England are hopeful that Moeen Ali's spinning finger has healed sufficiently for him to play a full part in the third Ashes Test at Headingley, which starts on Thursday.
Moeen split the skin on the top knuckle of his spinning finger during the first Test at Edgbaston, his first red-ball appearance in 21 months after Jack Leach's lower-back stress fracture prompted England to send him an SOS call. He returned figures of 3 for 204 in 47 overs.
His omission for the second Test at Lord's owed in part to a green pitch at a venue that rarely suits spinner, but Ben Stokes admitted: "It would have been a completely different conversation if Mo hadn't had his finger issue that he did last week."
Along with Rehan Ahmed, who was added to the squad for the second Test as cover, Moeen bowled on a practice strip on the edge of the square on each of the first three days of the Test, watched closely by England's spin-bowling coach Jeetan Patel. "It's the best I've ever seen him bowl," Patel said.
"Fingers crossed that in the next couple of days, he gets to rest it and he gets to Headingley and he's ready to go," Patel said. "It was pretty disgusting at the end of the Test… we've tried to look after it as much as we can. It's looking in really good shape; it's healed really, really well."
Moeen's injury owed to the prouder seam on the red Dukes ball than the white Kookaburra used in limited-overs cricket, as well as the sharp spike in his workload. "Mo hasn't bowled 30 overs [in a day] in a while and that was always going to be part of the risk of bringing him in," Patel said.
"But we knew that and he knew that - and he still said yes, and we still asked him. Is there a way to look after your fingers? Just bowl. It's probably the only way to do it: bowl regularly. He bowls four overs a game so he's probably not used to it and he hasn't bowled with a Dukes for two years."
Another England bowler, Olly Stone, lasted only three balls on his comeback from injury on Friday night before walking off the field. "Hopefully he is OK and will be fine for our last match on Sunday," Shaheen Shah Afridi, his Nottinghamshire team-mate, said.