- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
The WACA provides elemental cricket. No luxuries and indeed some hardships. I sat through the fourth day out on a baking tray, tilted in the direction of the sun.
The ground, like any other, was a vocal battlefield. Thousands of supporters arraigned against each other. Some ostentatious, taunting, some reserved, and others resigned to what they were seeing.
When cricket is so one-sided, some supporters can become more easily distracted. And this cricket has been exceptionally one-sided.
No team has been set over 500 to win in the last innings of a Test three times in a row, a record this England side would not be proud of.
If there was a sense that yesterday, the third day, was like Christians being fed to lions, then today was more like ritual sacrifice.
England were the early Christmas dinner, basted by a 134 runs in 17 overs in the morning and merely waiting now for the furnace to roast them fit for feasting on.
Two of England’s pillars were mocked. First Swann by Watson, who raced to his century before many had arrived, adding 73 runs from 41 deliveries.
Then Anderson, who Bailey took for a record-equalling 28 runs off the last over of Australia’s innings to reach a target of 504 and the declaration.
The WACA resembles the industrial complex Tim Burton envisaged for his 1989 Batman: Axis chemicals. The Prindiville Stand is like a silo, the light towers chimneys and the temporary stands like something that haunted Mary Shelley.
This Ashes will haunt England. Has a team ever been so collectively out of form? The competition is not between statistics but in them can be perceived the lack of competition. England have not scored a single century.
Australia have scored seven, more than one an innings. At stumps on the fourth day, Australia have scored 851 runs more than England. Earlier they had gone over a thousand clear in the series.
England may have arrived tired but the reason they have failed to win any of the key moments is because they have come off second best in all of the key duels, the first of which has been with the Australian opening batsmen.
England’s opening bowlers have not been able to restrict Warner, who averages 91.4 so far this Ashes. Not including the second innings at Adelaide, in which he remained 83 not out at the overnight declaration, Australia’s average score when Warner has been dismissed has been 145. That is 82 in the first innings and 208 in the second.
If England arrived in Australia tired, he has made them tireder.
Australia’s overall average run rate has been 3.7 runs per over.
England’s has been 2.82 so far, which is inflated by the current run rate of their second innings in Perth (3.74, their highest in the series) from what would otherwise be 2.64.
Australia have earned time that England have not been able to survive.
Australia’s numbers three to seven collectively average 44.94 runs. England’s bowlers together average 54.9 runs per wicket and have only taken an average of 7.5 Australian wickets an innings.
Australia average 416 in their first innings and 300 in their second to England’s 186 and 245.
Alastair Cook is one of England’s all time greats and Michael Carberry is the third best England batsman by average, but the openers have not given the middle order anything like a platform.
Until the 85 for the first wicket in the first innings here, 28 was Cook and Carberry’s best partnership.
England’s middle order have been left too much to do, against which Australia’s quintet have prospered. Their collective bowling average is 24.86.
Facing the music each delivery he is on the field, therefore, Prior has been left to crumble, like the pitch on the ground in which England will lose the Ashes today.
The linchpin of the team averages 17.60 with four of five completed innings having ended in single figures, two of which were ducks.
His keeping has suffered, too. The 99 runs his missed stumping of Warner off Graeme Swann yesterday was the most costly example.
The jeering became less comprehensible throughout the day as countless beers swilled around ample, hazelnut bellies.
One side remained mute but for an occasional, isolated lunatic. Irony is a tiring currency when it is this heavy.
Only after yet another inexplicable dismissal from Kevin Pietersen, having been quiet for the whole of the innings thus far, the Barmy Army coughed into life, no longer able to rationalise amidst the heat, beer and cricket.
Perhaps they were just following Pietersen’s example.
Their Australian counterparts had drunk themselves blurry. Innocuous bump balls were met with delirium and Australian shouts cannot sound anything but maniacal.
Cricketing history is in the offing tomorrow. It is this reason I have paid A$20 to return for the final day with five England wickets remaining (or 253 Australian runs).
In Adelaide on the last day Australia had needed to take four and only required an hour to do so.
A$20 might therefore be deemed a little much, but I have come all this way and English cricketing masochism is what I was bred on. Also, the WACA needs the money.
India will not play a Test in Perth in a year’s time, which can be taken to have been a warning to renovate the ground into the 21st century. But the writing is on the wall – its redevelopment plans were abandoned today.
Modernising would take a huge investment that is difficult to justify. The WACA only hosts cricket and generates income for half of the year. Even today a third of the stadium was apparently vacant.
With the Subiaco Oval (Patersons Stadium) able to seat almost twenty-thousand more than the WACA, it would seem that it is just a question of time before it comes to host cricket Tests with drop-in pitches in Western Australia.
History rarely stands up well on balance sheets.
Without the WACA’s pitch, where bowlers can do things they can’t elsewhere, cricket will be the lesser. Another stadium of character will be lost to genericness but I wonder if the batsmen will miss it.
Build your own fantasy cricket team and put it to the test with Draftstars daily fantasy competitions. Pick your match, pick your team and watch the points roll in to take out cash prizes on each match. What are you really gambling with? Set a deposit limit.