Football
  • Home
  • News
  • Ashes First Test Review: Perspective Important As England Push Australia To The Wire

Ashes first Test review: Perspective important as England push Australia to the wire

Australia's Pat Cummins celebrates hitting the winning runs on day five of the first Ashes test match at Edgbaston - June 2023

The full spectrum of Bazball was on display in the first Ashes Test and Dave Tickner reckons you can't take the good without expecting some bad every now and again.

Are you the sort of person for whom the Edgbaston reusable beersnake-preventing plastic cup is half empty, or half full?
Or are you like me, and think it might be half full, but it's half full of Dr Swann's Patented Spinning Finger Toughening and Revitalising Tonic? (Piss, for those who missed an enlightening press conference with eventual match-winning hero Nathan Lyon)
Ben Stokes is definitely a "half-full" kind of guy and there is absolutely no piss in his cup. His response to an agonising defeat of margins so slender that any one of countless England errors would have swung the result was to shrug and announce it was all great fun and riotously entertaining. Never mind the result, feel the vibes.
His only pang of regret about it all in the immediate aftermath appeared to be that the England fans would have quite liked a different outcome and it's a shame for them they didn't get it.

For all the acres of coverage devoted to Bazball over the last 12 months here, really, is its essence.

England have badly improved their results by convincing themselves results don't matter.

Stokes would quite genuinely prefer to lose playing like this than to draw or even win having betrayed even a single one of the ancient tenets of Bazball.

Backing Bazball

The evidence is still significantly in favour of this approach, but it will become tougher if there are too many more of this kind of punch to the gut.

Either side of a facile win against a distracted and depleted Ireland, England have now lost both here and the second Test in New Zealand back in February in thrilling yet galling and entirely avoidable fashion.

It is an inevitable byproduct of the method and how far people are prepared to tolerate it will define Bazball's eventual legacy and success.

Right now, those two defeats still sit for most in the "great for cricket" category. How much more Australian happiness can really be accommodated within that category we may perhaps be about to find out.

Because here is where your internal, instinctive cup fullness rating will kick in. We know all about Stokes' assessment.

The more level-headed half-full assessment is that an England team, on paper vastly inferior, managed to push a World Champion Australia side to the very limit, at times cowed them in a way not even Michael Vaughan's 2005 side managed, and gave themselves multiple chances of victory.
The half-empty assessment is that Australia will not be caught out like that again, will surely not play as badly again and that England might have blown their very best, perhaps only, chance to get into this series.
The half-full of piss assessment is why did you declare on day one with Joe Root batting in god mode, Ben? Hmm? WHY, BEN? WHY?
Declaring eight down on day one in a game you lose by two wickets is unavoidably going to get attention. It was also the most unashamedly Bazball moment.

Dropped catches and missed chances

England seeing crucial wickets chalked off by no balls or missing chance after chance was enormously frustrating but it wasn't part of the plan. Not even a vibes-based madcap scheme like Bazball has 'drop catches and bowl no-balls' among its core tenets. Although you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise at points. The declaration, though, was so Bazball rhythms.
And it's not entirely insane. You can see the thinking: Australia's openers have to get in twice, England's great yet enormously ancient new-ball bowlers get two cracks with that new ball. Nip one wicket out and it's of huge value.
But it ignores two things. One, England have taken, in the entire storied history of Test cricket, not one single wicket ever in a "tricky little session" before stumps/lunch/tea. And second, Root was batting in a way that was far more valuable than a few overs of bowling could be, with Ollie Robinson looking as comfortable as any number 10 could wish to look on day one of an Ashes series.
A declaration at Root's dismissal would have made sense but to do it while he was still there is and always was an objectively bad call. And if Bazball is all about entertainment and vibes, then it's hard to square on its own terms with "cutting off Joe Root at his most imperiously magnificent". That is bad vibes, surely.

It also did not, as many have argued in its defence, "put time back into the game". Root and Robinson were scoring runs more easily then than England were towards the end of the second innings.

Stokes could instead have declared a second innings that ended with Robinson, Stuart Broad and James Anderson eking out what they could.

The great thing is that England will absolutely do something as stupid again in a subsequent Test, because Bazball brooks no refinement.

There are those who say "Look, this is great, but maybe don't have Joe Root run past one from an ineffective Nathan Lyon to trigger a collapse just at the point the game is being taken decisively away from Australia?" But you can't half-measure Bazball.

Refinement risks

To try and smooth off its rough edges is to destroy it completely. If you can't handle England at their record run-chases then maybe you don't deserve them at their losing an Ashes Test after a pointless willy-waving day-one declaration. Maybe you can't have one without the other.
Still annoying, though.
The fear now is that Australia run away with the series. If it remains as close as this, though, it's going to dwarf 2005 for greatness. Styles make fights, and this contest is fascinating.

Australia's method for countering Bazball was, rather brilliantly, not to bother. They simply acquiesced to it. That's not a criticism.

Pat Cummins ended the game having produced an all-time captain's performance with bat and ball, while his captaincy approach was primarily to sit back and wait for England to do something stupid.

It sounds passive, even negative. It's also quite markedly un-Australian. It certainly annoyed an awful lot of people. It's also very clever and entirely correct. England will and frequently did do something stupid.

Huge swathes of this Test were essentially the Australian cricket team waiting for Jonny Bairstow or Joe Root or Harry Brook to knock their fondue all over a nuclear power plant workstation.

The series may come to be defined by how often England oblige when Australia decide to sit back and wait.

On this evidence, it will be teeth-grindingly often. And again, maybe that's just unavoidable. England may well lose this series trying to Bazball their way through it all, but they would definitely lose it playing the way they had for the previous three years.

Perfect timing

What Cummins did so brilliantly, though, was pick out the moments when attack was prudent or necessary. It was a marked contrast to England's more all-out approach, and it just about won the day.

There were two decisive passages of play. The first, those three and a bit overs Australia got with ball in hand on the damp and dingy day three when clouds rolled in and the ball hooped around.

Both England openers were dismissed and it could easily have been more.

And then, in an hour that will join the Ashes pantheon, when he and Lyon took the calculated gamble to take on the old ball and then the new.

It may seem now that there was no other choice, but the draw was a factor right up until that Root over that cost 14 and took the target down to a suddenly and sickeningly manageable 37.

England panicked in that moment. For the first time, Stokes was the captain worrying about runs and thus on the back foot.

England's response to a small taste of their own medicine was pretty ropey as Stuart Broad and Ollie Robinson bowled ineffective bouncers at batters who knew they were coming and James Anderson didn't get a go with the new ball at all.

England do at least have proof of concept, though, if they can rouse themselves from the disappointment and follow their captain in avoiding the 'what ifs?' that must surely be swirling around their bewildered heads this morning.

Australia beat England, but they have not yet defeated Bazball.

England got an awful lot wrong in this game - from selection onwards, because Mark Wood must surely play at Lord's even if it's part of a four-man seam attack augmented by Joe Root's dangerous if mercurial off-spin - and still came within a whisker of winning it.

But England will only get anywhere if they acknowledge the hard truths of those mistakes and don't get blinded by the vibes.

England's myriad and ultimately costly errors shouldn't mask the fact this was a great Test match that may well be the first instalment of a series to rival any other we've ever seen.

But nor should the fact this was a great Test match mask England's myriad and ultimately costly errors.

READ MORE: Slow over-rates costs England and Australia WTC points and match fees

    More Articles