As Zak Crawley collected the ball from beyond the boundary rope at the end of an exhausting five days of cricket, it was hard to escape a feeling of poetic cyclicity.
Roughly 104 hours and 21 minutes earlier, the Bromley-born opening batsman was carving a wide Pat Cummins half-volley through extra cover for four runs off the first ball of the match. Now here was Crawley, dejected and defeated, unable to divert a fine Cummins cut shot before it reached the fence from what thus transpired to be the final ball of a truly epic encounter.
Somehow, someway, the Australian captain had steered his team to victory. Despite having the upper hand for much of the match, and victory firmly within their grasp barely an hour earlier, England were not able to see the game over the line.
The first test of the 2023 Ashes series was essentially Newton’s Third Law in cricketing form. For every English action, there was an equal and opposing Australian reaction. Each time they took a step forward in the game, their counterparts would always drag them back.
It all started with that Crawley cover drive. A shot of confidence and authority. A shot which would ‘set the tone’ for the series to come. For once it was England who had thrown the opening punch. The ghosts of Phil DeFreitas, Steve Harmison and Rory Burns put to rest.
Aside from the history, the first ball also offered up an immediate rebuttal to the flurry of pre-match doubts regarding England’s approach. Coming into the Edgbaston test, despite a fabulous record of 11 wins in 13 under their new regime, many journalists, and supporters alike, remained apprehensive. Australia had just comfortably dispatched India on English soil, becoming World Test Champions in doing so, after all. They are, officially, the best test team on the planet right now.
There was a universal acceptance that this new England team under Ben Stokes and Brendan McCullum were not going to change their style just because it was the Ashes. The main concern was whether that relentlessly attacking approach could still produce positive results against such high-class opponents.
Well, 4-0 off 0.1 overs - here was an early indication of what was to come. The ‘Bazball™ Ashes’ had officially begun.
Throughout the four and a half days that followed, it would be England who would do nearly all of the running. Piling up 393-8 in 78 overs before an aggressive declaration surprised many, but this is the sort of bravado that we have now come to expect from this team and their captain. Joe Root had been at his fluent and stylish best for 118 not out, but entertainment comes first for Stokes and that meant a 20-minute blitz at the Australian openers.
Much has been made of the decision to declare. The common consensus seems to be that England left 20-50 runs out there in the first innings, which could have been pivotal in the Australian run-chase. Stokes defended his decision post-match. His repugnance of the draw has been well-documented over the last 12 months. Post-match at Edgbaston, he reiterated this point, adding that he also doesn’t deal in “what ifs”.
Although no Australian wickets fell on that first evening, the fact that a night’s rest allowed Stuart Broad to bowl a longer stint with the new ball and subsequently pick up the wickets of David Warner and Marnus Labuschagne in consecutive deliveries towards the end of his elongated opening spell the following morning seems vindication enough of Stokes’ bold call.
Even discounting the declaration, many an eyebrow were raised throughout the test as England continued to do things that would be historically regarded as ‘just not cricket’. Harry Brook coming on as the first change to bowl at Steve Smith, the schoolboy umbrella field to a batsman approaching 150 not out, Joe Root attempting a reverse scoop on the first ball of day four with the game firmly in the balance.
That being said, it was not any sort of reckless batting nor Stokes’ in-game decision-making that would cost England. It was simply their individual mistakes in the field.
Johnny Bairstow is rightly regarded as undroppable due to his batting ability. His brilliant counter-attacking run-a-ball 78 in the afternoon session on the first day exemplified this. The return to fitness of Bairstow, from a horrific leg break that he suffered last September, combined with Brook’s irrepressible form with the bat since his test debut against South Africa last autumn, caused something of a selection headache for the England brains trust earlier this summer. Their decision to omit the reliable Ben Foakes from the squad and hand Bairstow the role of keeper-batsman at no. 7 was a contentious one.
Perhaps it was just rustiness from a lack of action over the past nine months, perhaps Bairstow simply cannot move his feet as quickly since his injury, but the Yorkshireman had a game to forget with the gloves on. There were two missed stumpings and at least three clear catching chances that weren’t taken. The most notable of which was from Usman Khawaja after he’d faced just three deliveries in his second innings. An edge off the bowling of James Anderson flew between Bairstow and Joe Root at first slip. Replays showed that it was a hard chance, but the ball went past the wicket-keeper off the ground and within his arc. Most concerning was the lack of any sort of attempt from Bairstow, or Root for that matter, to take the catch. Khawaja was on 5 at the time. He would go on to score another 60 runs and anchor the majority of the chase.
