayflies hatched, thrived, mated, died, and some distant nebula grew into a red giant, turned supernova and collapsed into a black hole, and still, Dom Sibley batted. And batted. And batted. And it was utterly glorious. Not to watch, necessarily, Sibley’s got a good game for the radio. He’s someone whose progress you might best follow by looking at the scorecards in the foreign edition of a paper you picked up a day late on holiday some place where you can’t get the internet. But, yes, glorious for the team’s cause, and for England’s supporters. Supporters who had grown so frustrated and bored with the way England played during the spendthrift years, when their top-order squandered their wickets like sailors on leave do their wages. In this one innings, Sibley faced more deliveries than five of his recent predecessors did in their entire careers as opening batsmen. If you add up all the balls Jason Roy faced in the seven Test innings he played against Australia and Ireland last summer, and then double them, you still don’t get close to Sibley’s total. He faced 372 altogether. His hundred came off 312 and was spread over four sessions. Which made it one of the slowest ever scored by an Englishman. He got it, at last, with a firm push down the ground, the ball ambling across the slow outfield till it pulled up out of boredom a few yards in from the boundary rope. Which seemed fitting, and not just because it was the seventh three of his innings. Sibley isn’t an elegant batsman, or a thrilling one. In fact he must have one of the ugliest techniques in recent memory. He holds his bat like it’s something he’s seen people do on TV and decided to try for himself. And his stance, squat, square-on, bow-legged, makes him look like he’s thinking about trying to mount a running horse. Well, easy to tease. But there’s an awful lot to admire in the way he plays. After all, a man’s got to know his limitations, like Dirty Harry said. And Sibley’s certainly pretty familiar with his. In an interview he gave on Thursday night he explained that he really does have a lot of shots, he’s just choosing not to use them. He has, he said, played plenty of Twenty20, where he gets his runs at a decent lick, three times quicker than he does in first-class cricket. People who can remember life before the pandemic might recall that he brought up his first Test century with a reverse-sweep when he was playing against South Africa in Cape Town back in January. At Old Trafford, though, he stuck with his clip off his legs, which brought him 50 of his hundred runs, along with the odd prod through the offside and a couple of pokes down the ground, a limited but effective repertoire. And between them they add up to reveal his other great strength: his attitude towards the game. He has great patience and determination, and a clear sense of what he wants to do and how he plans to do it. That came though, too, in the way he decided to lose all that weight during lockdown. He ran off 12kg after seeing how fit his senior teammates are, and for the lack of any better way to use his time. Sibley’s always had the ability to play big innings, he made his name when he became the youngest player ever to score a double hundred in the county championship back in 2013. What you see here, then, is a man with self-awareness to see that despite his achievements he still needs to get better yet, and the drive to do it, too. These are qualities you need to succeed in Test cricket. Even so there are a lot of people out there, good judges some of them, who are sure he won’t, because they think his curious technique will be found out. And it’s true there are some pretty glaring flaws in his game, like his inability to rotate the strike by picking off singles against the spin-bowling, and his habit of getting caught down leg playing the ball off his hip. But these are problems his attitude can help him fix. He may have to learn, too, how to accelerate. In this innings, he appeared to have as many gears as a penny farthing, and finally got trying, and failing to hurry things along after he and Ben Stokes had both brought up their hundreds. Sibley got out playing his first really aggressive shot, skipping down the pitch to loft Roston Chase to deep mid-wicket his one rash shot in all those hours of batting.