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The Ashes are safely in Australia’s keeping once again – and in the most anticlimactic way possible.
Just when it seemed England had Bazballed them into submission with a day of dominance scarcely seen in the last decade of Ashes contests, cricket’s oldest foe had the final say, with rain washing out nearly all of Day 4 and the entirety of Day 5 to let Australia escape with a technical victory – the best kind of victory.
With the urn safe but the series still up for grabs, there is, of course, so much to discuss. It’s time for The Roar’s cricket night owl, Tim Miller, and our far less sleep-deprived Pom, Mike Meehall Wood, to unpack everything that happened (and didn’t happen) in Manchester across the weekend.
TM: Mike, I’ve got to warn you in advance: I have some scorching hot takes about this Test. Specifically in the realm of how England and Ben Stokes shot themselves in the foot and have no one to blame but themselves for letting the game get rained out.
MMW: Can we talk over rates already? It’s been the looming issue of this whole series that we haven’t mentioned, but even when England knew it was going to rain and had one and a bit sessions to bowl Australia out, they still dawdled and dawdled. It’s ridiculous.
TM: See, that’s interesting: we both think England left themselves too little time to get the 20 wickets they needed, but where you point to over rates, I’m going for the length of the first innings. With the forecast always likely to make this a three-day Test – three and a half at most – it was completely baffling to me that Stokes waited until the Aussies had bowled them out.
Honestly, I’d have declared the minute Joe Root got out on Day 2, with the score at 4/341 (a lead of 34), and had a pop at the Aussies for eight overs – but I’m willing to accept that a lead that slender and the lack of time given to the England bowlers to have a spell might have made that too adventurous a gambit even for Bazball, despite the need to win.
But to then bat on into Day 4 – and past lunch! – all the while drastically reducing the amount of overs they could bowl was quite astonishing. They had so many chances to declare and put the onus back on the Aussies to survive – when the lead got to 100, an hour before lunch, at the break itself – and all the while, with the forecast unchanging, the chance of getting the win they needed was slipping away.
England love a chase – imagine if they’d declared overnight, been able to roll the Aussies with 30 extra overs on Day 3 (entirely possible given how the lower order went in the first innings), and then had, say, that 30-over period on Day 4 to make 200-250 and win the Test.
It would have been absolute peak Bazball, and honestly my only explanation for it not happening is that Stokes valued getting his mate Jonny Bairstow back into form over the Ashes. Captain hindsight and all that, but still…
*breathes* Okay, rant over.
Jonny Bairstow and Ben Stokes. (Photo by Alex Davidson/Getty Images)
MMW: It was a bit strange, but I think the logic was bat once, bat big, thus removing the chase. I think it’s unreported (here at least) that the weather in Manchester is incredibly changeable and forecasts aren’t worth the paper they’re written on in that part of the world.
I grew up there – you can just about see my Ma’s house from the top of the Party Stand – and honestly, weather forecasts are completely pointless. We saw that on Friday as everyone compared the different providers…
I reckon Stokes just thought to get as big a lead as possible – remember they were scoring at the second-fastest rate in Test history at the time – and ground Australia into the dirt, with a gamble that the weather would not be as bad as it said it would be.
On that, by the way: how was it like as an opponent to get thoroughly Bazballed? It’s strange that England didn’t win, and yet have the biggest vindication so far of their way of playing…
tm: I’ve felt from the fist day of this series that there would be one day, somewhere along the line, where the Aussies copped a full Bazball blast. The law of averages suggests, if you get a bunch of quality cricketers and give them free reign to play as aggressively as they want, at some point it’ll all click. We saw that at Old Trafford.
Zak Crawley summed that up: I honestly thought he batted better on the first day of the series and at Headingley both times than he did for the first hundred of his 189. I lost count of the inside edges that flew just past his stumps, or the flays outside off just out of reach of the cordon, or any number of other near misses. Fair play to him on cashing in, though – I’m fairly certain his spot’s now safe for the foreseeable future!
I’m not big on overreactions, so for all the talk about Pat Cummins losing the plot and the Aussies getting ripped to shreds, I’m prepared to treat it as a one-off innings where everything worked brilliantly for England, and they’re just as likely to get bowled out for 250 again at The Oval as they are to make another 600-score. Cummins looks knackered, though, so now that the Ashes are safe it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he gets a rest.
Pat Cummins. (Photo by Alex Davidson/Getty Images)
MMW: ‘England are due to absolutely thrash them’ – some bloke last week.
I think the lucky part is just how all these things work, and if it wasn’t Crawley it’d be someone else. I’m a noted non-enthusiast for him, but when he’s on he’s impossible to bowl at and, crucially, he’s so big that the bumpers don’t work so he keeps scoring.
