Dave Tickner's Five-fer: Second Ashes Test, Adelaide

Adelaide Five-fer: Day five

Josh bomb

Two balls on the final morning was all it took for all England’s overnight hopes and dreams to start falling apart. Within 17 balls, all hope was gone.

Josh Hazlewood ended the match with the worst figures of all Australia’s bowlers, taking only three wickets for 105 in the match. But he got the two that really mattered, when it mattered. All Australia’s bowlers were absolutely exemplary on the final day, but it was Hazlewood, charging in with the old ball first thing this afternoon like some crazed fast-forward Glenn McGrath, who set the tone.

First he jagged one away from Chris Woakes to find an edge so fine that Hot Spot missed it but, crucially, snicko did not. Then the big moment of the day as another one moved away and kept a fraction low on Joe Root to take the bottom corner of the bat on its way through to Tim Paine.

Both England’s not out batsmen dismissed without adding to their scores. Game over. Series over.

Jonny five

With the game gone, Jonny Bairstow set about his usual task of scoring as many runs as he could muster before the innings was all over. He got 36 good runs this time before he was last out to hand Mitchell Starc a five-wicket haul.

England’s reasons for liking Bairstow with the tail are sound. He’s an aggressive player, a deft manipulator of the ball and lightning quick between the wickets. The problem is that England, in these conditions against this attack, have no tail for him or anyone to bat with. Bairstow at seven (eight here with the nightwatchman) is a luxury they simply can’t afford. It’s like having a Maserati and only using it to try and shave 30 seconds off the school run.

Bairstow has been out attempting to force the pace in all four innings so far in this series for nine, 42, 21 and 36. He’s been the eighth wicket to fall twice, and 10th once. It can’t go on.

There is no obvious personnel change England can make for Perth – the talk of Mark Wood being parachuted in should be a non-starter; he’s coming back from injury and it would be an insult to Craig Overton – but they must surely tweak the batting order.

The fix appears straightforward: Bairstow to five, the gutsy Dawid Malan to six and Moeen Ali to seven appears a far better use of England’s current resources. It promotes a man who currently looks their second-best batsman into the top five, and gets another right-hander in there as well to try and at least delay Nathan Lyon’s middle-order southpaw fun.

Lyon’s roar

Speaking of which. Lyon took six wickets in this match, every one of them a left-hander. He has dismissed Moeen Ali in all four innings of the series, and Alastair Cook in both innings where the former England skipper has lasted long enough.

All six of England’s left-handers have fallen to him at least once in the series. Of Lyon’s 11 victims, Chris Woakes – bowled through the gate in the first innings at Brisbane – is the only right-hander.

It might not be top of England’s to-do list given the WACA’s fearsome reputation for pace, but the left-handers have to find a way to survive against Lyon while the right-handers have to accept the responsibility to take him on and try to hit him out of the attack.

Starc warning

Mitchell Starc was nowhere near his best in England’s run-chase, and ended with figures of 5-88. Which is pretty revealing.

He struggled with his line and length for much of the fourth day, but today he was right on it. The second new ball may not have been as crucial to the game as might have been expected, but it certainly made short work of England’s tail.

Craig Overton ended a fine debut Test being crunched on the pads by the very first ball of the 81st over, an unplayable late inswinger at 90mph. Stuart Broad was tormented like a mouse under a cat’s paw before finally being dispatched, before Bairstow was the last to go as he gamely attempted to make something of a cause long lost rather than settle for red ink.

Whitewash?

England are apparently refusing to mention the word “whitewash”, in the wrongheaded belief that ignoring it might make it go away. The time has very much come to face up to the very real prospect that this series will end 5-0. It remains only a prospect rather than the near certainty at 2-0 down four and 11 years ago.

What can England do to avoid it? They must show the fight, skill and application they have shown for long periods in the first half of the Brisbane Test and the second of this. They will rarely dominate this Australian side, but they can match them. They simply have to do it for longer.

There are cracks in this Australian side. England have been able to expose them, but never bust them open. The pressure must be applied from ball one and maintained.

This is all obvious stuff and easier said than done, but a whitewash against this Australian side would be ignominious. England should be good enough, must be good enough, to avoid it.

• Second Ashes Test report
• Second Ashes Test recap 

Adelaide Five-fer: Day four

Test cricket

What a brilliant, ridiculous sport this is. Never, ever forget that. The administrators might not get it, but forget about them. People might lolz it up about a sport that lasts for five days and ends in a draw or stops for sandwiches, and they may get their hilarious tea-towels out. Forget about them. It is their loss. No other sport on earth has this capacity for drama, theatre, and making damn fools of everyone daft enough to express an opinion on it.

