Today at Adelaide Oval, the hottest of these Ashes, was not a day for “weak men”. The sun beat down on the expanse, and Australia beat down on England, until Bazball had been rolled flat into the 6mm of Santa Ana couch grass.
There were replays aplenty, and records too, affirmations that cricket takes all sorts – for proof, look no further than No1 and No2 on Australia’s all-time Test wicket list. Nathan Lyon, born old, fell in behind Shane Warne, for ever young, in his first over, equalling and passing Glenn McGrath’s total of 563 wickets. McGrath’s consolation may be the outline of a 5-0 Ashes shut-out, on which he holds the patent – more than England have shown these last eight days will be required to stop it.
It all began so hopefully, Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley launching the pursuit of Australia’s 371 breezily, almost nonchalantly. Then, in the fourth over of Pat Cummins’s comeback spell, Crawley drove hard to cover, and thwacked to midwicket, each time picking out a fielder. Good-looking shots; as tends to be the case with Crawley, no finesse. That left him on strike for what might be the best delivery of the Test – a ball from Australia’s captain that seamed away almost like a leg cutter. That exposed Ollie Pope at No3, and the word is used advisedly.
“He won’t make a run,” said Mark Waugh of Pope at the top of the tour. Nothing has disturbed that trend line. Aside from a couple of rinky-dink hundreds against Zimbabwe and Ireland, his Test average shrinks to 31.5; his average away from home is now below 30, and in Australia 16, without a 50 in 15 innings.
Worse is the sense of brittle bravado that Pope exudes, antithetical to the air of the best No3s. Even in his short innings yesterday, facing Scott Boland, he gloved a ball just short of slip and missed a wild drive. It wasn’t batting; it was suffering. England’s last three starting No3s in Australia, Jonathan Trott, James Vince and Dawid Malan, have perished here; realistically, Pope has one innings to ensure he does not emulate them.
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As Cummins threw the ball to Lyon, there was no “dog” about Pope; it was more canary, and cat. There was a short midwicket that Pope must have seen; there had been signs of quite sharp turn yesterday that Pope must have noted. Anyway, he flicked Lyon’s third ball, from around sixth stump, straight to the catcher. Three balls later England were 42 for three when Duckett was bowled by a delectable off-break that drifted in before turning away – a collector’s piece of finger-spin to a left-hander.
Lyon had been stuck on 562 Test wickets for 165 days, through a wicketless Test bracketed by two 12fth man stints. No matter, he is a patient man, who gives the onlooker a long time to contemplate him. It was said of the Australian spinner Arthur Mailey that he entered a Test match as though he just happened to be walking that way. He is a recognisably Australian type, dry as a fifth-day pitch. You see faces like his on prospectors in daguerreotypes of the gold rush, on photographs of farmers in the Depression.
His key is low. As he approaches the umpire with his threadbare cap, Lyon’s sunglasses afford him a sense of wishing to pass incognito, and his pate blends with the paleness of the pitch. He gives a groundsman’s caress to the popping crease, steps out a run as though retracing the footprints from the last time he bowled here. He gets through his overs quickly but without hurrying; he bowls a lot of deliveries but never without purpose.
A spell from Warne used to be full of grunts and groans, winks and moues. Occasionally, Lyon will raise his right arm, or hold his right foot in the air a little, as though pausing on an imaginary stair. Otherwise, he’ll just wheel around, and do it all over again, as he did the rest of the day. “There’s no secret behind what I do,” he said afterwards, typically deadpan.
Still, it is remarkable. Just as Jamie Smith’s awkward foot movement and ball handling in Brisbane accentuated the excellence of Alex Carey, so Will Jacks’s inability to maintain a length on the first day sharpened appreciation of Lyon’s constancy today. “Won’t you give me some peace, Wilfred?” Victor Trumper is said to have implored Wilfred Rhodes. You could impute the same thoughts to Ben Stokes as he bent forward in defence today, a statue of defiance.
Poor Stokes. Once Cummins had nicked off Joe Root after lunch, England’s captain could find nobody to stay with him. Harry Brook did what was asked and tempered his approach during a painstaking partnership of 56 in 118 balls with his captain, only to edge behind in Cameron Green’s first over when he may have felt the job done. Smith later seemed perplexed to be given out caught behind on review, but he was also the victim of poor shot selection – his premeditating a pull with the field set for a miscue was a last running-towards-the-danger death rattle.
It was a day of further misadventures with Snicko, so that it seemed at times less like watching a Test match than reviewing a laptop – or so it may have felt to third umpire Chris Gaffaney. At 43 for three, he decided that Root’s inside edge had not carried to Carey; at 149 for five, he ruled that Cummins’s bouncer had come from Smith’s helmet, so the question of whether it carried to Usman Khawaja rolling over at slip did not arise. The delays were interminable, the technology creaky, the judgments subjective, although after the rum do of the first day’s “calibration error” benefiting Carey it did not feel unfair that the visiting batters were spared. Unlike Carey, England failed to make use of their second chances.
Not until Jofra Archer dug in for the last hour, propping up his wearying skipper, was Australia’s progress checked. Earlier, Archer had taken five for 53. Trouble is that this left non-Archer bowlers with the figures of five for 311. And from there the day got hotter.
Photograph by Robert Cianflone/Getty Images