The relentlessness of Ollie Robinson: County cricket's metronome

By Nick Friend

It is easy at a time like this to pine for the certainties that shape our summer. For those at Hove, Robinson's persistent excellence has become one such vision, bringing about 137 County Championship wickets in the last two years.

To adapt an old adage, you are never – in county cricket – more than six feet away from a victim of Ollie Robinson.

Simon Harmer has taken 140 wickets across the last two County Championship campaigns; Robinson is just three behind. There were 74 in 2018, a further 63 last time around – albeit in just 11 games. On three separate occasions in 2019, he collected a match haul in double figures; against Middlesex alone, he took 24.

He has developed into a suffocating, irrepressible presence – a metronomic threat to batsmen up and down the country.

It is easy at a time like this to pine for the certainties that shape our summer. For the members at Hove, the sight of Robinson galloping to the crease has become one such vision – a déjà vu, pounding away at the proverbial sixpence ball upon ball, preying on impatience, testing techniques.

If you are unfamiliar with his work, settle down to his highlights reel – each one resembles the next, rarely straying from his plans. His first-class average of 21.26, in fact, does him a disservice. Ignore a disappointing 2016 when he took his wickets at an anomalous 50.05 and his overall figure drops to 19.90. Take the last two years in isolation and it falls further still to 18.09. A swinging and seaming grip reaper, if you will.

And so, with cricket at a standstill – until the beginning of July at the very earliest – Robinson is understandably frustrated. Few can have spent the winter with such confidence in their own repertoire; he took nine wickets in three games as part of England Lions’ landmark, unbeaten tour of Australia.

In recent times, seamers from these shores have not always returned from that particular trip with their reputations enhanced. Amid all the talk of raw speed, however, there remains a market for simply bowling well.

“I’ve always looked at Glenn McGrath,” Robinson explains – his gather at the crease bears more than a hint of resemblance to that of Josh Hazlewood. “Over the last five years of his career, he didn’t bowl express pace but he just didn’t miss.

“Wherever you are in the world, no matter what pace you are, if you don’t miss the top of off and can move it both ways a little bit, you’re going to be successful, I think.”

It is a simplicity that has been drilled into him ever since he joined Sussex ahead of the 2015 season; Steve Magoffin – a compatriot of McGrath and Hazlewood – was spearheading the county’s attack at the time and his own game swore by that mantra, while Sussex head coach Jason Gillespie was another believer. “Dizzy is very keen on the idea that the top of off never moves,” he adds.

“Out in Australia, I think the Kookaburra made me realise that you have to be that much more precise with everything. In England, you might bowl the odd half-volley and get away with it sometimes with the Dukes ball.

“I sort of knew that I’d get wickets out there,” Robinson admits, having spent the first half of his winter in Potchefstroom working alongside and learning from James Anderson and Mark Wood.

“I’d been using the Kookaburra all winter in preparation for it, so from November I’d been bowling with the Kookaburra, practising ways to get the ball moving. I knew I could do it in the nets and in the indoor school against a few of our lads. So, I had some confidence going in, which I think is massive when you’re going to a different country.

“If you have confidence with the ball you’re using – I knew that with my height and the hard pitches out there that I’d get some good bounce, it was a big asset for me.”

Robinson has taken 137 County Championship wickets in the last two years

Comfort with the Kookaburra is, of course, a rarity in itself among English bowlers, and yet another sign of the painstaking preparations that went into the tour. 

"It did just feel like we’d all been playing together for years,” he adds.

Robinson went wicketless in his first game of the series, having rushed himself back from a hamstring tweak in order to feature at Hobart. He underperformed there as a result, before peaking in the unofficial Test victory over Australia at the MCG. Dan Lawrence stole the headlines with his century, but Robinson’s seven wickets were key in a milestone win.

Success has become the new norm; only once in the last two campaigns has he failed to take a wicket in a red-ball match – the solitary occasion being the final game of last season, when rain meant that Sussex never actually bowled a ball. The 26-year-old puts that change in fortunes down, quite simply, to growing up.

It is six years ago now, but there was a time when Robinson was far from flavour of the month. On the back of a succession of incidents deemed “unprofessional” by director of cricket Martyn Moxon, he was sacked by Yorkshire at just 20 years of age.

At the time, Moxon admitted that “it just got to a point where myself and the support staff have had enough really”.

Looking back on it all is a strange task, so much has happened since. Robinson is happy to broach those memories and he is philosophical in his reflections, aware in hindsight of the difficulties he faced as a teenager at a county far away from home in Kent, whose academy he had initially come through.

“It was a tricky one but I think getting sacked from Yorkshire was almost the best thing for me in the end,” he admits. “Having that thrown at me – one of the biggest counties just getting rid of you does sharpen you up and slap you in the face pretty hard. It’s actually stood me in good stead.

