“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” offered coach Brendon McCullum ruminating on England’s eight-wicket Ashes defeat in Perth – hardly a well-chosen metaphor, one might think, when his team had sprinted through two innings totalling 67.3 overs, and lost a Test in less than two days.
Because if it is a marathon, then why were England sprinting? Sprinting so that their underdone bowlers were back bowling five hours after ceasing their first-innings exertions; sprinting so that an Australian attack minus two of its marquee pacemen, and with its great spinner off the field injured, were made to resemble world beaters; sprinting so that a chance to pot Australia here for the first time in fifteen years went begging in a manic afternoon. Coach McCullum, by the way, called this “a bit of a collapse”, which is like calling the Wall Street Crash a “technical correction” and the loss of the Titanic a “maritime misadventure”.
You see where McCullum is coming from. He wishes to discourage a fear of failure. He wishes to keep a cool head when he knows that all about him will be losing theirs. But if a performance like this doesn’t call for the hair dryer, then what will? Perhaps the difficulty is that he and his captain Ben Stokes would need to turn the dryer on themselves.
Because England went into this Ashes neither sprinting nor marathoning; they went in jogging, with a picnic match on a slow, low pitch at Lilac Hill. Harry Brook might have been out three times in his sixteen-ball jolly; Mark Wood needed scans after eight overs. It was such a token effort they might as well have played golf for a week – this team would probably have preferred it.
Nobody seemed to have given a moment’s thought to the challenge of Perth Stadium. Nobody speculated that these might not be conditions for airy drives at the top of the bounce. Because thinking, in Team England, appears to be construed as negativity. And because when you prepare so blithely, you are ill-equipped to play any way other than England did.
Before this Test, Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett had put on a record 2511 runs for the first wicket for England – they still have. Crawley’s dismissals in the first over of each innings, to a wild flail and a hard-handed push, should by rights have acted as cautions. Yet it is as if nobody in England’s line-up at any point watched anybody else bat, checked the score or assessed the match situation. Even Joe Root was at it; especially Joe Root was at it, dragging on from fifth stump when England had just lost three for spit.
The post hoc rationale now is that, well, Travis Head had a crack and succeeded, therefore England were on the right track all along. The trouble is that Head’s intent was task-oriented. A 200-run chase cries out for a batter at the top to seize the initiative, to take on the hard ball, and exploit the attacking fields.
As Head said afterwards: “Quite easily could have been out first over. It didn't really matter.” Well, it sort of did, but, with Marnus Labuschagne and Steve Smith to follow, Head could feign such nonchalance. He could play with utmost freedom because there were other guarantors of stability.
England’s batting here had no such stable base, no light and shade; it has never, in fact, felt more like a culture of utmost conformity. Viz Ollie Pope, the last man picked, who appeared to have convinced himself that to hang with the cool kids he would have to adopt their swagger. He has played sixty-two Tests to continue making the rookie errors he made in this Test match, and still his elders smile benignly.
To contribute to the oceanic quantities of ink spilt on the subject, a short word about Bazball. It has its recommendations. It’s clear; it’s accessible; it’s fun. Who wouldn't prefer to play that way? But it’s very 2023. It’s gone from refreshing to familiar, in now verging on the passé, and may very soon be retro. I get the point, but any point endlessly restated grows wearisome, and you win Test matches by making more runs not making them more quickly. It may here have reached its reductio ad absurdum.
With the Ashes, too, a new element has come into the apologias – that Bazball’s chief merit lies in its riling Australians. To draw from the Dad’s Army playbook so popular in cricket circles lately: “They don’t like it up ‘em.”
Maybe; maybe not. But as Travis Head demonstrates, Australians also know a little about attacking cricket, its time and place, risks and rewards. And to promote Bazball for its effectiveness in trolling Australians reminds me of that strand of American right-wing thought aimed not at achieving specific ideological ends but rather at “owning the libs.” See also the Epstein files for the dangers of self-owning.
If that all seems a bit highfalutin, let me bring you back to the streets of Perth this morning, as Cricket Australia shovel two days of refunds out the door, and as disoriented England fans wander aimlessly, wondering how to fill three days of their trip of a lifetime. Literally as I’m writing this in a cafe selling overpriced full English breakfasts, two such gentlemen are scrolling through their phones for diversions.
“Great weekend getaway,” says one.
“Koalas and kookaburras,” says another.
“Serenity?”
“Aye, serenity.”
Sounds like a good plan, and I hope they enjoy it. It’s a marathon not a sprint for them too. And they’re paying for it.
Photography by Robbie Stephenson/PA Wire