Ashes
2017/18: 1st Test, Day 4
England
Cave-In
November 26th 2017
Generations of schoolchildren have learnt the words
“vini, vidi, vici”. Generally translated as “I came, I saw, I conquered”, more
appropriate for the England side is “I came, I saw, I conked out”.
Seven sessions of highly competitive cricket were followed
by five sessions of increasingly one-sided play. It was if the sleeping
Australian beast had to be prodded into life before it would react. Whereas at
the start of play there was a feeling that the match was still very much in the
balance and that if England could get one solid partnership going, Australia
might yet face a tricky chase, by Lunch the talk was of the match finishing in
four days. That it did not was symptomatic of the “so near and yet so far”
issues facing England.
As the match rolled on to its seemingly inevitable
early finish on Day 5 (hope springs eternal, but I do not plan to lose my sleep
on the 1% chance that Bob Willis – or his modern equivalent – takes 8-43, or
that Ian Botham takes 5-1 to transform a lost position into a miraculous win:
it is not going to happen), it was obvious that England are not going to waste
their energy on a lost cause when there is another Test starting on Saturday
afternoon.
For a time in the morning England fans could watch
Joe Root batting sublimely, first with the obdurate Mark Stoneman and then with
Moeen Ali and start to hope. For a few overs the run-rate accelerated and you
sensed that another half an hour and Australian heads might start to drop and
then, suddenly, out of nothing a wicket came to knock the stuffing out of the
fightback before it could become a real problem.
Even after Lunch, when all but the most stubborn
fans back home had given it up as a bad job and gone to bed, Moeen Ali and
Jonny Bairstow started another promising partnership that ended with a “controversial”
dismissal. It could be that the fate of the Ashes has been decided not by the
metre that stood between James Vince and a second run in the first innings, but
by a few millimetres of extra paint in the crease that meant that the toe of Moeen’s
back foot was just touching the line when Paine broke the stumps instead of
being behind it. The line belongs to the fielding side. Moeen was out according
to the laws of the game. End of.
Moeen accepted that his foot should have been further
back, but we are getting now to a ridiculous situation where millimetres can decide
Test matches and Test series. Yes, technology can decide to a millimetre or two
if the centre of the ball would have hit the stumps, or if it has pitched
outside leg, but now we are depending on how exactly a groundsman has painted a
white line! The laws were never designed for these combinations of high tech
and low tech. Do not believe Tim Paine that he saw it all very clearly: if even
the TV umpire took an age to see it clearly, we are tying ourselves into absurd
knots with the interpretation of the laws (there was a similar example in the
recent rugby Test between England and Australia in which the fans of one side
clearly saw the player’s foot on the line and of the other, clearly saw grass
between foot and line).
We have a similar situation where, in a runout, the
wicket is so often broken between one frame and the next: in these cases one or
other side will always feel a grievance and technology will always be blamed
because it is sometimes just physically impossible to know if the bat was on or
over the line. The Australians will always remember a similar decision in 2013
that they believe cost them the series, when Ashton Agar was ruled out,
stumped, when a different Third Umpire might easily have given the opposite
decision. Technology will always work best when things are clear one way or the
other and an injustice has been done: a great example was the Joe Root
dismissal to Cummins in the 1st innings when Marais Erasmus clearly did make a mistake and his not out
decision was overturned, or even Moeen’s 1st innings dismissal where
the umpire’s call, rightly, went the way of the bowler.
Fortunately, Moeen defused the situation by saying
that that the dismissal was his fault. Not all players would be so honest and
honourable.
It would also have been very unjust for England to
have escaped punishment for their deficiencies on a technicality. The sad fact
of the matter is that throughout the game the Australian attack had the happy
knack of taking a wicket every time that an innings or a partnership started to
become threatening. Stoneman, Root, Moeen and Bairstow all got starts, but only
Root reached 50… and he fell next ball. Stoneman and Root put on 45; Root and
Moeen, 39; Moeen and Bairstow, 42; Bairstow and Woakes, 30. Each time a
partnership started to develop that seemed to be righting the England ship, a
wicket fell. And, this time, with bowlers who had their tails up and had bowled
far fewer overs than in the 1st innings, Stuart Broad was never
going to slog a quick 30 to change the momentum of the game.
You can identify three game-changing moments:
· James Vince’s ill-judged attempt
to beat Nathan Lyon’s throw at 145-2 in the 1st innings.
· The failure to bowl Anderson and
Broad after Lunch on the third day, when England were facing the tail and
Australia should have been bowled out 50 behind.
· And the Moeen dismissal in the 2nd
innings, that snuffed-out the last possibility of an England fightback, just as
the partnership was beginning to prosper.
It is not
all gloom and despondency, because the game is far tighter than the scorecard
will reflect in the end, but it is a game that England will look back on and
know that, after 7 sessions of play, they were well-placed to win. There was a
huge momentum shift after Lunch on Day 3 and it only got bigger with each
passing session. By the end of the series England may rue letting this
opportunity slip.
Last rites
will be celebrated on the 5th day and Australia will, deservedly, go
1-0 up.
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