Just when this Ashes series might do with a cooling off period, it charges on, Australia’s 43-run victory at Lord’s less than a day old but the Third Test at Headingley — which starts on Thursday — already firmly in view.
England head to Leeds 2-0 down and spewing, focus surely sharpened by a (wrongful) sense of injustice and, more pertinently, the miracle task that now lies before them in trying to become only the second team ever to fight back and win 3-2.
Australia travel north buoyant, on the brink of a career-defining success, but knowing that events at Lord’s have trained a few more sights on the target already on their backs, and started up a few of the old whispers about what their team is really about.
A series that began on terms a little too pally for some former players now has its clear and hostile divide, its heroes and villains cast in what — through an English lens — are familiar roles and the battle lines drawn around that sacred old chestnut ‘the spirit of cricket’, as well as the famous Urn.
That is not yet the party stance from either camp, Ben Stokes, whose epic 155 on Sunday proved in vain, and Pat Cummins playing down the idea that the controversy and confrontation will set the tone for what is to come, both watching several teasing post-match questions whistle past off-stump.
Asked whether we could expect Mankads and underarm bowling from his side from hereon in, Cummins joked it would “depend how flat the wickets get”. When it was put to Stokes that Brendon McCullum had already vowed not to break bread with the Aussies any time soon, the skipper shrugged that he was not one to hold a grudge and still had designs on sharing an end-of-series beer.
Whether some of the more angsty members of the support cast — think David Warner, Stuart Broad and, particularly, the shrinking-violet-wronged Jonny Bairstow — feel quite as blase behind the scenes seems doubtful. Whatever the players contest publicly, things have, undoubtedly, changed.
The fuse was probably lit on the fourth evening at Lord’s, when Mitchell Starc’s non-catch was overturned on review, a decision on which England had no bearing but one that established the terms of engagement: namely, that rules are rules. It was a comparison drawn upon yesterday, when Bairstow was run-out — later corrected to stumped — by Alex Carey while dawdling out of his crease, Australia more than happy to let the game’s laws do the rest. Naturally, the people most affronted were the collective self-assigned to set them.
Ah, yes, the MCC members, so outraged by the lack of good faith on show and the soiling of this ground’s great tradition that they had little choice but to turn the Long Room into a bear pit of red-faced, pink-trousered fury. Judging from the bemused look on the face of two-metre-tall Cameron Green and the fact that Matthew Renshaw actually stopped to point and laugh at his hecklers, like a child spotting two animals at it in a zoo, it was not an especially intimidatory one.
As scenes supposedly unbefitting of occasions go, we were hardly in the realm of the Astor Place Riot, when it all kicked off at a New York opera house during a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but at no other cricket ground would Australia’s perceived indiscretion have been met with such a ridiculously entitled display of righteous indignation.
On to Headingley, though, where the pantomime vilification will no doubt be a little more intense, Australia having, in the eyes of some, reverted to type to make a mockery of their post-Sandpaper moral transformation. Stokes insists he, as captain, would have withdrawn the appeal and will not go searching for any eye-for-a-black-eye rebuke in Leeds, though, of course, that is easier said from his current side of the ledger and he may be secretly hoping that a vengeful Bairstow behind the stumps does not put him in an awkward position.
England are in a daunting one, without even a shred of margin for error, but Stokes remains defiant: “We’re a team who are obviously willing to put ourselves out there and do things against the narrative” — a narrative that, after yesterday, has another layer.