Despite four staggering sessions for England, Australia remain firm favourites to win this match. But the fact that England have a chance at all from a position of 142-7 in reply to 442-8d is nothing short of ridiculous.

For England, though, a worrying prospect: they will likely end tomorrow having matched or bettered Australia in half of each Test yet lost both convincingly.

King of Swing

There’s a curious obsession in Australia with denigrating James Anderson’s achievements. It goes beyond the usual tired old anti-Pom rhetoric.

Maybe it’s his un-Australian style. He’s an artist in a country that values bloky aggression and pace above Anderson’s subtler skills.

He also doesn’t have the best record in Australia, which hardly helps. But the paucity of that record is also overplayed. For one, he’s played in a victorious Ashes away team, which puts him on a short list of current players on either side. He’s also now taken 51 Test wickets in Australia at 36, which is hardly disastrous for a swing bowler forced to use the diabolical Kookaburra cherry.

But even within that overall stat there’s a story. Essentially Anderson has struggled at Brisbane and Perth, the two Australian grounds that offer the most pace and bounce but least lateral movement.

He now has 16 wickets at 29 here in Adelaide, to go with nine at 23 in Melbourne and 13 at 27 in Sydney. Not too shabby.

This, though, was his first five-wicket haul and it was a stunner. A nation of sleep-deprived Brits hissing “pitch it up” while trying desperately not to wake their sleeping families finally got through to Anderson on the third evening when the pink ball started to talk under the floodlights.

He carried on where he left off this morning to register his first five-wicket haul in Australia – and only his fifth away from home – in his 15th Ashes Test here.

Anderson’s skill is beyond dispute, but this effort owed much to his fitness. A 35-year-old bowler running in and bowling 19 of the first 41 overs bowled in an innings. Extraordinary.

He might have just turned a series on its head in the one country where that skill is questioned.

Strengths and weaknesses

One of the main reasons this series is so thrilling is that neither side is good enough to stay in control for long. The flaws are too large, the gaping holes in each team too obvious.

You could put together a truly world-class XI from these two sides, and, in Australian parlance, a pretty ordinary one. The nationality split would be close to 50:50 in each.

And when putting the world-class team together, the difficulty would come in selecting the bowling attack. Big scored in this series will come despite the frailties of the batting line-up that compiled them, and will therefore always be built on fragile foundations.

Australia have already been 209-7, 209-5 and 138 all out in this series. England we know all about. The bowling attacks are both too good to ever found themselves utterly without hope. Just look at the damage England’s bowlers were able to repair here after their day-two disaster.

Handscomb and Vince

Two batsmen struggling more than most are Peter Handscomb and James Vince.

Vince was thrown a hospital pass when asked to bat number three here. If he’s anything at Test level, he’s a five or six. His technique is not tight enough to face the new ball: eight of his last 10 Test dismissals have been caught by keeper or slips, and one of the others was a run out.

It’s hard to know what the solution is for England, though, in the short term at least. Joe Root doesn’t want to bat there, there’s no plausible option anywhere else in the team, and the spare batsman in this squad is Gary Ballance. Until Haseeb Hameed recovers his touch – and he will – England are stuck.

So Vince is likely to struggle through the rest of the series. If his series tally ends up doubling his first-innings 83 in Brisbane it will be a surprise.

At least Vince knows his game, though, flaws and all. Handscomb looks absolutely lost.

He spoke bullishly before this game about knowing and trusting his unorthodox technique and it has brought him runs in the past.

That technique is half Steve Smith, half Ballance. He stays so deep you think he’s going to be lbw every ball, while he fidgets and fiddles around his crease like the Aussie skipper.

Unfortunately for Handscomb, his career trajectory looks more Ballance than Smith: a fast, run-laden start and then swiftly worked out.

Anderson tormented him here. Handscomb tried walking across his stumps. He tried staying legside. He had no answer, and it felt like a mercy when a desperate steer to gully was smartly gathered by Dawid Malan.

Vince will be asked to carry on, Handscomb may not. With Shaun Marsh clearly batting well enough to step up to five, Glenn Maxwell to provide fireworks at six and a genuine fifth bowling option looks a hugely tempting option for the last three Tests.

Review the situation

The review system was a major talking point again on day four, with Steve Smith’s use of it extraordinarily wasteful.

