The Ashes: After the hype, ‘normal’ Test offers excitement in spades

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This was published 6 years ago

The Ashes: After the hype, ‘normal’ Test offers excitement in spades

By Malcolm Knox
Updated

Thursday dawned with fake news: Bodyline! The Gabbatoir! Scared eyes! Joh for Canberra!

But the real Queensland, as opposed to the fictitious one, is only an hour behind the times. When the actual game began, the Gabba wicket behaved as it has year after year, more bark than bite. The only credible invocation of the terrors of the past were the handlebars on Mitchell Starc's moustache. Two young England batsmen grafted for their lives against steady Australian bowling. The impact of solid, conservative, professional Test cricket from both teams was almost startling. Stop the presses! Normal cricket takes place!

The Australians not only didn't fulfil the fake-news bulletin, they didn't even attempt it. Without the option of an all-rounder, their quartet bowled with the headline-eschewing attributes of caution and thoughtfulness, everything to a plan within their thoroughly planned lives.

As far as those plans went, it was a case of better the devil you know. Alastair Cook used to plunder Australia's bowlers before they realised, around 2013, that he does not like to play the off-drive. Ever since, they have served him a diet of half-volleys around the off-stump. As counter-instinctive as it is for fast bowlers to throw pies back to a short-order Cook, the tactic continues to work and his productivity has fallen. Accordingly, Mitchell Starc bowled nine good full balls to the former England captain, and then a perfect one. Simple.

Familiar failing: Alastair Cook fell early, struggling again with the off-drive.

Familiar failing: Alastair Cook fell early, struggling again with the off-drive.

So much for the known threat. To the unknown quantities Mark Stoneman and James Vince, plans had to be developed on the run. This uncertainty was apparent from the first ball Starc bowled to Vince, short and on the pads. After demonstrating such clarity in how to dismiss Cook, the Australians soon went to the plan you have when you're not having a plan: off-stump line, patience, discipline, starve the batsmen until they commit a mental error. For the most part, they bowled more like this was Bengaluru than Brisbane.

The shortcomings were soon apparent. Stoneman and especially Vince showed a taste for hitting the ball through the off, and simply waited for some width. The first hour passed as if all of Brisbane was holding its breath. Presently, when Stoneman and Vince began to find the cover boundary, their travelling fans found their voice.

Until late in the afternoon, both Stoneman and Vince were up to the mental challenge, countering with broad bats and cool heads. Either side of a rain delay, the pair were seldom troubled as they exceeded the highest England partnership in the entire series last time they were here.

Was the Australians' conservatism an overreaction to the slow, tacky surface? The vaunted Starc-Hazlewood-Cummins attack, keenly awaited for six years, reverted to stock-bowling method. The bouncers they occasionally unleashed dollied into Tim Paine's gloves. All three pacemen bowled within themselves, focusing on accuracy. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Starc was far from erratic…but too far? It's always a fine balance.

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England won the morning, most of the afternoon, and would have had a clear advantage for the day if not for Nathan Lyon, easily the most dangerous of the Australian bowlers. His dip and turn kept Vince and Stoneman in the crease, and his economy rate was England's concession to the threat he posed. Now that he is the Greatest Of All Time, Lyon is starting to behave like it.

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It was Lyon's fourteenth over that changed the game's tempo. He went through the well-set Vince twice, and then drew the edge, which Paine failed to glove. The Australians were suddenly invigorated, and with the pitch drying and quickening, Stoneman jammed out two yorkers before Cummins bowled him with a peach, or some such stone fruit. Soon after, Lyon put on an impression of Vivian Richards in the covers and, with a swoop and a shy, put an end to Vince's adventure. An excellent one it had been, and the young Englishman turned his prior Test average of 19 into the stuff of pure fiction.

Increasingly, the Australians came to life. In keeping with the lessons picked up during a year on the subcontinent, the pacemen gained more swing with the old ball than the new. Cummins rifled through Joe Root's forward defence, and the pendulum swung Australia's way. Moeen Ali wrested it back, clouting Lyon over the rope. Dawid Malan blazed some drives and a memorable hook shot off Hazlewood. England's middle-order had arrived. Thrust and counter-thrust, here was a contest growing into itself. An excellent first day's cricket. As it turned out, the predictions, like the weather forecast, fell far short of the real thing.

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