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Stuart Broad has revealed his heated exchange with Pat Cummins in the aftermath of the Jonny Bairstow stumping incident during the Ashes at Lord’s in which the English seamer called him an “absolute disgrace” and the Australian captain fired back at him about his record of gamesmanship.
A few days after Bairstow’s quotes for an upcoming book reignited the debate of Alex Carey’s controversial dismissal of the England keeper during the second Test, Broad has detailed how when he walked out to bat soon after the incident that he sledged Cummins about not rescinding their appeal.
Broad said after he heard the appeal from the middle, he quickly looked at a replay of Bairstow being caught out of his ground and thought he would not be sent on his way because the ball was dead.
“Saw it on the TV, ‘Nah, no way is that out’. Sat back down and then I heard a huge boo. I was like ‘what’s happened there?’ and I think Baz (coach Brendon McCullum) went ‘oh he’s been given out’ and I’m like ‘you’re joking’,” he recalled on the Up Front podcast.
“What set me off is I walked through the Long Room which is normally like ‘good luck, have a great …’ and one of the members was looking out the window and just turned around to me and goes ‘absolute disgrace!’.
“I would say mindset’s a strength of mind and I’ve learned to be very controlled with what I’m doing but that word just turned me into … I just had red mist for 10 minutes.
“So I walked past Jonny and normally the out batter you’d go ‘What do you think, is it swinging mate, how are you feeling?’ He was just snorting, staring at the floor like a raging bull. Didn’t even look at me and that revved me up as well.
“So as I’m walking out to bat at Lord’s and there’s boos going at the Aussies, the captain Pat Cummins is coming on to bowl so he’s walking towards me to the end of his mark.
“And I just looked at him and said, ‘You’re an absolute disgrace’. He said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re hardly an upkeep of the spirit of cricket’.”
Cummins was clearly referencing Broad’s decision not to walk in an Ashes Test in 2013 despite nicking the ball to first slip and being given not out.
“So that upset me a bit,” Broad added. “So then the next 10 minutes became me being very facetious and shouting in every time which I had huge regrets about that night. I was hugely embarrassed about it but I had no real control over what I was doing.”
Broad added that he eyeballed two close-in fielders and joined in the singing of “Same old Aussies, always cheating” that was reverberating around the usually genteel ground.
England’s Stuart Broad grounds his bat as Australia’s Marnus Labuschagne and Alex Carey look on. (Photo by Adam Davy/PA Images via Getty Images)
He also revealed Stokes told him to “keep doing your thing” of agitating the Australians because it appeared to put them off their game.
“Pat went over to long-on, way away from me and the crowd are booing him when he walked out and I’m shouting from 60 metres ‘Pat, Pat, all these boos, they are for you, mate. All of them’,” he added with a trademark smirk.
“Started off as a red mist and then I tweaked it into an advantage of we’ve got them by the balls here a little bit, how long can I make this carry on?
“It made the series, to be honest. We galvanised around it.”
Australia went on to win the second Test in a thriller and despite England getting up in two of the final three matches, the tourists retained the Ashes by virtue of their 4-0 cakewalk Down Under in 2021-22.
Broad also conceded that Bairstow didn’t leave his crease during a live-ball situation again for the rest of the series so “he realised maybe I was a bit dozy at times just wandering out”.
In an extract published earlier this week by the UK Telegraph in a soon-to-be-released book “Bazball: The inside story of a Test Cricket Revolution”, Bairstow told author Nick Hoult that he thought Carey had set a bad example by stumping him when he started wandering out of his crease thinking the over had been completed.
“The decision was that I was out, and I moved on,” Bairstow said. “I’ve not brought it up since. I’ve kept quiet. It’s on them. If that’s how they want to go about it and win a cricket game or what have you, then so be it.
“If you’re starting in your crease, then it wouldn’t even enter my mind to do that.
“I’ve never seen it happen from someone starting in their crease. I don’t think you want that filtering down into kids’ cricket.”
He has since copped more ridicule given there was also a similar incident earlier in the Lord’s Test when Bairstow had a ping at the stumps when Marnus Labuschagne was batting but he claimed that was a different set of circumstances because the Australian star was batting out of his crease.
And footage also emerged of Bairstow involved as the wicketkeeper in a similar incident in a county game in 2014 when he stumped Samit Patel well after the batter thought the ball was dead.