The playing regulations have been changed this winter. Teams no longer lose a review if an “Umpire’s Call” lbw decision goes against them, but on the flipside no longer have their reviews topped up at 80 overs.

This fundamentally affects how captains should use it, but Smith did not heed those lessons.

First of all, you need to be very, very sure before reviewing anything that isn’t an lbw. There is no “review retained” for a catch, and with no top-ups each review is now more precious. An optimistic review for caught behind against Joe Root off a ferocious Pat Cummins nip-backer was a gamble too far. It was negligent.

But common sense is needed for lbw reviews also. Ever since its introduction, Hawk-Eye and its imitators have shown the stumps to be shorter and wider than popular perception.

Even now, there is widespread surprise at things ball-tracking technology sends over the top of the stumps (see Shaun Marsh in this match), while things people confidently say are “going down” turn out to be hitting a good chunk of leg stump.

As such, failing to review an early lbw shout against Alastair Cook that was knocking leg stump out of the ground but then deciding to review one against Dawid Malan that hit him above the flap of the pad was bizarre.

The first looked, at worst, like an umpire’s call and review retained. For the second, that was the best-case scenario.

Smith now has no reviews at all for the final day. It could be crucial.

Adelaide Five-fer: Day three

Four sight

England’s night-session recovery was very welcome, totally unexpected and – for now – utterly futile.

The four Australian wickets James Anderson and Chris Woakes surgically removed with precise swing bowling of the very highest order have their value, but they were as nothing to the four England wickets that fell in the first session of the day as 29-1 became 128-5.

There was simply no way back into the match for England from that position. They have shown some fight and pride, and that’s not to be dismissed out of hand. It goes without saying that the fight, bottle and technique Woakes and Craig Overton showed to turn 142-7 into 227 all out was preferable to the meek slump to 160-odd that appeared likely when Jonny Bairstow was so brilliantly caught and bowled by Mitchell Starc.

If nothing else, it may have influenced Steve Smith’s decision not to enforce the follow-on, a call that ultimately allowed England to at the very least save face if not quite regain a foothold in the match or series.

Hard to follow

Mitchell Starc confirmed after play that the decision not to enforce the follow-on had been Steve Smith’s and Steve Smith’s alone.

While a raised eyebrow is permitted here – it would surely have made sense to at least speak to the bowlers if only for appearance’s sake – it also feels necessary to defend his decision.

With the way the pink ball behaved for England’s bowlers, it’s not fanciful to suggest England could have been significantly worse off than Australia’s 53-4 and the match done and dusted.

But at the same time he has only a four-man attack, all three of his big quicks had got through at least 16 overs and two of them have a history of injuries.

He gave England a chance to salvage some pride and they took it, but his side remain in an all but impregnable position in this match. Yes he could have unleashed his bowlers under the floodlights here, but if England are to take anything from this match they still have to bat under lights. Twice.

A five-match Test series is not a sprint. Smith’s decision is good news for his bowlers – if not his or his top-four colleagues’ stats – and the benefits will be felt down the line.

England’s bowlers started this match having to bowl for the third time in four innings. It showed.

Unforced errors

England’s dire morning was summed up by three of their top four getting out in deeply unsatisfactory ways. All different, all disturbing in their way, and all avoidable.

Let’s start with the obvious, James Vince driving hard off the back foot in Josh Hazlewood’s first over of the day. A high-risk shot selection early in the day and in his innings, and a shot that he should not have played.

He had, though, played an identical shot to an identical delivery two balls earlier and picked up two runs. There was no criticism there, and this is the thing.

We’re quick to criticise an attacking shot when a wicket falls. Obviously, wickets are going to be analysed more than pushes through cover for two.

But when discussing flawed shot selection the emphasis should be on the process not the outcome. Vince was wrong to play the shot that brought him two, and wrong to repeat it. It was a low-percentage, high-risk option.

Related to this is the fact that ultimately at some stage you do need to score some runs. This is one of Vince’s shots and there is no risk-free way to score runs, despite Steve Smith making a pretty convincing fist of it in Brisbane.

This brings us to Root, who nicked an attempted drive early in his innings off Pat Cummins. Here, the shot selection itself need not concern us. It was a long half-volley. There was enough width to allow Root to drive through the covers, not so much width that he needed to reach for it.

Here, we are concerned with execution rather than selection. Where Vince should not have played his shot at all, Root should merely have played it better. It is, in many ways, the more concerning dismissal. Vince can make the adjustment: put that shot away until well set.

