There must be a few other people who misremember Zak Crawley making a hundred at the SCG in 2022. The scorebook says 77, but it felt like a ton, the way he ended what must have been a miserable 12 months averaging 10 in Test cricket. Taking on Australia’s bowlers in the fourth innings, lacing drives either side of the wicket along the grass. In current England parlance, it had century vibes, and it did help them avoid a loss for the only time on that tour of Australia.
Pat Cummins and his team wouldn’t have been too worried about a repeat in Manchester this week. Initially everything was on track. Ben Duckett was again out early, showing a compulsive inability to leave the ball alone. Crawley and Moeen Ali were swishing and missing with regularity. More wickets were surely in train.
Except they weren’t. By quarter past five, with the score on 336, the third wicket fell. Crawley had made 189. Moeen had been the only one in the interim, slapping to midwicket on 54. England had piled on their first 300 in a couple of sessions. From being bullish at the start of the day, the Australians had a wide-eyed air of trying to figure out how the hell all that had happened.
Given the way he started, that feeling was understandable. Half a dozen times Crawley edged the ball past his leg stump, three of them for boundaries, one of them via the wicketkeeper’s glove. Another half a dozen times he threw the bat at fast bowling on a hard length, trying to drive on the up facing seam movement, self-imposing an insanely high degree of difficulty that by some miracle did not result in an edge behind.
By the time Crawley’s hundred came up, his false-shot percentage was tracking at 25 per cent, the sixth-highest on record. It just didn’t seem to matter. Usman Khawaja clapped from cover, Cummins the same while walking back to his mark, bumping one palm against his fist holding the ball like he was doing the Mashed Potato dance. The next delivery was a bouncer at the face, Crawley swaying back. Then he kept right on playing his shots, middling them more and more often, to the point where The Wiggles might as well have been the ones bowling.
Whether the inexperienced Todd Murphy could have changed anything is speculative, but still. Old Trafford is the ground where Richie Benaud bowled Australia to victory, where Shane Warne announced himself in Ashes cricket. Years later, one of Warne’s books was named No Spin, which is also a description of Australia’s current bowling attack. With no option to change the pace of the innings, Travis Head bowled his part-time slows with five fielders back, daring Crawley to slog for the stands.
More than Murphy, the empty plate at the dinner table belongs to Nathan Lyon, now back in Australia to mend his injured calf. In his absence was a long-distance cordon of catchers at deep third, trying to get Crawley to slice the quicks in their direction. He found gaps anyway, and frequently picked up twos, as did Joe Root with an 84 from 95 balls that was far too good to deserve being a supporting hand.
This is Australia’s blue-chip pace attack: Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc. It is interesting that those bowlers, so often so good for so long, can from time to time be completely collared. Start with Cummins and Hazlewood at Headingley in 2019, add Starc for India’s fourth-innings performances in Sydney and Brisbane, then go through the various configurations in this series – in each Test so far, there have been periods where taking the attack to them has worked. This was the first day when it completely brought them undone.
The no-ball oversteps mounted, the misfields crept in. The fields attempting to slow the attack seemed muddled. There was the matter of Mitchell Marsh not bowling to Crawley until the latter had scored a century, after twice nicking him off with outswing in the previous match at Leeds.
You could find symbolism in the shoulder-shrugging stroll of Marsh away from the umpire, pulling on his cap, after Root had just ramped him for six. What can you do? England have a lead, six wickets in hand, and the biggest blow came late in the day, when Starc landed heavily on his shoulder and left the field. Australia’s selections may yet get them back out of trouble, with a bad forecast ahead and a depth of batting that they didn’t use sufficiently the first time. In the end, their main mistake in the field was being there at all, when they should have spent most of that second day making runs.