The opener from New South Wales, who was awarded the player of the match, was also given a reprieve by English sloppiness in his first innings. Khawaja had batted with supreme discipline and skill to steady Australia after the early wickets of Warner, Labuschagne and Smith. His partnerships with Travis Head and then Cameron Green brought Australia back into a game which they looked well behind. The visceral celebration of 'Uzzie' when he brought up his century, his first in England, was a stark contrast to the composure and serenity of his batting.
Nonetheless, it was still the hosts who were still comfortably in the ascendency with a lead of 129 runs when Khawaja was clean bowled for 112; only for Stuart Broad to have overstepped his mark in the process. Khawaja would add another 29 runs, dovetailing with Alex Carey and Pat Cummins, to bring Australia up to a deficit of just 7 at the halfway stage of the match.
The no-balls were a disappointing trend. England bowled 23 of them across the two innings. Those extras were far more costly than any imaginary runs that Root and the tail might have added but for the first innings declaration.
Ultimately, England looked like a team that were just slightly undercooked. Considering that their preparation for this series consisted of a single test against a pretty feeble Ireland, in which only their top 4 batsmen spent any sort of serious time in the middle, alongside numerous rounds of golf at the likes of St Andrews, Gleneagles and Loch Lomond, is that really such a surprise?
James Anderson and Ollie Robinson each missed that Ireland game, and also the previous month of domestic first-class cricket, due to injury. Despite having Mark Wood, Josh Tongue, Matthew Potts and Chris Woakes fit and ready-to-go, Anderson and Robinson both started the first test. Jimmy, in particular, looked far from his best. The 40-year-old took just one wicket in the match.
It all points to the seemingly laissez-faire attitude of Stokes and McCullum towards test match preparation. Whereas the likes of Smith and Labuschagne were determined to come over to the UK months in advance to acclimatise to the conditions via the County Championship, England could not have appeared less interested in warm-up matches. Stokes himself still went to play for Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League, despite the chronic issues with his left knee and the fact that the IPL Final was just three weeks before the start of the Ashes series. Interestingly, Pat Cummins decided to skip the IPL to manage his schedule ahead of the busy red-ball summer.
Then there was Moeen Ali. Convinced out of retirement by Stokes less than two weeks before the start of the series having not played test cricket for nearly two years, Ali showed that he can still bowl ripping wicket-taking deliveries with a Duke’s ball despite his recent hiatus. At the same time, he also did not allow England to consistently mount pressure on Australia due to his inability to hold up an end in the same way that Jack Leach has repeatedly done during the McCullum-Stokes era.
Joe Root was then forced to deputise as the main spinner when Ali was unable to bowl due to a debilitating callous on his right index finger on the final day. Root performed admirably, dismissing Alex Carey with a fine caught-and-bowled, but the decision to keep Root bowling with the old ball after the wicket of Carey was crucial in the swinging of the pendulum back towards Australia in the finale. From the last three deliveries of Root's final over, Cummins smashed 14 runs, including two sixes, The runs required suddenly dropped from 51 to 37. The entire mood around the ground changed. The total belief of the rambunctious English crowd in the Hollies stand instantly transformed into trepidation. The home side never recovered.
The lack of sharpness will likely be flipped as a positive within the England dressing room. They pushed Australia extremely close and really should have won this game, so if they are only going to get stronger as the series progresses, they will believe they can assert more dominance in the remaining tests. That being said, they have to accept that they have now conceded a lead to a champion team who are expert front-runners. They can also be sure that the world’s two premier batsmen will not produce another four low scores like they did at Edgbaston.
The next test at Lord’s is one that England simply cannot afford to lose. No team has come back from 2-0 down to win any test series since Australia did it to England in the Ashes of 1936-37. England have decided to take five days off before restarting training in London. Australia will take a three day break.
Besides a handful of old-school conservative nay-sayers, it must be said that the extravagant and swashbuckling nature of this England team has been well-received by cricket-lovers around the world. They aim to entertain and boy, do they entertain.
On the contrary, calmness and rationalism are the buzzwords for the Australian approach. Despite much scrutiny over his containing, non-attacking field placements, Cummins' captaincy was justified by the final outcome.
As ever, the fickle and unforgiving nature of sport means that it will be the results which will define how the two brands of cricket are analysed and reviewed over the course of the summer - despite the best efforts of the England captain and coach to counter this traditionalist way of working.
The highly-conflicting styles between the two old enemies made for a fabulous spectacle in Birmingham. If England can add just a little bit more thought and cohesion into their preparations moving forward, one would still expect that this series is far from over.
This article was written by James Ablett and published first on www.kanubelieveit.com on 22 June 2023.
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