Root, who in prime form would have driven that half-volley to the boundary, instead got his head hands and feet in awful positions. Having spent the Brisbane Test falling over to the offside, here he was driving with his hands, getting only half a stride and with his head back.

That takes a bit more fixing.

The worst shot of the lot, though, was Cook’s.

Whatever the flaws of the shots played by Vince and Root, they at least, if played perfectly, would have brought each man four runs. There’s a risk-reward calculation to be made, but at least the reward column is not empty.

Cook tried to defend a turning ball from Nathan Lyon that was never within a foot of his stumps using half his bat. If he plays it perfectly, he might get a single. There is no reward to justify the risk.

Caught and bowled

A Test cricket collector’s item in the afternoon as three successive wickets fell caught and bowled. The first two were absolute stunners as well. First flyin’ Lyon soared to his left to catch Moeen Ali’s limp chip towards mid-on and then, even better, Starc took a reflex one-handed stunner at the second attempt to end a fretful but fitfully promising Jonny Bairstow innings.

Sticking out his right hand – his weaker hand, remember – to initially knock the ball into the air owed something to luck, but the way he twisted his body against his forward momentum to grab the ball in the same hand behind his back was brilliant and almost outrageously cool.

The third, offered by Woakes after a period of high-class resistance, was an anti-climactic sitter.

Back to the Future

England’s last session demolition of Australia’s top order when the ball swung prodigiously under lights – more even than James Anderson expected, he conceded after play – won’t save them in this match and it probably won’t save them in this series.

It did, though, confirm England will regain the Ashes on home soil in 2019.

What we clearly need is a neutral Ashes series. Who wouldn’t want to watch these sides both fumbling around cluelessly for five Tests on Indian dustbowls?

Adelaide Five-fer: Day two

Fine margins

It doesn’t do to focus too much on bad luck when a cricket match (and with it surely the series) goes as decisively away from England as it did on day two. England did plenty right with the ball, but also a fair bit wrong across two days in the dirt. And the fielding came up just short too.

But it’s certainly fair to reflect on the fine margins that shaped the day at a time when the match remained if not in the balance then at least well short of decisively settled.

England were not ‘unlucky’ that Anderson saw two lbw decisions overturned. They were both missing the stumps. If we wanted to be harsh, we’d say it was further evidence that he bowled just a fraction too short, even today.

But you’d need a heart of Australian stone not to feel some sympathy. The lbw verdict Anderson earned against Marsh looked absolutely plumb at real time, and the review was hopeful rather than expectant.

Every replay, though, caused the concern for England to increase. It had hit Marsh just a little bit higher than we thought. His stride was a little bit longer than we thought.

Plenty queried the ball-tracking verdict, but a ball hitting a batsman above the knee-roll when fully forward can legitimately be expected to clear the bails.

With that in mind, it was perhaps surprising that Anderson won another on-field verdict so soon, Tim Paine the batsman this time. This always looked high, hitting Paine on the back leg above the pad. It was in fact a bit like that optical illusion where the lines are actually the same length. It was identical to Marsh’s.

And so it came to pass that DRS helped set Australia on their way from a potential 270 all out to a game and series-defining 442-8d.

Paine killer

Marsh’s reprieve ultimately allowed him to become the day’s standout figure, but it was Paine who initially set the tone.

There was something very Brad Haddin about the way he instantly set about unravelling England’s dream start to the day, hitting Anderson out of the attack inside two wayward overs and never looking back.

Paine had a plan and executed it with absolute clarity and conviction. Having rightly survived that initial leg-before verdict, his only subsequent alarms came via a couple of blows on the gloves from Craig Overton. Both landed flush on the right index finger, the digit which has so cursed Paine’s career.

Even his dismissal could hardly go down as an error, as a pull shot entirely in keeping with his hitherto successful attack on England landed in Moeen Ali’s lap at deep square-leg from the middle of the bat.

Marsh Attacks

Marsh’s recall – his eighth in Test cricket – was one of many eye-catching, head-scratching choices Australia made before the series. It’s already been vindicated.

This was a masterpiece of an innings from a player who has so often flattered to deceived but at last, at 34, has got it worked out.

He earned the right to play here, battling through the night session on day one at two an over, and much the same against the new ball in the afternoon session today.

He went from 49 to past his century in the evening at four an over and then teed off brilliantly after the dinner break with a memorable straight drive over the longest straight boundary in cricket off Stuart Broad a particular highlight.

Bancroft, Marsh, Paine; tick, tick, tick. The Aussie selectors came in for plenty of stick before a ball was bowled. Humble pie for the rest of us and a smug, satisfied smile for them.

