Don’t you just love the Ashes? With a history that goes back to 1882 and the “death of English cricket”, as reported in the Sporting Times after defeat at the Oval, every generation of English and Australian cricketers are aware of the significance of these series.
Even when other sides are nominally top of the world, as West Indies were in the 80s, an Ashes series still feels like a world championship. Sometimes we have a great, memorable and totemic series, and sometimes they can just fizzle out.
After 2 tests we were in danger of seeing the Ashes remain firmly in the grip of the Aussies. Headingley thankfully delivered the result that England and the series needed. 1-2 with two to play it begs the question as to whether this extraordinary England team can make history to become the first England side to come back and win the Ashes from 2-0 down. The Aussies did it once but they had a bloke called Bradman!
Let’s face it, England could and should have won the first test and might just, only at a pinch, have won the second. In the first they made most of the running, in the second they were always trying to catch up.
This was always going to be a contest between “Bazball” and relative orthodoxy. The former has given England players the freedom to banish the fear of failure but also to embrace mistakes as acceptable human error, allowable in the greater scheme of events. As long as you win is the caveat added by the rest of us but the team does not allow itself to say that, at least in public.
The Australians back themselves to play at their own pace, as evidenced beautifully and serenely by Usman Khawaja at Edgbaston. When it came to the crunch there it was Cummins not Stokes whose calculated belligerence tipped the scales right at the death.
England would have won that game had they been just a tad smarter. For all the buzz of Bazball any set of players must be aware of the little things that add up to a better outcome. Sir Andrew Strauss used to talk about the 1% and 2% advantages his team could gain by being smart. It was a very different and calculated approach to winning and helped him be an Ashes winner Down Under in 2010-11.
Forget the talk about the early, day 1 declaration, England could have made more runs in the second innings and could have made stumpings and taken catches that would have seen them home. Again, at Lord’s, smarter batting, playing the odds against a barrage of short pitched bowling rather than blithely taking it on, could have seen a better outcome.
The one thing that has caused more angst than anything else is the stumping of Jonny Bairstow at Lord’s. It is the sort of thing that gets newspapers and Twitter, well, all of a-twitter.
So, was it unsportsmanlike behaviour, verging on cheating, from Australia, as some correspondents would have it, or was it a case of the Laws of Cricket being harshly but correctly applied?
I’m sorry to be unpatriotic but I am in the latter camp. I totally understand why Jonny would feel that he was doing nothing untoward in tapping his foot in the crease at what he thought was the end of the over and leaving his ground believing himself to be safe. However, I also see that Alex Carey was very sharp to have noted JB’s tendency to do exactly that and the fact that there was no hesitation between the ball landing in his gloves and him releasing it back towards the stumps confirms to me that the ball was not dead, as JB assumed. Even though the umpire had begun the process of moving away from his position he still needs to call “over” before a batter is free to wander off. For the sake of a second to look behind him to check with the Australians that the ball was dead, in which case JB would have seen what was going on and could have stayed safe in his crease, we could have seen a very different passage of play as England chased victory.
Equally, we might not have witnessed Ben Stokes’s sheer brilliance as the pace of the chase might have been more considered in a partnership with Bairstow rather than with the necessity to go to all out attack with Broad as a partner. Full credit to Broad, both for his bravery and his theatrical playing up to the spectre of the previous wicket.
For the record, that Stokes onslaught was just the most remarkable thing one will ever see in a test match. He is determined to promote test cricket as a brand and I will stand on the highest rooftop and applaud him for doing so.
England’s fulcrum is Stokes. How many more times he can rescue situations like Headingley 2019 and the World Cup Final of the same year or take his team to the brink of unlikely results as at Lord’s, only time will tell. He kept England within range in the first innings but also had the firepower of Mark Wood to give him the cutting edge that had been missing before.
Mark is one of those cricketers you cannot help but like, adore even! The whole hearted effort he puts into his work as an out and out fast bowler is inspirational both to his teammates and to those watching for whom the summer is all about England winning back those Ashes. Real pace, as Mikey Holding used to say, makes batters do strange things and if it disconcerts the best batters it certainly makes blowing away a tail a lot easier!
So, on to Old Trafford it is, where a full house, and a potentially raucous one at that, could spur England on yet further to square the series. It’s already a fabulous series but will the historians soon be sharpening their quills to record something we’ve not seen before?
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