George Scrimshaw lay alone in his hotel room near Trent Bridge staring at the ceiling. He did so for hours.
23 September 2023 should have been an evening of celebration, what with Scrimshaw snaring three wickets on his England debut – a 48-run ODI victory over Ireland.
But simply painting by numbers did not reflect Scrimshaw’s contribution.
“It was horrible,” he tells BBC Sport. “I couldn’t get to sleep. Some people can let things go a lot easier than others – that day really swallowed me up.”
Just 24 hours previously, Scrimshaw had been informed he was in the England XI. Matchday brought some nerves but “I get them every single game, and that’s good for me. But then what happened, happened”.
What happened was that, with his opening delivery in international cricket, Scrimshaw overstepped. He did so three more times in his first over. His second over contained another pair of no-balls and a wide.
“I’d bowled one front foot no-ball in the first T20 game of the 2023 season but not a single one after that,” Scrimshaw explains. “So, I’m just thinking ‘what is going on here?’ I felt the same as in every game. My body was hurting a little bit but that’s no excuse – my body is always hurting!
“I just didn’t know what was going on: Is my run-up wrong? Am I running in faster? Am I running in slower? Just horrible. The crowd cheered when I bowled a legal delivery.”
Team-mates surrounded Scrimshaw with positivity but on the boundary’s edge he was isolated.
“You can’t block it out,” he says of the surrounding noise. “I can hear all of their conversations. I felt like they were coming through a speaker. It was sympathetic but I didn’t want sympathy. I’m a professional cricketer; I obviously know how to bowl.”
After 11 legitimate balls, Scrimshaw had conceded 35 runs. Then some welcome relief arrived via Andy Balbirnie nicking to Ben Duckett. The celebrations were mooted and, naturally, his front foot was checked by the TV umpires.
“I’m thinking ‘here we go they’re going to no-ball it’,” Scrimshaw says smiling. “I was getting a load of taps on the back, and I just said, ‘don’t worry lads you’re all good – plenty of bowlers have been here and done this before and look at them now’.”
Scrimshaw’s team-mates were “praising me, telling me to keep my head up, to keep fighting. I really did try. I tried to scrape through the rest of that innings”.
Fortunately, England had earlier posted 334 runs, giving stand-in skipper Zak Crawley a little wriggle room. He stuck with the quick for a third over, and that cost just a single. Later, Scrimshaw returned to remove Lorcan Tucker and then, to seal the win, Josh Little.
Scrimshaw had been playing for his now former county Derbyshire at Scarborough when England selector Luke Wright called.
“I didn’t think it would be for the 50-over format because I’ve hardly played any of that,” he said.
“The skills are transferable, but I thought if I got picked it would be for T20. But I was over the moon to get picked for England; it was brilliant.”
Even 12 months on, though, Scrimshaw’s disappointment at what is, to date, his only international appearance lingers.
“I wasn’t bowling like I normally do at any point in that game,” he recalls. “I was bowling low 80s, whereas normally I bowl high 80s, or even 90s with the white ball. I wanted to show people watching what I could do but they got the wrong ‘me’ that day.”
Scrimshaw’s dad, uncle and brother were in the Nottingham crowd and called him down for a post-play photo.
They made their pride in him clear, but he could not properly take it in, instead opting to disengage.
“I tried not to look at socials,” he says. “All the reports were coming through – things like ‘nightmare debut’, ‘hero to zero’. After that game I had a bit of performance anxiety.”
That tension only eased when Scrimshaw was able to finally play again at the Abu Dhabi T10 tournament last December. “I was like ‘oh thank God, I can still play'”.
If anyone can recover, it is Scrimshaw: he and adversity are on first-name terms. Ahead of joining Derbyshire in 2021, he had, owing to a series of back injuries at Worcestershire, gone more than 1,300 days without 1st XI action.
Having joined Northamptonshire in 2024, Scrimshaw pushed his body a tad too hard, and a stress fracture has consequently ruled him out since early June. An early 2025 return is pencilled in.
“I’ve not been in touch with England a lot to be honest,” Scrimshaw explains. “I’ve had one message to say, ‘we’ll be watching you’. For now, it’s about not expecting too much. It’s about working hard, nailing down my place, doing well in T20 and seeing what comes of it. But obviously my main goal is to get back there.”
