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Key events
7th over: England 35-1 (Crawley 5, Bethell 0) Just when Duckett was looking himself again … He had cut Starc for four, helping himself to his favourite dish, and then clipped him (uppishly) for four more. But Starc has had an immense series and he hit back with a classic outswinger and a classic nick, which produced a fine low catch by Alex Carey.
WICKET! Duckett c Carey b Starc 27 (England 35-1)
Ben Duckett hits Starc for two fours … and pays the price!
6th over: England 27-0 (Crawley 5, Duckett 19) Steve Smith goes for an early bowling change, replacing the blameless Neser with Scott Boland (perhaps Neser is going to change ends). Boland instantly finds some seam movement and beats Duckett’s outside edge. Crawley then plays no stroke to the nip-backer. Dangerous game … As the ball lodges in his pad, the Aussies discuss a review, but decide against – and they’re right, as HawkEye shows it was too high and too wide.
5th over: England 26-0 (Crawley 5, Duckett 18) Duckett gets another freebie from Starc and flicks it for four. Then he plays and misses at a loopy bouncer outside off, but when Starc goes full again Duckett tucks in with an off-drive for four more, following through like Brian Lara. You’d never guess that he’d had a shocker of a series.
After three overs, Mitch Starc has none for 17. But he also has the Ashes in his pocket.
4th over: England 17-0 (Crawley 5, Duckett 9) Duckett gets a single off Neser, but Crawley is joining the dots (plus a leg-bye). He’s wary of Neser and And well he may be as Neser is one of seven bowlers in this series who are taking a wicket every 35 balls or better. If they maintained that over a long career, they would be the seven most incisive bowlers of all time. At the moment, the bowler with the all-time best strike rate (min. 200 wickets) is Kagiso Rabada of South Africa, on 39.
3rd over: England 15-0 (Crawley 5, Duckett 8) Duckett, facing Starc, plays a nice solid push down the ground for two, followed by a glance for a single. Then Crawley gets a thick edge to a ball that comes back in, but it lands safely enough in the silly-point zone.
No big shots yet, and they’re still going at five an over. Rumours of Bazball’s death may be exaggerated.
2nd over: England 11-0 (Crawley 5, Duckett 5) At the other end it’s Michael Neser, who’s been taking wickets for fun. He nearly has another one as Crawley, squared up, edges into the gap where fourth slip would be if the Aussie captain was Steve Waugh, not Steve Smith.
1st over: England 5-0 (Crawley 1, Duckett 4) Crawley leaves the first ball, which is well wide of his off stump. He defends the second and takes a quick single. No sooner is Duckett is in his sights than Starc hits his straps: a yorker on middle-and-off, just about stabbed out, followed by a length ball and an uncertain prod. Duckett manages a leave, then gets what he wants – a nice half-volley on the pads, which he whips away for the first four of the day.
The Test begins with … a delay. In fact, two: one for a reflection in the crowd, the other for a steward moving behind the bowler’s arm. Proper creekit.
Ready now. It’s going to be Mitch Starc to Zak Crawley.
As the Aussies spread out with pink numbers on their backs, Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett stride out to open the innings. On TNT, which had had an even worse series than England, Graeme Swann is at the microphone. “This is where you want someone to do an Alastair Cook,” he says. “To be 35 not out at lunch.” Good luck with that.
“Hello Tim, and happy new year,” says Andrew Benton. Happy new year to you too, and everyone. “Who could replace Brendon McCullum? I do think he should go given his stated aim was to win the Ashes, but who could take over? There seems to be a dearth of suitable candidates. But there seems not to have been much discussion in the media on it in any case. What’s your take?”
I’m not sure! So I went on WhatsApp and asked Tanya Aldred, our queen of the county scene. “Um,” she replied. “Championship winner with three counties Peter Moores?” But she did add a laughing face.
“Might be limited,” Tanya went on, “by who wants to commit because obvs they can all get lucrative franchise gigs. I’d go for Rahul Dravid if they can get him.”
This is the pink Test, with funds being raised for the McGrath Foundation. As the players make their way out there’s plenty of pink in the crowd, adding to the elegance of the faded green stands at the members’ end.
Sydney, by the way, used to be a spinners’ paradise. The all-time top wicket-taker in Tests at the SCG is Shane Warne, with 64 from 14 Tests, and second is his old understudy, Stuart MacGill, with 53 from only eight. It makes you wish England had taken Rehan Ahmed.
This is thought to be the first time Australia have gone into a Sydney Test without a frontline spinner since 1888. And now, as at Melbourne, they will have to bowl last, unless that long batting order of theirs racks up enough runs to win by an innings.
“Long odds,” says Jack Gough, “but… tantalising possibility that Steve Smith gets 5 catches in this Test, Joe Root gets none and Smith then goes to the top of the leaderboard for most Test catches of all time.
”Smith has 11 catches in 3 matches so far and Root has 3 catches in 4 matches. What do you think?”
I think that’s a good spot. The point Stokes made about the bowlers – that Australia’s have been better under pressure – could equally well apply to the slip catching.
Toss: England win and bat
Steve Smith tosses the coin, Ben Stokes calls tails and tails it is. “We’re gonna have a bat,” he says. Why, says Isa Guha? “Good conditions here in Australia.”
Shoaib Bashir? Not picked. Matthew Potts comes in for the injured Gus Atkinson.
