The raging atmosphere has never sounded like it did in 140 years of Test cricket at the ground after all hell broke looseAt 2pm the Harris Garden was empty, and the Nursery deserted. Apart from the idle bar and catering staff, the cleaners sweeping up the tumbling plastic cups, the outer grounds were uninhabited. Everyone was inside, in utter tumult. In the Edrich Stand they were chanting “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!” and over in the Compton it was “Same old Aussies! Always cheating!”They have been playing Test cricket here for 140 years, the atmosphere at the ground has been loud enough before now, excitable, tense, and on edge, too, but it’s never felt, or sounded, quite like it...
A long, bruising day trying to take wickets seemed to take its toll on the hosts, before Australia showed them how it’s done Ahh, Bazballs. The old salts around the ground have been complaining for days that England need to learn there’s more than one way to play this game. Saturday turned out to be an object lesson in exactly that. England slogged up the long, hard road to taking the wickets they needed and once they finally had them watched Australia canter down the straight, short one.They still need six more to win, but then three of those bat below Stuart Broad. England, on the other hand, probably need Ben Stokes to work the same sort of miracle he...
The Australian tennis player revels in defying convention and now returns to the scene of his 2022 final loss – where tradition is everythingAs Nick Kyrgios trained on the Aorangi practice courts at Wimbledon on Thursday, a club photographer snapped a moody portrait that seemed to capture the Australian’s essence. Wearing his white peaked hat backwards and sporting a dangling necklace, two earrings in his left lobe and a full beard, Kyrgios’s eyes were narrowed and his brow furrowed. For that split second, with his glance cast towards the camera with suspicion, last year’s finalist appeared as watchful as a toddler about to have their favourite toy taken away.Never one completely in love with tennis, the Canberran has additional reason...
Bowler has been pick of England’s seamers this series and showed once again his worth to Ben Stokes’s sideDeep down, beneath the layers of mooching sang-froid, Ollie Robinson might have bridled a bit at Matthew Hayden’s description of his bowling as “124kph nude nuts”. He might have felt the pressure of becoming an improbable pantomime villain, cricketing Dracula, the embodiment of some discing quality of potty-mouthed medium-fast aggression that seems to have united Australia across the generations in its ire towards a slightly blank-looking 29-year-old from Margate.It seems unlikely. Robinson has always come across as reliably impervious. Has any English sportsperson embodied quite so expertly the concept of “bloke”? Here is a cricketer who appears at all times to have...
The injured Australia spinner went out to bat knowing it would be his last contribution to the match and possibly the AshesIt happened in a way that felt organic, even though you knew that it was coming. Applause that started around the players’ steps in the Lord’s pavilion and spread across the ground, ripples reaching the edge of the pond. Once there it turned back inwards, building in volume, sound becoming a more manifest wave, lifting people from their seats row after row. For a few moments, the whole place glowed.If you had predicted a standing ovation for Nathan Lyon before the second Ashes Test, it could only have been for his imminent 500th Test wicket. Instead he moved to...