Harris nine-for destroys Durham

Once upon a time, it all came so easily for James Harris. In his second Championship appearance, at the County Ground in Bristol in May 2007, he celebrated his 17th birthday with a haul of 7 for 66 for Glamorgan, a revelatory return that marked him down as a boy with an extraordinary future.

Eight years later, and 11 days shy of turning 25, there's still plenty time yet for that future to manifest itself. But with today's career-best haul of 9 for 34 at Lord's, Harris achieved more than simply consign his teenage precocity to the archives.

"I came to Middlesex as a fairly big signing," said Harris. "But I've had two lean years which have really hurt me. I expected to be doing this sort of thing straight from the off, so it's been a long time coming and I'm delighted."

It should, by rights, have been a tense fight to the finish on the final day at Lord's. The morning dawned with foreboding grey skies to dent Durham's hopes of adding 235 runs to their overnight 24 for 2, but with a howling gale buffeting straight down the ground, Harris was twice forced to abort his run-up as he struggled to reach the crease.

The original plan had been to come off after a couple of overs and leave Ollie Rayner to lob his spin into the breeze. But then the wickets started tumbling and suddenly Harris was walking in the air.

"Once you get into a bit of a rhythm, you don't tend to feel tired or any exterior things," said Harris. "It didn't swing too much, it just did a little bit off the surface which is perfect for me. I was on a bit of a roll and thankfully it kept happening."

Full and focused, with an exemplary rhythm and a little bit of movement off a length. The scorecard will suggest that the wicket became a minefield, with two completed second innings adding up to 18 runs fewer than the 178 that Sam Robson scored on the match's first day. But not a bit of it. It was simple, old-fashioned, you-miss-I-hit hostility. And every one was a coconut.

The simplicity of his performance was irresistible. Durham's batsmen didn't dare lay a bat on ball for fearing of nicking off to the cordon, but couldn't risk leaving it either, as Michael Richardson discovered when he shouldered arms and found only his leg stump left standing.

Callum McLeod and Paul Collingwood fell for ducks to consecutive deliveries, and when Phil Mustard and Scott Borthwick picked out second and first slip respectively, Harris had claimed five wickets for five runs in the space of 16 balls, and finished with 7 for 21 in 8.1 overs all told on the day.

It was a reversion to the energetic excellence that had first brought him to the public eye and just another high-profile example of a talented young bowler shrugging off the strictures imposed by a cabal of well-meaning coaches, to do what comes naturally and reap the rewards.

"They'd been trying to change things since I was very young," said Harris, "both in the programmes at Loughborough and in bits and bobs, because every young bowler wants to bowl at 90mph-plus and swing it round corners. It's what you need to do if you're a seamer to get international batsmen out.

"We went searching for a lot of things, we changed a lot of things, and we probably found the half a yard we needed, but it was to the detriment of skill and moving it around. I don't care if you bowl 100mph, if you don't move it around you're probably not going to be too successful."

They were strong words, softly spoken. Harris added that he was grateful to have undergone the alterations, because otherwise he might always have wondered what might have been. But on the evidence of this stellar day at Lord's, not to mention Harris's own testimony of the dark days of soul-searching that he's been subjected to in recent years, it's hard not to wonder why they couldn't have just let him be.

"There were a lot of cold dark hours in Finchley indoor school," Harris said. "My body was feeling pretty poor, my action was feeling pretty poor, I'd lost my wrist through parts of last year and there were times when I wasn't holding it down the seam."

He ended up being loaned back to Glamorgan at the end of a 2014 season in which managed a grand total of 17 wickets in 245 overs, compared to the 13 in 34.4 that he's ended up with in this contest.

"I'd decided before I went that I was going to go back to being as natural as possible, because it was feeling horrible, the changes, the Brett Lee style different load-up that we tried to do to be faster, it really wasn't working for me.

"I tried to be better, it didn't work, simple as that. I had to bite the bullet and go back to what I knew and what made me successful in the first place."

By the time Harris had equalled his career-best seven wickets in an innings, he was still on course to emulate his Middlesex bowling coach, Richard Johnson, whom he credited for his assistance in deconstructing his action, in claiming all ten wickets in an innings.

Instead, his thunder was stolen by another man who is in the process of relearning what once came so naturally. Steven Finn, hitherto unnoticed as he ploughed a furrow from the Pavilion End, found an inside-edge off Usman Arshad that lobbed to Sam Robson in the gully, as he continued a battle to shake off the tinkering that, of recent England vintage, James Anderson and Liam Plunkett have also had to endure.

"I've had the luck today but he is bowling beautifully and it won't be long before he's back in the wickets and I'm not taking them at the other end," said Harris.

But at least when that happens, you sense it will once again be on the bowlers' own terms.