An Australian win, a huge match haul of wickets, a turnaround from a day earlier – sure, all significant on the fifth day of the Women’s Ashes Test in Trent Bridge. Significant above all, though, were two words in that previous sentence: fifth day. Finally, a women’s Test was played over the full span that men’s matches enjoy, giving the space to the contest that allowed it to run its course.
Only once has a women’s match been scheduled over five days, for a standalone game in Sydney in 1992. On that occasion the entire third day was washed out, and Australia won by an innings so might well have wrapped it up in four had that not been the case. Even the anomalous five-match series of 1984‑85 had four-day matches. So if we get deeply technical, this was the first women’s Test with play on all five days – and it was a triumph.
Perhaps somebody should drop a note to Cricket Australia. Their next scheduled women’s Test, against South Africa in February, is still set for four days. The schedule for their December tour to India has of course not been released by the Board of Control for Cricket in India, but presumably that Test will be the same. Yet the next Ashes match in Australia will surely have to be five days given this one was, and at that point it won’t be defensible to have different rules for others. There really is no going back.
You could make an argument that this match could have been finished in four days with extended overs, given the fifth morning didn’t make it through the first session. Perhaps, but those overs on different days would have had different outcomes, and four days means more chance of losing bigger chunks of the game to rain, like the delay in Nottingham on the second day.
In any case, there was such a special feeling about showing up on the fifth morning, the whole day ahead of everyone, with all four results on the table, having had an extra overnight span to think about what might come. England could resist, settling into a grind. Danni Wyatt could carve into the bowling. Amy Jones could overturn her dismal record against Australia with the bat. Ashleigh Gardner and Alana King could prosper with spin. Darcie Brown might fly the flag for the new generation. Ellyse Perry could stamp her influence one more time. Everything was possible, and cricket comes to life in that realm of possibility, all of the beautifully drifting strands of what could happen before they are finally compressed into the single cord of what has.
What happened – add a question mark and you’ll see what the England team will be thinking – was Gardner. Extraordinarily so. She had been in a bowling contest up against Sophie Ecclestone in their teams’ respective first innings, Gardner’s four wickets plays Ecclestone’s five, those four struck at key times to eventually keep England 10 runs short of Australia when at times they looked sure of roaring into a lead.
Where Ecclestone added another five wickets in the third innings with a long shift of determination and guile, Gardner added eight in a couple of explosions. On the fourth evening she removed the backbone of England’s batting with a burst of three for nine. On the fifth morning she took all five remaining wickets, England unable to cope as the off-spinner used an increasingly inconsistent pitch immaculately to her advantage.
There was the ball going on with the arm to nick off Kate Cross, the slight turn in to have Jones stumped and bowl Lauren Filer, the line around the wicket and straightening to trap Ecclestone in front, then back over the wicket for a straight approach when Wyatt had to attack batting with No 11. Wyatt had done her part with a fast half-century, but nobody else had joined in.
The result for Gardner was fitting for a historic match. Three women have taken 11 wickets in a Test. The Pakistan leg-spinner Shaiza Khan has the most with 13. Gardner now sits second, her 12 for 165 the defining performance. Also memorable was Alyssa Healy, revealed to be keeping wicket with a fractured finger on each hand as she completed five catches and the Jones stumping.
It will be left to England to wonder how Ecclestone’s exceptional spin performance was bettered by Gardner, and how they became the first team, men or women, to lose a Test despite having players with a double century and a 10-wicket match. The Australians go four points up in the multi-format series, winning by 89 runs.
But the real legacy of this match should be the case proven: fine cricket across five days, with fast scoring, the most runs on aggregate in any women’s Test, and still time to let those scores shift towards a result, on a pitch that eventually let bowlers back into the match, especially through the brilliant fourth day that was as good as the format has seen. Now that we’ve seen that, we need to make sure we get to see it again.
