The debutant offers hope of progress for Indigenous Australians with a moving reaction from the standsThere were four moments across the first two days of the third Ashes match when the Melbourne Cricket Ground rose, in movement and in voice, to the hometown bowler Scott Boland on his Test debut. The second time was when he took his first wicket, as Mark Wood’s dismissal was upheld by the video umpire. The third time was when Boland, batting at No 11, scored his first runs with an edge through the slip cordon.Those either side were more important. The first, before the match began, when Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin spoke during the welcome to country, noting the rarity of an Indigenous Australian...
The 39-year-old bowler is steadily getting better despite the battle scars with the team going in the opposite direction Jimmy Anderson walked into the indoor nets at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and slumped into the first available chair. His eyes were weary. His boots were scuffed. His trousers were soaked in blood, a fielding injury from Adelaide two Tests earlier which had never been allowed to heal. The fourth Ashes Test of 2017-18 had just ended in an excruciating draw, Anderson had just bowled 59 thankless overs and only a lunatic would have entertained the notion that he would be back at this very ground in four years’ time for more of the same.A lunatic such as Jimmy Anderson, in...
Latest Ashes collapse is overly familiar and a backdrop to the beginning of the end for Stokes-Bairstow-Buttler middle orderTypical: Christmas evening, you turn on the television and it’s another bloody repeat. Although in fairness to England, pick through the dental records of their latest Ashes capitulation and you might just be able to identify a few distinguishing features. And above all the defining quality of their Boxing Day fiasco in Melbourne was the sense of hopelessness and predestination: of a team and a generation whose narrative arc has finally run dry.There was a time when England collapses had a kind of fascinating car-crash quality. These days, by contrast, they feel strangely banal: tedious, overfamiliar, predictable, like a recurring anxiety dream....
The host captain’s early incision undid England before lunch at the MCG not the tourists’ mid-session muddleYou could easily arrive at the conclusion that Patrick Cummins had been blessed by some benevolent god. The best-on-ground performance in the teenage Test debut, the personal qualities that made people speak of him as a future captain, the rise to that position despite a century and more of entrenched Australian opposition to bowlers taking the job.That interpretation, though, would be overlooking the long, long wait after that teenage beginning, when Cummins had played one Test but spent six years being denied the next, the cycle of injuries whirring as endlessly as the exercise bikes on which he did another stint of rehabilitation. Your...
Undertaker’s cart is creaking across the cobbles but the ashes of these Ashes are not quite ready to be scatteredClang. Bring out your dead. There was something a little ghoulish about the spectacle down the wires from Adelaide as England’s last-wicket pair attempted to push the second Ashes Test into its final knockings on day five.An Australian Ashes summer always has a strangeness about it seen from 10,000 miles away: those bleached-out greens and blues bounced around the world and beamed out into the depths of a northern winter. Watching James Anderson and Stuart Broad fence and fend at the teeth-and-toes assault of the 6ft 6in, 92mph Mitchell Starc, it was hard to avoid the feeing of something hollow-eyed and...