- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
High on Oxford’s walls, the English summer coaxes purple flowers from the face of ancient stone. In this Test’s unlikely environment, Australia’s hopes have managed the same sporadic bloom.
Hope is a curious creature, resident of a nebulous zone between pessimism and delusion. Each observer draws their boundaries differently, the result an emotional Kashmir.
The Spanish verb to hope is esperar. It also means to wait, and to expect. The subtle iterations depend on context.
“Stay behind the yellow line and hope for a train”, is one way to read Argentinian station signage. Cold nights on Melbourne’s Hurstbridge line and that seems an apt approach.
Decades after the 1970s ‘disappearances’ carried out by South America’s military juntas, ageing parents still hope for their children to return home. Or they wait. We would see the concepts separately, but in essence they are the same.
To continuing waiting, you must have hope. To continuing hoping, you have to be prepared to wait.
Australia’s hopes were high in the long wait before this match began, and higher still when England stumbled to 215. Those same hopes dipped the same day, four wickets down by stumps.
They rose with Steve Smith’s half-century, fell with his nicked off-drive. Rose and rose and rose again with Ashton Agar’s Monkey Magic emergence, irrepressible, from the magically fertile rock of Australia A.
As the painful third day ground on and on, I kept waiting for Australia’s hopes to be ground out. Pessimistic after their brittle first innings, I thought anything over 200 would be too great to chase batting last.
The persistent bad luck during Stuart Broad and Ian Bell’s frustrate-a-thon should have been enough to kill off any sense of vigour, but Australia, tired as they were, brought persistence to match.
Beginning fresh on Day 4, they broke the stand after 30 runs had been added, then wrapped up the innings in quick time. The final target was 311.
It was well past my nominated range, but Australia began with an assurance not seen in their top order for some time. Shane Watson’s boundaries weren’t followed by nicks, and Chris Rogers justified his selection with a controlled display.
As they strolled along, a strange feeling began to manifest itself. I quizzed the nearest Australian correspondents.
No, the queasy look on their faces wasn’t down to a dangerous lunch decision. There it was. The stirrings of hope.
Each time Rogers eased the ball to the rope, each time the target receded another decile, the sense of possibility firmed. By the time Watson fell the gap had come back to 227.
Even that was ok, we were expecting him to go. Ed Cowan smacked a couple of crisp boundaries, putting the sheen back on.
Getting to lunch at one wicket down looked a distinct possibility.
The bird of hope may even have sung a few notes, before Ed clubbed it brutally with another aberrant cover drive.
Ed Cowan this match has played shots that Ed Cowan would hate; like Richie Benaud talking up The Block, you can almost hear a little part of him dying inside each time.
Still, the deficit came back to 187, and it still seemed possible. Rogers misjudged the pace to spoon to midwicket. The gap narrowed to 150, more than halfway there. A decent partnership from Michael Clarke and Smith, with batting to come…
It changed, with the suddenness we’ve come to expect. The men in question fell from successive balls, Phil Hughes soon afterward, three wickets for three runs. What did we do all that hoping for?
Australia’s fate with umpire reviews this game has come down to millimetres of red leather. Rogers and Watson have been given lbw to balls clipping the stumps, so reviews have been struck down.
Jimmy Anderson and Joe Root have had not-out calls from the same deliveries, so reviews against them failed.
Clarke’s edge was such a feather that the batsman himself said he didn’t feel it, and confidently appealed his decision. And the ball that got Phil Hughes lbw couldn’t have been more than a millimetre away from officially pitching outside leg stump.
The chunks of Broad’s bat that edged to slip, of course, could have been counted in centimetres. The only millimetre that has gone Australia’s way has been the scrap of Agar’s boot leather that might just have saved him from an early stumping.
Yet now, at stumps, that same damn bird of hope will not shut up its chirping. Chances are it will continue through the night, and make its presence known in the trees of Nottingham’s Park Estate around dawn.
Because despite the trials of the past few days, the batting slides, the millimetric misfortune, there is still some hope for Australia in a match which is firmly England’s.
Even without expecting a second miracle from the overly put-upon Ashton Agar, Australia are 137 runs away from victory. Comparisons have been made to Edgbaston in 2005, but this is a stronger position.
The pitch is slow but not yet hazardous. Scoring has not been difficult for those able to show patience. Ian Bell has set the standard for how to approach a Trent Bridge innings.
And Australia’s final five, we know, can bat. The relevant statistics have been mentioned: Mitch Starc’s recent 99, Peter Siddle’s twin fifties, James Pattinson’s obduracy, and recent events that need no recap.
Of course, in terms of reassurance, telling me that Brad Haddin has made three Test centuries is as like saying your cousin should babysit my kids because he once survived falling though a greenhouse.
But while there may be nothing we can rely on, there is still hope. There is a chance.
It may be gone within two overs of tomorrow’s play, but through tonight, it will live loud and long and glorious, sailing with full colours flying toward its realisation or its quick demise.
The tyranny of stumps means that we cannot know till then what may occur. But it also gives us time to indulge the possible, some hours for the spectre of the unlikely to walk the earth.
And so we make it through the night with an unanswered question. Tomorrow morning is the only medium though which we’ll find an answer. If the Spanish could understand Test cricket, they would say Esperamos.
Let’s hope. Let’s wait.