This is Test cricket too, the format of the sport when every single fibre of your being is examined day after day – not a limited-overs game which requires only a limited attention span.

And it is the format where long days in the field leave periods with only your own thoughts for company. Aside from one dropped catch this summer, which Atkinson would normally expect himself to take some eight or nine times out of 10, he has not put a hand or foot wrong. Whether his mind was elsewhere during these Test days, or if cricket was a welcome distraction, we do not know. But what cannot be questioned is that events this summer will have brought the Atkinson family horrifying memories of that night in a Fulham street, when their lives were turned upside down by someone driving at twice the speed limit.

The importance of Caroline Atkinson in her son’s amazing career to date was emphasised to me only last week when talking to Gus’s cricket coach at Bradfield College. As a 15-year-old, according to the ex-Hampshire batsman Julian Wood, the boy was naturally, even absurdly talented at batting, bowling and throwing a cricket ball, and at golf or any other sport he tried, but, like many of this type, he had no single focus. It was all fun to be had, and nothing more.

“It was his mother who drove him at this stage,” Wood said. She was the one who spurred him on and got him involved in Surrey’s youth programmes, into which he drifted, until his own urge to become a professional cricketer took over.