In a mad half an hour at Lord’s, a day where England had been almost perfect turned South at a rate of knots.
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The most important context to this passage of play was that it started with Nathan Lyon limping off the field. As he hobbled around the boundary rope supported by the team Australia physio, the crowd and commentators simultaneously realised this was more serious than cramp.
Leave aside, for a minute, the connotations that moment could have for the series and simplify them to this game alone. Lyon walked off in the 37th over of the innings. By that point, he had already bowled 13 overs and taken the only England wicket to fall. Australia have four seamers, two of whom with recent injury struggles, plus the part-time spin of Marnus Labuschagne, Steve Smith and Travis Head. England would be batting last on a pitch that’s had little in it so far for either side’s seamers, and Australia would have no specialist spinner. If they were average for the rest of the day, or even just below that, they could have batted themselves into a position to almost put the game beyond doubt.
Instead, they pushed their self-destruct button.
The most effective thing Australia could have done to England was to play on their ego. Three men out on the hook and short deliveries banged in one after the other brought on the predetermined testosterone fuelled rampage. Ball after ball flew just short to the fielders on the boundary or popped up off gloves into nowhere until, inevitably, one stuck.
Three balls after Pope holed out, Joe Root also tried a pull shot. It ricocheted off his glove and fell into Alex Carey’s grasp. That would’ve been the second time Root was out to a poor choice of shot in as many innings. As it happened, Green had overstepped for the fifth time in his spell. That moment could’ve been just as seismic for the series as Lyon’s injury – a Root hundred and the game would be pretty much gone from Australia. But, instead, that error cost Green just nine runs. Another pull shot, another pop-up in the air and another wicket.
Root tends to get a free pass on his modes of dismissal. Rightly so, as England’s best ever, he’s earned that right. But that doesn’t make his wicket any less daft. If anything, it makes it even more frustrating. As England’s most trusted, talented and safest bat, the burden is largely on him to give the rest the freedom to play the way that has allowed them to find success. That doesn’t mean putting the reverse ramp away, but today it meant acknowledging the situation England were in at that time.
Duckett had also fallen in between Pope and Root, two runs short of a century. In reality, he missed out by an even finer margin. In the over before he was out, Labuschagne had fired the ball in at the non-striker’s stumps and hit. If he had missed, no one was backing-up to prevent the ball from flying down to the boundary and gifting Duckett a century. But he didn’t. Next over, Duckett was out to his 14th pull shot in six overs.
It could’ve been worse for England – Harry Brook was dropped by Labuschagne at square leg on 24. But even a collapse of 34-3 is rookie numbers compared to some of what we’ve seen over the past few years. And, in most of those cases, England weren’t 188-1 at the start of them.
That half an hour doesn’t have to be a damning indictment of England’s entire approach, but Stokes’ safe negotiation of the final hour showed that there is room for nuance in England’s aggression. Pope and Duckett batted sensibly for most of the afternoon, and 188-1 is more than any would have hoped for from England’s top three 18 months ago. Their freedom-centric approach that allows them to play extremely risky shots sometimes is what’s allowed them to do that. But it’s not that they played some extremely risky shots. It’s that they played about 20 within 15 minutes.
England’s approach is about always playing the game on the front foot and finding a way to win every match, no matter the situation. In that half an hour, they were dictated to by an obvious and simplistic plan. Lyon’s injury gave them a situation which allowed them to seize the game, instead, they allowed Australia back in.
