Bairstow has been out of action for eight months because of injury, but on Wednesday he was included in the England squad for the only test against Ireland next month.

Bairstow was at the peak of his powers when a leg injury cut short his career. Quite expectedly, he had great misgivings about his future after that incident.

You wonder if you can walk, run, run, play cricket again. Certainly such thoughts come to mind.

It depends on how long you think about them. There’s a lot of different things, and until you get back to the game, well…do you think it’s going to feel the same? – ESPNcricinfo quoted him as saying.

He may never recover 100 percent from his injury, but Bairstow can live with that.

It’s pretty funny, people were saying, You’re limping. I don’t know a single person with a serious shin injury who walks the exact same way.

There will be a little limp, there will be some aches and pains, that’s part and parcel of it. Whether it’s knees, hips, ankles, lower back, whatever it is.

When there is an injury, there will be adaptations to the way your body moves or walks, that’s part and parcel of it. I’m not going to run the exact same way I did last year, but that’s okay. He’s also confident he’ll be in enough shape to keep wickets.

I don’t think it’s any different than working on the field — when you’re running, changing direction. You crouch at the stumps and move sideways, but you’re not running at 25k to the boundary.

So it’s a different kind of fitness – the old legs and glutes are a little stiff after the first day in the dirt, but it’s an integral part, he added.