Fielding becomes self-flagellation for Stokes and co as England toil away | Ashes 2023

Ahh, Bazballs. The old salts around the ground have been complaining for days that England need to learn there’s more than one way to play this game. Saturday turned out to be an object lesson in exactly that. England slogged up the long, hard road to taking the wickets they needed and once they finally had them watched Australia canter down the straight, short one.

They still need six more to win, but then three of those bat below Stuart Broad. England, on the other hand, probably need Ben Stokes to work the same sort of miracle he did at Headingley in 2019 else they will be two-nil down with three games to play.

Stokes knew it too. There were parallels in the way he played, in the marathon spell he bowled in the third innings and his slow and steady batting later in the day. He and his team had flogged themselves through the afternoon, when they subjected themselves, and everyone else, to interminable spells of short, slow bowling. They banged away at the middle of the pitch like a kid with a new drum kit.

It came to feel more like self-flagellation than fielding, an act of penance for their slapdash batting when Australia had used similar tactics against them in the first innings. Josh Tongue did nine overs in a row, so did Ollie Robinson, while Stokes, who isn’t a man to tell anyone to do a job he wouldn’t take on himself, thrashed himself through 12 straight.

Eighty overs came, and went again, without England thinking to take the new ball. Then the 90-over mark passed too, though the old one they were bowling with was, at this point, as tired and bruised as the men using it.

All the while Jimmy Anderson was stuck in the outfield, doing much of nothing. Anderson is the greatest new-ball bowler England have had and has more wickets on this ground than anyone, but England decided they could get by without him.

He bowled five of the 52 overs they got through on the day. It was a little like watching three men take it in turns to batter a bolted door down with their foreheads while the locksmith watched on with a pick in his pocket.

The barrage worked, in its fashion, but not nearly as much as the bowlers who were doing it. Life felt like their lengths: nasty, brutish and short.

Then here comes Australia, Mitchell Starc at one end, a shiny red ball in his hand and a sharkish grin on his face, and Pat Cummins at the other. Starc and Cummins are well capable of bowling short, but neither seemed to feel the need to do it. Starc almost had Ben Duckett caught in the gully off his sixth ball and had Zak Crawley caught down the leg side with his seventh.

The delivery started on middle-and-leg and swung away. Crawley hit it with an elegant little clip, the sort of shot a man plays with his umbrella while he’s waiting for the bus to come, and edged it fine for a catch behind.

Crawley looked at his feet and prodded the pitch, trying his best to pretend he hadn’t hit it, but the umpire, Chris Gaffaney, knew differently. Crawley seemed furious to be called on his bluff.

So in came Ollie Pope, England’s Scrappy-Doo vice-captain. Pope has played 10 innings against Australia now, with a top score of 42, which he made in the first innings here, and an average of 15. Whatever it is England’s management see in him that makes them believe he is the right man to take over the leadership of this team, you can be fairly sure that Starc and Cummins don’t share it.

Pope played three peppy strokes, for a single each, “lemme at ’em, lemme at ’em”, then Starc bowled him with a delivery that pitched on off and swung back in to rip his middle stump out of the ground.

It was the kind of delivery an old cricketer might use to scare their children into behaving. “You’d better play straight or else Mitch Starc’s going to come and get you with his inswinger.” Pope could do it when he has children, assuming he’s had enough therapy between now and then to feel comfortable mentioning it in public.

England were 13 for two, then, and the 371 they needed seemed a very long way away indeed. By the time Cummins removed Joe Root with a vicious short ball and Harry Brook with one that nipped away off a length it had just about vanished out of sight.

Watching Starc work with the new ball after all those hours watching England toil with an old one brought to mind the old story about the conversation between Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man. Hoffman explained he had been up for three days because he wanted to bring a little extra verisimilitude to a scene in which his character had done the same thing. “My dear boy,” Olivier told him, “why don’t you just try acting? It’s so much simpler.”

But then, of course, it is when you’re an Olivier. Or you have a bowler who can deliver a 90mph inswinger.