“It’s a weird one; I knew if I was sacked for the same sort of reasons at Sussex, that was last-chance saloon. But I knew cricket-wise, I had the ability to make it.

“I was just a normal 18-year-old kid trying to live both sides of the coin really. I was trying to play cricket and be an 18-year-old in a new place, away from family, away from friends. I found it tough and I think if I lived it again, I’d do it very differently.

“There aren’t many of us who haven’t made a mistake. I’ve been given a chance at Sussex and I’ve grown up a bit. I’m 27 this year, so if I hadn’t grown up by now, it would be a bit late.”

Robinson took 24 wickets against Middlesex alone in 2019

On Robinson’s first-class debut for Sussex against Durham, he struck 110 while batting at No.10 – a knock that gave him the confidence, he believes, to perform at his new club. Unsurprisingly, it remains his highest score in professional cricket; bowling has since become his dominant skillset but that was not always the case. At one stage at Yorkshire, he had been viewed more as a batsman.

In that same game, he formed part of a bowling attack that also included Magoffin, Ajmal Shahzad and Matthew Hobden, who tragically passed away in 2016.

And it was in conjunction with Hobden, who made an unbeaten 65, that Robinson’s century came; the pair added 165 for the 10th wicket. At the top of his Twitter profile, there sits a touching tribute to his former teammate.

“It’s a bit of a blur, looking back now,” he says of the innings. “It feels like a long, long time ago. It was something that I’ll never completely forget, especially with what happened to Matthew. It’s something that I’ll hold close to me all the time really.”

Sussex have rarely been short on high-quality seamers in recent years; at varying stages, Robinson has had to compete for his place with Shahzad, Magoffin, Chris Jordan, Jofra Archer, George Garton, Tymal Mills, Reece Topley, David Wiese, Mir Hamza and Vernon Philander – among others. It is a measure of his absolute consistency that he can now be reasonably considered as the attack’s spearhead.

He points to Jordan, for one, as having had a significant impact on his game. Robinson took 46 first-class wickets in 2015, followed by 19 in each of the two seasons that followed. The question, then, is simple: what changed to bring about the subsequent maelstrom? According to CricViz, last season 25.1 per cent of his 2,565 County Championship deliveries brought about false shots, the highest proportion nationwide.

“Just being around people that are successful,” he explains. “You’ve got Chris Jordan who I look up to at Sussex. If he’s doing something, I always try to do it with him. We had Steve Magoffin here when I joined; Ajmal Shahzad had just been playing for England.

“Just looking at those players who have been at the top level and how they go about it, I think it made me get into the habit of that as well.

“I still look at pace. I think over the last two years, I’ve definitely put on a yard. It’s something that every bowler will always be looking to improve on. You can never be too quick, so it’s definitely something that I’m still working on. I’m getting fitter and stronger in the gym. Being around the England setup and learning the odd bit or tweaking things here and there, I’m hoping to add that half a yard.”

He made his England Lions debut in July against the touring Australians – an experience that “has driven me more to be that much better and train that much more”; he still speaks every so often to Magoffin.

Paul Farbrace is another who has been an important sounding board; the former England assistant coach – now Warwickshire’s sport director – is Robinson’s step-father, having married his mother Sandra last year, and has been his one-to-one coach since his early teens. “If I’ve ever been struggling for form, I’ve always sent him videos of the match I’ve just played and asked what he thinks,” he says. “He helps me out a lot – not just on the cricket side, I suppose. If I’m struggling with anything, I can speak to him.”

A familiar sight for those at The 1st Central County Ground...

And then, of course, there is Gillespie, who – as fate would have it – was first-team coach at Yorkshire when Robinson was let go. Richard Dawson, his England Lions coach over the winter, was Yorkshire’s second-team coach at the same time. There can be few better markers of Robinson’s development that he describes the pair as “two coaches that I’d love to work with for my whole career”.

When Gillespie was appointed as Sussex’s head coach at the end of the 2017 season, he and Robinson spoke immediately.

“We cleared the air instantly,” he recalls. “I hadn’t spoken to him since I’d been at Yorkshire, so we had a chat straight away and we haven’t looked back. We go for dinner, go for drinks. He’s just been really good for everyone – not just me. He has been fantastic, he’s been unreal – he’s just so easy to play under and get along with.

“I think a lot of the players in the squad, you’ve seen better sides to them since he’s been at the club. Hopefully, we can get promoted whenever we play again and we can win some trophies.

“It’s a bit of a shame that we’ve had to stop because I have felt that the last 12 months have been really strong for me. Coming home from Australia, I felt hungrier than ever to carry on and keep going from where I left off.

“It is pleasing to know that I’ve still got that behind me and when they look back to pick teams and squads and Lions tours in the future, they’ll see that I did well in Australia. Hopefully, that’ll stand me in good stead.”

Whenever, indeed, that might be, Robinson will let the ball do the talking.

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