England’s specialist batters have struggled throughout while Australia’s bowlers have increased the pain in the form of runsThere was a moment in the trajectory where the impossible announced that it was, in fact, possible. Nathan Lyon had just played a pull shot, which was nothing unusual. His only shots in Test cricket are the pull shot and the sweep shot, which for Lyon is the pull shot he plays while kneeling down. He knows fast bowlers will bowl bouncers at him and he has devised one method of deflecting them.So it is normal to see Lyon lean back and heave across the line. It is not unprecedented for him to hit one of those shots for six, which before this...
Having reduced Australia to 12 for three, the tourists ended up using a part-time spinner in ideal conditions for seam bowlingAccording to reports, the England team took a charter flight to Hobart. Watching them play on the first day at the Bellerive Oval it looked more like they had travelled by ancient sailing bark, and arrived, like Abel Tasman, soiled, sore, and ship-worn, half-starved after six months picking weevils out of biscuits. Battered, cut, and bruised, suffering from strains, niggles, aches and breakdowns, a loss of form, and a lack of faith. Between the 11 of them it felt like if you cherry-picked the best bits from each they could just about cobble together one fit, functioning, and happy Test...
Batter’s quickfire century hauls Australia out of trouble and silences criticism of Bellerive Oval’s emerald green pitchOn the first afternoon of Hobart’s Ashes debut, the knives were out for Bellerive Oval. Australia had lost David Warner, Usman Khawaja and Steve Smith for a combined six runs, while Australia as a team had scored 12. The pitch looked like it belonged to the Emerald City. Accordingly, people online started getting stuck into the surface as no good, a lottery, a disgrace, or anything else they could think of, proclaiming that Hobart had blown its entree to big-league Test cricket and that the city should never get a Test again.Except that over the next hour or so, Travis Head and Marnus Labuschagne...
How to explain the denouement of this supposedly dead-rubber Test? Try this: life moves pretty fast, but the clocks stopped on day five at the SCGOK: blank sheet of thought-scap. How do we root‑and‑branch this? What are the bite‑ables here? What, exactly, do our targeted people units want more of? When the England and Wales Cricket Board’s inevitable Ashes review gets round to the glorious oddity of day five of the fourth Test, it is tempting to wonder exactly how those present will dice and slice the events of Sunday afternoon at the Sydney Cricket Ground.The last-ditch, non-result, dead‑series Test match draw: there is no other substance quite like this in sport. It’s good. It’s great. It’s irresistible. But try...
The format can feel like an unreasonable drain on time but that makes thrilling moments like the finale at the SGC even sweeterThis was the payoff. There can be times watching Test cricket when you wonder about the sense of investing the equivalent of a full‑time working week into a single sporting match. There can be times when a non‑contest is over in half that time and you still wonder if it was worth the expense. But then there are these times, the 15th session, the final hour of a fifth day, when the result is still on the line. The less good makes the great greater.This, too, is the glory of the draw, when one team can be miles...