Comedy of errors

England battled hard in the first session for little reward. In the second session, things went south.

The beauty of this kind of brutal day’s Test cricket is that there’s always a moment. Always an event that provides the perfect image for the day as a whole. The perfect GIFable microcosm.

Just such a moment duly arrived when Chris Woakes surprised the batsman, himself and 50000 inside the Adelaide Oval by finding extra bounce to hit the shoulder of Marsh’s bat.

The ball looped towards gully, but there was nobody there. So slow was the ball, though, that Alastair Cook was able to make the ground from slip easily enough. He dived and pouched the ball in both hands… only to discover that James Vince had made a similar journey from point, arriving a fraction of a second later, just in time to knock the ball out of Cook’s hands.

Every cloud…

Nothing’s ever completely terrible, though. There’s always a silver lining. And today the silver lining to England’s cloud came in the form of, well, cloud.

The prospect of England’s physically and mentally drained batsmen taking on a full two hours against Starc, Hazlewood and Cummins with a new pink ball under dark floodlit skies was not a pretty one. The game and with it the series could have been lost right there.

Instead they lost only Mark Stoneman in just 9.1 overs before the rain came to the rescue.

Now Cook and Vince get the chance to set England on the road to recovery after a night’s rest and in far friendlier conditions.

Avoid any mid-pitch collisions and they might even do it. Second Test links

Adelaide Five-fer: Day one

Short not sweet

Joe Root’s decision to bowl first always had the potential to go a bit Brisbane 2002. Nothing that happened with the pitch or later under the floodlights did anything to suggest this was anything other than a straightforward bat-first day.

But he wasn’t helped by his experienced new-ball bowlers. Stuart Broad and especially James Anderson were far too short far too often as any potential early advantage was thrown away.

It was maddening stuff, not least that on two of the rare occasions when the ball was pitched right up to David Warner he was beaten playing tentatively forward.

Broad and Anderson are, clearly, England’s best two bowlers and their best chance of getting into this series.

But there’s a sense that they’re too content to keep things tight, racking up the maidens but with nothing to show for it in the wickets column.

England can’t win this series on the back foot. If you’re not prepared to gamble for wickets after winning the toss and choosing to bowl, then when will you?

As Damien Fleming put it on BT commentary: “You have to spend a bit of money to win the jackpot.”

England did at least attempt to put this right after a rain break allowed them to regroup and reassess. Warner was able to get a couple of drives away to the boundary, but that’s something England are going to have to be prepared to see. And the earlier get him playing those shots, the bigger the risk for a key man in the Australia line-up.

Anderson’s best spell of the day was his fourth just before the… whatever the second interval is called here, while he finally got on the board with a full ball

Heads up

There wasn’t that much for England to enjoy on day one in Adelaide, but the sight of Cameron Bancroft sprawled on the turf quite literally headbutting the line after being run out following a horrible mix-up with Warner was certainly a sweet moment.

Wait on

Just as England made things easier for Warner by only testing him on the drive once he’d got a sight of things, did Joe Root miss an opportunity by waiting 40 minutes after Usman Khawaja came in before turning to spin? Seven of his nine dismissals against England have come against off-spinners, but he didn’t face spin until he’d already got 32 balls and 15 runs under his belt.

Just because a plan is obvious doesn’t mean it’s not the right one. Make him start against spin. Every single time.

Human after all

England tried about 300 different ways to get Steve Smith out in Brisbane. None of them worked.

Here they decided to try and sledge him out. And it did work, sort of.

There was no doubt that he was taken out of his comfort zone by the verbals of James Anderson and Stuart Broad. It wasn’t big and it wasn’t clever, but it had some effect.

Smith spent the entirety of his eight-hour 141 not out in Brisbane located firmly in his own bubble. He was never troubled, never flustered, never shaken from the job at hand.

Here he was distracted and jumpy. There were more false shots than in the whole of the Brisbane Test and eventually one of them cost him as Craig Overton claimed a memorable first Test scalp.

Light entertainment

The ease with which Peter Handscomb and Shaun Marsh – easily the two most vulnerable members of Australia’s top six to any kind of sideways movement – were able to bat through the last hour was a touch surprising. And worrying for England.

The seam and swing England were counting on just wasn’t there, while the pre-match Aussie hype about “the fastest pitch in Australia” also turned out to be nonsense with the ball frequently dribbling through to Jonny Bairstow.

England got it wrong at the toss, and didn’t do enough in the day to put that right. Even if they did get Smith out at last.