Boland’s brilliance becomes beating heart of Australian bowling

Nothing happened in the 21st over of England’s innings at the Sydney Cricket Ground today. No wicket fell. No run was scored. Nobody will talk about it in years to come; few would have remembered even ten minutes later. But about the Ashes of 2025-26, it imparted quite a good deal.

Joe Root was on strike, wending his way toward batting’s blue riband, held for 15 years by Sachin Tendulkar. Barrelling in on heavy boots from the Paddington End was Scott Boland. Two traditional cricketers in a traditional scenario: to watch them is almost to slip back to kinder, gentler days, fastened to craft, free of histrionics.

Boland was the build-that-man-a-statue revelation of the 2021-22 Ashes in Australia, Root the that’s-entertainment, reverse-ramping rampager of the 2023 series in England. In that series, Boland, in fact, had a terrible time of it, a martyr to his own accuracy, which Bazball twisted into predictability. A hundred days before the commencement of these Ashes, in which he might not have played had Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood been fit, Boland conceded thinking over those experiences, and straining for positives: “I’ve obviously thought about it a lot since it happened in 2023. But I still think there were times in England where I bowled pretty well and just didn’t get a wicket. I’m a better bowler than I was back then.”

In a nervous opening sally at Perth Stadium, it did not look like it: floaty and full in the first innings, he went wicketless and gave up 62 runs. But with each succeeding spell, Boland has come back into his own. Without perhaps the obvious lethality of 2021-22, and more as a foil to his much-lauded confederate Mitchell Starc, he has personified Australian discipline and nominative determinism. Boland bowlin’ bowlin’ – it has a rhythm like the wagon train in ‘Rawhide’.

To Boland’s first ball, Root pressed forward, and made good contact, drilling the delivery to mid-off. A tidy shot, but the ball had to be played. Boland is the devil to leave, because he has a fiendish nip-backer, and awkward to drive, because he seldom departs an attritional four-metre length – Alex Carey’s close attendance this summer, too, has kept batters from stealing a metre or two to solicit half-volleys.

Second ball, Root pushed cautiously to cover. It was, again, delivered at a good pace – 135km/h. Boland has at times this summer bowled fast, at least for him, breaking the 140km/h barrier, but he does not need that speed gun spur, and knows enough not to strain. For Boland effort is total and general, not intermittent and conditional. His follow through, is strong, upright, totally in control, eyes on the target.

To the third ball, Root had to open up slightly to counteract movement away. Again, though, that line. It could almost be called the Boland line – tauter than the Maginot Line, realer than the Brisbane Line, all turrets, barbed wire and chewed up ground. To the fourth ball, Root was drawn to play, and his flinching defensive shot was beaten on the outside by a little extra bounce. Boland raised his arms, but only a little. He does not even waste energy appealing.

To the last two deliveries, sent the opposite way, Root played defensively, to point, slightly off the outside edge, and to mid-on, slightly off the inside edge. Root is a great player with a rare capacity for picking off slight errors of direction – seldom does he offer a bat entirely dead. But to Boland in Test cricket, even stretched over peak Bazball, his attacking percentage has contracted to less than twenty per cent. In Test cricket as it is played today, this amounts almost to tinned-beans-and-ammo survivalism.

Anyway, after six deliveries, all compelling a shot, there it ended: two for 86 at the start, two for 86 at the end, the clock showing 1.45pm, the state of detente. Amid a crisp burst of applause, Root went to touch gloves with Jacob Bethell, Boland to collect his glasses and cap from umpire Ahsan Raza’s hat. But overs exist in accumulation not isolation. It is no small thing to bowl this way – to hammer away at a length calibrated to top of off stump, consistently compelling a stroke, tugging the ball a little this way then a little that. It is a formula, frankly mandatory for success in Australia, that has continued to elude England this summer: Boland’s counterpart in this Test, Matthew Potts, has coughed up almost a run a ball across 25 overs. “Pressure”: Australia walks it where England, largely, talks it.

It also requires hard graft. Before the First Test, Boland, aged 36, bowled flat out in three Sheffield Shield matches, taking 14 wickets at less than 18 in ninety overs. Mark Wood, younger by nine months, broke down in Perth after 11 overs. Not his fault, of course, even if, before this series, it was Australia who were Dad’s Army. About Boland bowlin’ bowlin’, there’s nothing accidental or freakish.

But wait there’s more – after another over, Steve Smith swung Boland to the Randwick End, where again Root was his quarry. Boland was still pounding in at 2.30pm when he produced another hasty nip-backer, and wrung an lbw verdict from Chris Gaffaney, upheld on review. The best English batter of his generation had faced 24 deliveries from Boland, and scored from none of them. His only consolation, perhaps, was having borne a brunt that might otherwise have been Bethell’s.

Not that Bethell seemed to need much protection, despite coming in during the first over, and despite having no prior first-class hundred. We can hardly say: where has he been hiding? For he has been hiding, in potentia, in plain sight. Funnily enough, the day before, he had bowled well and spoken well afterwards. “This is proper Test cricket now in terms of the graft and the stuff that you have to put in,” he told the assembled press corps. “It was a tough day, but that’s what it’s about.” It sounded incongruous from a face so fresh amid all we grizzled hacks, but it spoke to values Boland would recognise. And while he is too slimly elegant a batter to be identified with grafting, Bethell today showcased a method and temperament of promising durability.

The Ashes, nonetheless, is already over, and it’s not been decided by one-offs, for all England’s players have had moments, innings and spells, that have shown them to good advantage; it’s been the building, day-after-day and brick-by-brick, of cumulative excellence. Boland today took only the wickets of Root, and later of Brydon Carse, but his spells are worth setting out: 4-1-5-0, 3-1-3-0, 5-1-7-1, 4-0-15-0 (swollen by four overthrows), and 3-1-4-1. In his 18-3-34-2, he bowled 86 scoreless deliveries, conceded one boundary, and continued beating the bat – with the last two deliveries of the day, he bent a 75-over-old ball past Bethell’s outside edge as though he had just come in.

Nobody has demanded any monuments or mentioned him as a medallist, but since that unhappy opening day Boland has taken 20 wickets at 21 and conceded three an over. His record from 19 Tests, meanwhile, is eighty-two wickets at 18.4. In the best sense, that’s a whole lot of nothing.

Photograph by Darrian Traynor/Getty Images