Head hits early and often, Wade is ready to chance his arm – perfect players to ride shotgun alongside Steve SmithCricket teams are all about balance. Right-handers with left-handers, leg-spinners with off‑spinners, the range of personality and style and temperament and approach that make a team a complex and evolving creation, reflecting light from its varied facets.After the fourth day of the Edgbaston Ashes Test, my colleagues in these pages have doubtless described Steve Smith in terms of a computer or machine, having calculated Australia’s course through the match. At the same time he was accompanied by two players who are extremely human. The balance was just right: one-part organism to one-part mechanism. Related: Australia take control of Test after...
It makes no sense that James Pattinson can hit the England captain’s stumps but not take his wicket simply because the bails remain onIt’s the end of the 21st over of England’s first innings at Edgbaston. The Australian quick James Pattinson is finishing his seventh. He’s been rapid, moved the ball through the air, threatened constantly. He bowls the England captain, Joe Root, a combination of all three. Angle in towards the stumps, a hint of swing. Straightening off the seam to beat Root’s shot as he steps across to try to cover the line. A wooden sound, and the umpire gives him out caught behind.Root’s review reveals a spike on the waveform sound-tracking graph. But not when the ball...
The Australian batsman was booed on his way to the crease, but 144 runs later left to applause from all around the groundThey came for one kind of story. What they got was another entirely. Under gloomy Birmingham skies Steve Smith produced an innings of rare and compelling brilliance, ending on 144 out of 284 and transforming through a combination of craft and will the direction of this first Ashes Test.It came, of course, in the most extraordinary circumstances. We booed him out – and we booed him back in again. And then in again. And then out. And then again at 4.44pm as Smith sprinted off the field, only to come haring back on again as the covers were...
Australian fast bowlers against English batsmen has been the defining contest in this most famous of sporting encountersThere are the usual signs that it is getting closer. The Ashes white noise starts to fade. The Ashes hum starts to die back, wider current of Ashes anxiety to fall away. And suddenly Test cricket begins to pare itself back to the basic, atomic level business of Australian bowlers against English batsmen, Baggy Green in the field against starchy whites at the wicket. Look back and cricket’s oldest two‑hander has so often pegged itself out this way. Hence, perhaps, the strikingly emotive response to Joe Root’s announcement that he will move up one space to bat No 3 for England in Thursday’s...
Gower is ‘being retired’ by Sky after the Ashes. His palpable kindness, making us feel safe in a sport that can be – especially to the uninitiated – a little intimidating, will be missedThe news that David Gower will be laying down his microphone – or, rather, unclipping the lapel mic from whatever elegant silk tie he happens to be wearing that day – caused a murmur of sadness in my family. He had retired from international cricket when I started watching the game, so my memories of him were never those of the golden-haired boy of summer. His batting was already being embalmed in nostalgia, a mosquito trapped in amber, its wings spread in an eternally stylish cover drive....