Cricket marches backwards into the future. It pores over its past to divine its possibilities. As ever more data is collected, ever more patterns are detected, and uncertainty trades at a discount to accountancy. Then unpredictable reality takes a hand.
The preceding weeks have been dominated by the absences of Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, and thereby the subtraction of their 600-plus Test wickets from Australian aggregates. Joe Root arrived with 39 Test hundreds in his kit bag and was anointed the “best batter in the world” by Marnus Labuschagne, even if England promised “balls-to-the-wall” preparation then played a beer match instead.
Today? Today, it all went to hell. Mitchell Starc took seven for 58, so that Cummins and Hazlewood were hardly missed; Root made 0, but then Labuschagne and Steve Smith, who have been lousy with runs, also failed. In all, 19 wickets fell for 295 on what was, in all frankness, a very good batting pitch. Bazball, eh? Who knew it was infectious?
87.6mph
England's average bowling speed on day one in Perth was 87.6mph, the highest they have managed in a Test since records began in 2006
It recalled the first day of the last Test summer, which featured 17 wickets, although it was also a reprise of 2023: England, so freewheeling they might just have returned from Burning Man, versus Australia, like the kids in a classroom of a strict teacher when someone has let off a stink bomb trying hard to maintain composure but finally collapsing in giggles. Oh, and there was us, watching all predictions go crazily astray.
It started early. At 10.20am, Starc opened the bowling to Zak Crawley, whom he had previously dismissed twice in 195 deliveries for the concession of 155 runs. A favourable match-up, to use the vernacular. Crawley certainly thought so. He drove airily at the third ball and missed, airily at the sixth and edged – a stroke that reeked of impunity.
With Ben Duckett gone at 33 for 2, if ever Root was to ton up in Australia, meanwhile, it was almost scripted that this was the day. Against Cummins, it had been noted, he averages 26, against Hazlewood 31, but against Starc 44. England’s champion sprinted to the centre, arms windmilling, as though eager to set matters to rights, and abjured the off-side glide that has previously been his downfall in these parts.
The delivery from Starc that dismissed him came from nowhere. It was not on fifth stump, or targeting the front pad, or breaking back, or pushed across, or any one of the countless other variations of promise – it came down the line of the stumps, so that Root closed the face just a little prematurely. It was hard to recall Root ever having been dismissed in such a way before. Now he had.
Steve Smith knows his data. When Ben Stokes came to the crease at 94 for four, Australia’s captain swiftly summoned Nathan Lyon, who has previously dismissed England’s captain nine times in Test cricket. But it was not Lyon who broke through after lunch – a ball-shaped back in and cleaved the stumps, as Stokes stumbled forward like he had been jostled from behind in a queue.
Starc again. Starc, Starc, Starc. He has not been a favourite of the accountants. He has been left out of Ashes Tests for being too costly; paradoxically he was regarded as a white-ball banker before identification as a red-ball force. Yet since adding the wobble seam to his repertoire of swing while retaining if not sharpening his speed. He is like an opera singer who has also learned to rap.
Root was Starc’s 100th Ashes wicket. Six more and he will pass Wasim Akram as history’s most penetrative left-arm pace bowler. As if to reinforce the day’s topsy-turvydom, Scott Boland, with a bowling average in Australia of 12, was too full, went wicketless and seldom threatened, going for 62 off his 10 overs.
Analysis of Harry Brook in Australia, of course, hardly offers much for the stattos to work with. His top score here previously was 20; his Big Bash League average was six; he slides out from beneath analysis as he sways away to the leg side, his intermittent defensive shots looking like vague afterthoughts, modest indulgences.
As ever, England’s vice-captain played the day’s best and worst strokes, with the irony being that he perished through indecision, unsure how hard to go with the field scattered, he gloved a crabbed half-hook, giving new cap Brendan Doggett a choice maiden Test wicket.
Yet things kept happening for the first time when Australia’s other new cap, Jake Weatherald, fell lbw to his second ball from Jofra Archer – never before had both first innings in an Ashes Test begun with a wicket on 0. With Usman Khawaja reported “unwell” as indeterminately as Jeffrey Bernard, Australia’s much-discussed order became its rejected alternative, with Smith at No3 and Labuschagne opening.
The pair provided a glimmer of what we once thought of as “proper” Test batting, soaking up pressure with an eye to the morrow, when conditions might ease and the bowling flag, scrounging 28 runs from 84 deliveries – almost half as long as England batted.
It was only an intermission. Archer bowled Labuschagne off an inside edge, before Brydon Carse nicked off both Smith and Khawaja – again hemmed in from round the wicket. Australia would have been five for 48 had Atkinson held a return catch from Green’s leading edge, which may have come to him more slowly than he expected.
That brought Travis Head, with no recent runs to speak of – one score more than 40 in his last 20 hits, if somehow only ever one chunky cut from fluency. But Head perished tamely, then Cameron Green, Starc and Alex Carey lazily, to Stokes. There was some joshing about Stokes taking cricket’s worst six-for at Lilac Hill last week; this was one of Test cricket’s rattier five-fors.
Still, kudos to the visiting bowlers. The last two attacks England sent to these shores were Anderson, Broad, TBA and AN Other. This group is a pitchfork with five sharp prongs, and it dug into perfect lengths. Gus Atkinson bowled as well as any of them and went wicketless.
Finally, a note to the propellor heads of fan engagement at Cricket Australia, who can leave nothing alone, not even the already perfect first ball of an Ashes series – Friday’s expectant hubbub was drowned out by duelling electric guitarists as though welcoming Metallica not Mitchell Starc.
Nobody expects a breathless hush in the close any more, but what earthly point was served, and how was the experience enriched, by this sad, middle-aged male fantasy? It was like having Kylie emerge from a giant Melbourne Cup, or delivering the Olympic torch in a Batmobile. Administrators souring cricket with their stupid brainstorms – now there’s something on which you can absolutely rely.
Photograph by Matt King/Getty Images