In two spine-tingling hours, Zak Crawley reaps the rewards of being Zak Crawley | Ashes 2023

The end, when it eventually came, was fitting, and, in some ways, to be expected: Sometimes, the only person who can get Zak Crawley out is Crawley himself.

Three times previously, inside edges had whistled past the stumps, but the fourth crashed into them, and in a way, the french cut was the key shot this innings. Crawley did have his fortune, playing a false stroke to one in four balls on his way to his hundred, but that’s not what’s noteworthy. Don’t look at the luck itself; inspect the response to each slice.

The first, in the 12th over, heralded his quietest period, with eight consecutive dots doing little to signpost the carnage to come. This was a near-double at better than a run a ball, but Crawley did still pace his innings. The first fifty took 67 balls as England consolidated after an early wicket, the second needed 26 as he seized the initiative, and from there he maintained a run a ball to cement the advantage.

Still, if that was a marker of the minor ways in which this innings paid heed to tradition, the other two escape-reactions showed exactly what makes Crawley unique. The last inside-edge came shortly before Moeen Ali’s dismissal, and England were still nearly 200 runs behind. But after the makeshift No.3 fell, Josh Hazlewood, who had so nearly seen off Crawley, was twice hit across the line for four – once between two mid-wickets, and once fine, but deliberately so this time.

Crawley does not overly fuss at the near-misses and close calls. He’ll still play the same shot to the same ball if it’s there to swing at. This can be a frustration. Crawley’s technique looks like it has been honed on a bowling machine, each stroke tracing a path to an identical connection point, and that’s partly because it is, and when the ball does move off the surface, it can find the edge. But when it clicks, it’s glorious, and there is a virtue in expecting the best and forgetting the worst.

Which brings us to Crawley’s largest slice of luck. In the 22nd over of the innings, Pat Cummins found the inside-edge of Crawley’s bat, the ball flicking Alex Carey’s desperate glove on its way to the fine leg boundary. In the next, Crawley reverse-swept Travis Head’s first delivery of the game for four to bring up fifty, and then slog-swept the next into the stands. Startlingly, it was just the second six of Crawley’s career, and his first under Brendon McCullum, a statistical oddity, but also a marker of Crawley’s conviction in his ground game, backing himself to go through the field and rather than over it. By the end of his innings he had notched two more, demonstrating his total dominance. The last of those, an eye-popping step-down leg-side whip off Mitchell Marsh to take England into the lead, might just match his first-ball four at Edgbaston for England’s moment of the series.

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The numbers are staggering. This was England’s fastest Ashes hundred by a player not named Gilbert Jessop or Ian Botham, and the second fastest hundred by an opener in England’s Test history – Crawley also sits in first place, for his rollicking Rawalpindi ton. He hit 106 runs between lunch and tea alone, the most by an England batter in a session of Ashes cricket since 1921. His partnership with Joe Root was the fastest double-century stand in Test history. Crawley now has the most runs of any batter in the series, having faced 499 balls, or roughly a whole day’s play with bad over rates – fewer than Usman Khawaja in second place.

But they don’t convey the full effect of his innings, the rate at which Australia sagged. They were – and it is unfortunately necessary to use this word – rattled, and understandably so. Crawley was impossible to bowl to, and to set a field to. He hit balls just outside off-stump through the leg-side. He took on shots which fields were set to stop, and found gaps that didn’t exist. And when he didn’t find the middle, the edges flew past fingers and to the fence, and then he’d smash the next one. Every bonkers session in these bonkers times makes the others feel a little less so, but even in the context of Bazball, this was mind-boggling and spine-tingling, two hours of cricket that will go down as among the most dominant, the most memorable, and the most fun England have had against Australia.

This was the ultimate upside of the ultimate upside selection, a player whose continued presence has defined England’s philosophy even as he has, before this series, contributed less to their success than his teammates. McCullum and Stokes look at what a player can do, not what they can’t. They select for what their best day looks like, not on how often those best days occur. “His skillset is not to be a consistent cricketer,” McCullum said of Crawley last summer, an utterance that prompted derision from some corners at the time. “He’s not that type of player. He’s put in that situation because he has a game which, when he gets going, he can win matches for England.” England haven’t won this game yet, and the weather may put paid to their hopes of doing so. But the fact that they have any chance is down to Crawley.

This has been the mindset Crawley has projected too, even if there have been moments of self-doubt along the way. He has proclaimed that he doesn’t need to work on his defence any painted any criticism as coming from “Joe Bloggs” and therefore not worth listening to, and this has rankled with England fans, but he has needed reassurance and backing too, and lots of it. “I do doubt myself at times but I have to say ‘keep being me’,” he told Sky Sports at stumps. “Under any other coach and captain I wouldn’t be playing this series,” was another disarmingly honest line in the post-day presser. And yet, despite knowing his own fortune, Crawley is able to remain true to himself.

It’s the kind of thinking that allows you to throw your hands at the first ball of an Ashes series and crash it for four, rather than let it go safely by. It’s the kind of thinking that might, just, keep England’s hopes of regaining the urn alive.