The weekly Stat: England have been bowled out twice in under 100 overs in three of their last four Tests in Australia. They had been bowled out twice in under 100 overs on just two occasions in their previous 140 Tests in Australia, between 1907 and the Adelaide Test four years ago.
The word ‘extraordinary’ is used a truly extraordinary amount in all forms of sports coverage. Sometimes, however, it is merited. The Perth Test was gripping, spectacular, and statistically astonishing. At the same time, it was the epitome of the Stokes-McCullum era – brilliant, flawed, intense, and mind-scrambling for players on both teams, spectators, and statisticians trying to keep up with everything.
England are well used to being 1-0 down after the first Test in Australia, but seldom has defeat come after such a visceral swing of fortunes, after such hope had been raised.
The cricket proceeded along a bewildering, pyrotechnic course, a cascade of wild fluctuations, of narrative, emotion, and expectation. Nineteen wickets fell on the first day, the most on the first day of any Ashes series. The first innings lasted a combined total of 78.1 overs, the second lowest such figure in Ashes history. The match total of 141.1 overs made this the ninth-shortest completed Test ever played, and the shortest in the Ashes since 1888. The match run rate of 4.76 per over was the fifth-highest in Test history, and comfortably the highest in an England-Australia match.
England became the second team in the last 93 years to be bowled out in fewer than 35 overs in both innings of a Test. They have been dismissed in under 40 overs in six innings over their last 13 Tests, since the Oval defeat to Sri Lanka in 2024, as many times as happened in the troubled 1980s and 1990s combined (and something they avoided entirely for 55 years from 1921 to 1976).
Despite frittering their first innings away with the bat, at lunch on Saturday England had control of the match, after one of their finest ever Ashes-opening bowling performances (Australia’s 132 was their third lowest total in the first innings of an Ashes series since 1921), with Duckett and Pope well set and scoring freely.
On the first day, Ben Stokes had taken England’s fifth-fastest five-wicket haul in men’s Tests (36 balls). Australia had recorded a higher proportion of false shots than in any other innings since such data began being etched into cricket’s niche of history, and England had bowled at a faster collective average speed than they had ever been reliably measured at. The pre-series confidence was looking well-founded.
Two of the worst back-to-back sessions of England’s Test history later – 105 for 9 in 19.5 overs with the bat, then 205 for 2 in 28.2 overs with the ball – they emerged one-nil down, again, with none of their batting line-up having had a good game, and all five of their bowlers, so excellent in the first innings, had suffered new entries in their top three highest economy rates in a Test innings.
England’s high-risk approach to batting, largely successful in 2023 on less challenging surfaces, erupted in match-turning splatters of wickets. Mitchell Starc, with 10 for 113, returned the second best figures in the first Test of an Ashes series since 1953, having dismissed Crawley and Root twice each without conceding a run to either – this was the first time in Root’s Ashes career he has been out twice in single figures in a Test – plus Stokes twice, for just five runs. The next Test is a day-night game. In his previous 14 day-nighters, Starc has 81 wickets at an average of 17.0.
Then Travis Head flayed one of the great Ashes innings at a pace even Bazballian England have never matched. Australia smashed the record for fastest-scoring Ashes team innings, scoring at 7.2 per over. Head, one of modern cricket’s most fascinating players, made the second-fastest Ashes century, and only the fourth fourth-innings Ashes century in a winning cause since 1963.
A match in which turning points and pivotal phases piled up chaotically found its decisive moment when Pope, Root and Brook fell in the space of six balls, with the score on 76, all to imprecise, high-risk drives at deliveries well wide of off stump, with the match in the balance. Had Khawaja caught a simple chance off Jamie Smith’s edge three balls later, it would have been the fourth time in England men’s Test history that they had lost four wickets without scoring a run, and the first since 1977.
This mind-melting sporting hyperdrama highlighted the reasons why, in advance of the series, many thought that England could win, and the reasons why many thought they would lose.
If England fail to recover from this defeat, those six balls may come to be viewed as the pivotal minutes of the series, and the moment when the Bazballistic project, which has achieved much regardless of what happens in these Ashes, hit its defining stumbling block, the moment when a potential away win in a first Ashes Test, a joy experienced by England only twice since 1936, dissolved to a numbing defeat.