The point of the batting style is pressure transfer, and Cummins has fallen for that hook, line and sinker on multiple occasions.
As for him getting rested: I’d say it’s overdue, and was always going to be an issue when you have a bowling captain. He’s so good that he has to play, but the law of diminishing returns was always going to kick in across such a condensed series.
My feeling was that if England had got the result in this Test then they’d have won the last, too, but now I have no idea.
Mark Wood must be entering the red zone, because he’s rarely played three in a row, and much as I love him, Jimmy Anderson looks off it. Ollie Robinson will come back in.
Here’s an interesting question, though: can the player of the series be someone who’s played just three of the games? Wood and Mitch Marsh would come close if they keep their form from Manchester and Leeds…
TM: Wood has been the game-changer for England (along with Chris Woakes, of course) and you’d have had to pick him had The Oval been a decider.
Now that it’s not, it wouldn’t surprise me to see him get a rest given the three-day break between Tests. It would be hard to pick him as a Compton-Miller Medallist off just two games, but unlike in 2019 when it was Smith, Stokes and then daylight, it’s hard to pick many standouts across the whole series.
My picks at the moment are pretty boring: Stokes again for England, and Usman Khawaja for the Aussies, though two more low ones from Khawaja in the fifth and another decent score from Bison could make it interesting. He’s definitely gone ahead of Cameron Green, at any rate.
MMW: England have been so strange. Ben Stokes has been great and so has Joe Root, but in the games that England lost; whereas when they won, it was Wood and then this game Crawley. It says a lot that he’s now the top scorer in the series – nobody has blown it apart like Smith in 2019.
I was kicking an idea about Piggy in my head today: by the next Ashes in England, there’ll likely be a total changing of the guard, especially from Australia.
Smith, Warner, Khawaja will all be gone, as will (in all likelihood) Josh Hazlewood, Mitch Starc and Nathan Lyon. It’s more than half of the side that has barely changed in a decade.
Look at England and, Broad and Anderson aside – plus Moeen Ali, who isn’t really first choice – and it’ll likely be the same team but more experienced. It’s another 2005 vibe, right?
Mark Wood celebrates dismissing Travis Head. (Photo by Clive Mason/Getty Images)
TM: The next two and a half years are as important for Australia as any I can remember, because you’re bang on: England will most likely come into the 2025/26 series with a far more set line-up.
Mission one for the Aussies is replacing Warner, and then Khawaja soon-ish, at the top of the order; Matt Renshaw I reckon will be one given his age and status as the next in line at the moment, but whether the other is Will Pucovski, Marcus Harris or someone from further back who can say. I just hope they don’t have a situation with Uzzy where they wait too long like they’ve done with Warner and are stuck with a past-it opener with no time to blood a replacement.
As for the bowlers, I’ve got a suspicion that series will be Nathan Lyon’s swansong – he’ll be 38, which is about the limit for a professional cricketer even for a spinner. There’s no reason Hazlewood and Starc can’t go around as well like Broad and Anderson, but I’d love to see Tests in the next 12 months for Jhye Richardson and Lance Morris.
They’re young, quick, and the future – with fill your boots games this summer against the West Indies and Pakistan, there’s no better time to bring them into the rotation, probably at the expense of – and with apologies to – Scott Boland and Michael Neser.
Final thoughts on the fifth Test, Mike – who has the most to gain? Bizarrely, I reckon it’s England – given how the series started, a 2-2 draw would be a proper vindication of Bazball, where I suspect most of us Aussies would be perfectly fine with tying the series and keeping the urn.
MMW: I think it’s been a huge vindication of Bazball: the world champion team, who absolutely pummelled us 18 months ago, are properly rattled. That there was even a chance of a draw in Manchester – or a result at all at Edgbaston – was because of England and the way they played.
Yeah, we didn’t win, but as I’ve mentioned before, England loves a glorious failure and a moral victory. The country is hooked on cricket like it hasn’t been in almost 20 years. They have to see the job through, though. If they lose meekly at The Oval it’s an inarguable 3-1, whereas 2-2 will feel like a victory.
2019 was 2-2, but felt like a defeat because one of the wins was a total miracle that we should have lost and the last was when the series was gone. Admittedly, we’d just won the ODI World Cup, so who cares, but 2023 will feel like a win because this is the start of something.
Those of us who remember 2009, then into 2010/11, can see the trajectory of the team. The next two years are going to be a lot of fun, if they can keep this up.
Wait, no: we’ll get bowled out for 50 in 35 balls on a bunsen in Chennai early next year.
Anyway: The Oval. They have to win. They’ll never have a better chance than against an Australia that snuck through the weekend and are at the tail-end of a long, gruelling tour.
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