“I would have batted,” Steve Smith says briskly. He’s left out his specialist spinner too, so Todd Murphy, like Bashir, will be carrying the drinks. It may or may not be a consolation to him that Smith adds, “Hate doing it.”
Beau Webster comes in for Jhye Richardson, which means Cameron Green survives but has a rival alongside him. And the Aussies will bat deep, with one of those two at No 8.
“Great pre-amble,” says Tom van der Gucht, sportingly. “It got me thinking whether Labuschagne or Weatherald could do a Pope and Crawley and do just enough to retain their place.” (At the risk of splitting haiirs, I thought Pope had lost his place?) “Cricket is a strangely moral sport whereby you earn your chance, become the next cab off the rank, deserve another shot etc… Bazball has been weirdly anti-Bazball by eschewing county form, yet still hanging onto hunches and giving Pope/Crawley shot after shot based on their feasts and ignoring their famine. Weirdly, Crawley has probably pencilled himself in for the rest of the year based on the paucity of scores from other batsmen. I bet Malan is fuming – never really fitting in or backed in any England regime whilst Crawley seems destined to be picked for the ODI team too.
“One of the pleasures and unique idiosyncracies of the sport I suppose, like looking at how many incredible Aussie batters never got the chance in the test team due to its strength and consistency: Bevan, Hodge, Law, Love… Even Glenn Maxwell… How the hell has he not been backed as a game changer in Tests?
“I should go to bed…”
Ha. To be fair to Crawley, he’s been pretty good against Australia, unlike Pope. His average in the Ashes is 39, the same as Joe Root and Alec Stewart. And his 37 in the run chase at the MCG was worth 75.
The difference between the sides
In that press conference, Stokes put England’s defeat down to the Australian bowlers and their ability to get it right under pressure. They’ve certainly brought a lot more experience – even their new bowlers are fairly old. But England too have bowled better than they usually do in Australia.
The Aussies’ average (completed) score has been exactly 300, which is their second-lowest in a home Ashes series in the 21st century, only just beating the 292 they managed against Andrew Strauss’s triumphant team in 2010-11. England’s average score has been 242, so the gap has been 58. On England’s last Ashes tour, under Joe Root in 2021-22, it was a gulf of 148; on the tour before, also on Root’s watch in 2017-18, it was 222. On the tour before that, under Alastair Cook in 2013-14, it was 198.
Strauss’s achievement was to inflict a gap like that – 219 – on the Aussies, which was a spectacular case of giving them a taste of their own medicine. No wonder he got a knighthood. And it was lovely to read, the other day, that he’d found love again after losing his first wife, Ruth, to cancer.
Pre-match reading
Barney Ronay has been listening to Ben Stokes, who is beginning to sound like William Goldman. “We all play a good game,” Stokes tells the media, “by looking like we know what we’re doing when we’re looking at the wicket.”
Preamble
Tim de Lisle
Hello everyone and welcome to the final act of this drama. It should have been a cliffhanger, and could well have been if England hadn’t fluffed their lines on the second day in Perth. It should have been an epic, and might have been had the pitches in Perth and Melbourne not come straight from a seamer’s dream. The long and the short of it is that it’s been both long and short at the same time.
It’s been a long tour – four of England’s likely XI today left home on 10 October, for the baffling warm-up that consisted of two white-ball tussles with New Zealand. And yet it’s been a short Ashes series, occupying only 13 days so far. For the players, it may have felt a little like what was famously said about the First World War: months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. They haven’t shot themselves in the foot, but they will have spent a bit of time kicking themselves.
For the Australians, who may have been mildly irritated to lose in Melbourne, Sydney is a chance to make that game look like a blip, to complete yet another hammering and give Usman Khawaja a handsome send-off. And to show why they deserve to keep their places, as there have been three underperformers in their top seven – Jake Weatherald, Marnus Labuschagne and Cameron Green, who may already have been dislodged by Beau Webster.
For England, it’s a chance to play for pride again, for a sliver of respectability, for some World Championship points, for the record books, for the mood in the camp and their long-suffering captain, not to mention their travelling supporters. In Test cricket, no rubber is ever more than half-dead. A consolation win is still a win, and as England discovered at Melbourne, when Ben Stokes and Joe Root finally tasted Test victory in Australia, it is definitely some consolation.
The best England can do now is to lose 3-2, something they’ve done just once in 140 years of Ashes tours – way back in 1936-37, when Gubby Allen’s team raced into a 2-0 lead, only to find Don Bradman pulling off the greatest comeback in Test history. A 3-2 win by the Aussies has happened only once in England, too: in 1997 Mike Atherton’s team went 1-0 up, then 3-1 down, before winning a dogfight at the Oval.
So there’s no shortage of sub-plots, and the pitch is among them. It’s been looking like another greentop, but the man in charge of it, Adam Lewis, says he’s confident it will go to five days and Cricket Australia, along with the spin-bowling community, will be praying he’s right. The weather hasn’t been on Lewis’s side – too hot and dry before Christmas, too cool and damp since. Today’s forecast is for all of the above at once, with warm sunshine giving way to showers after lunch and a fair chance of a storm in everybody’s tea cup.
All being well, the toss will take place at 10am (11pm GMT), so do drop by five minutes after that to find out if Shoaib Bashir has finally got the nod.
