Fifth Test, Day 2 – A Sadly Inevitable England Disaster

 

 

Ashes 2015

 

Fifth Test, Day 2 – A Sadly Inevitable England Disaster.

 

August 21^st 2015

 

“It is already beginning to look uncomfortably familiar to The Oval 2013 and to Lord’s 2015. Australia building up a huge 1^st innings score against an England side that has visibly turned the intensity down a notch or two. It would not be an enormous surprise if, by the 3^rd Day, we are talking about a potential follow-on.”

Oh my prophetic soul! It was sadly inevitable and utterly embarrassing. In a series where the two sides have taken turns to be utterly incompetent, today it was England’s turn and the result was as bad as anything Australia have produced. The result is that yet another Test should end on the third day unless, incomprehensibly given the bad weather forecast for Days 4 & 5, Michael Clarke decides to bat again.

There is still the possibility that England can turn this around. With rain forecast for days 4 & 5, every minute of resistance is vital. Sadly though, the feeling is that this match will end today with a second, huge defeat in the series for England, this time by an innings. At The Oval in 2013, England fought back from a pretty poor first two days to produce the memorable finish, but this game looks more like Lord’s.

Can a side ever have won a series 3-2, despite suffering two defeats as humiliating as Lord’s and the one that will surely come here today or tomorrow? For Australian fans it will just convince them, as in 2013, that there was something very underhand about the manner of their defeat when they have seen themselves so superior in two matches. The truth though is that these are, as I suggested before the series, two extremely vulnerable sides that are both far from top class: Australia’s away record has been awful for several years and England are extremely inconsistent.

Through the series, England’s plan of counter-attack when losing wickets has come up trumps more often that it has failed. At different times, Ben Stokes and, together, Moeen Ali and Stuart Broad have turned the game on its head. Even at Lord’s, with England 30-4, first the Cook/Stokes stand and then the Cook/Ali stand threatened to wrest control from Australia. After a steady start, Cook and Stokes had put on 145, both were approaching a century and the runs were flowing freely with the bowlers looking short of ideas; another hour and England would have been right back in the match. However, as in the later Cook/Moeen Ali stand, before things could escape control completely, a wicket came. Both times it was Mitch Marsh who struck the vital blow.

Here, once again, it was Mitch Marsh who applied the killer blows after Peter Siddle had shown that not selecting him for the previous two matches may well have lost Australia the series. Starc and Johnson huffed and puffed, but when Siddle came on as second change, he made the ball talk and then Mitch Marsh removed three of the four batsmen who have led England resistence in the series. Not that a talking ball was needed to shift Adam Lyth: confidence shattered, a series aggregate of just 105 runs, Lyth knows that whoever does go to the UAE and South Africa, he will not be with them. A similar crisis is building around Jos Buttler: his figures are even poorer than Lyth’s.

The selectors have shown faith in Lyth. He scored a century against New Zealand, but eleven other innings this summer have produced just 148 runs. We all warned of the danger of dropping him straight into a summer of Test cricket against two very good attacks with almost no cricket behind him for months (would playing in the 3^rd Test v West Indies have helped?) The selectors have given him a vote of confidence: they could easily have dropped him for the 4^th Test and here would easily have suggested that they wanted to give someone else a try, but have resisted the temptation. Unfortunately, Lyth is shot. Most likely he will score stacks of runs for Yorkshire at the end of the season but, here, he seems to be in a nightmare that he is facing the Australian attack with no idea how to play them and then wakes up and finds that he is.

It has been suggested that Lyth has kept his place in part because no one else was hammering on the door. After a fabulous start to the season Alex Hales has gone off the boil until recently. A century v Warwickshire in a One-Day Cup match in the last week of July has given him a new burst of life and his recent scores have been 85, 9, 81, 58 &, yesterday, a murderous Championship 189 opening the batting. Hales is making a pretty convincing case just at the right moment. At the same time, albeit more placidly, Nick Compton was holding a Middlesex batting line-up together against Durham’s attack in conditions tailor-made for seamers, showing all the discipline and battle that England  were so conspicuously lacking in difficult conditions.

Jos Buttler had a good start to his England Test career and did some great things in the ODIs v New Zealand. He has also improved out of all recognition with the gloves, making some wonderful catches this summer but eighty runs in seven innings against Australia, scored at a rate slower only than Cook & Lyth, is not what England picked him for. He still averages almost 35 in Tests, with 5x50, but is having a nightmare series with the bat here.

Lyth and Buttler will have one more innings, as will England to set the record for the summer straight. Sadly though, almost no one expects a rearguard as determined as Brisbane 2010 or Ahmedabad 2012, but one is desperately needed. If England lose, as most expect, they should go down with a fight; if rain saves them, it needs to be because of backs to the wall resistance. Nothing less will do.