The season’s turned full circle. Eight weeks ago, Australia were here for their press day before the World Test Championship final against India. We asked Mitchell Starc what he had made of England’s aggressive play over the last year, and whether he believed they would really be able to bat like that against Australia’s attack. Starc was too smart to fall into that trap, and said, instead: “I guess we’ll find out over the next six weeks”.
His grin said everything about what he was really thinking. Fat chance. A 90mph inswinging yorker does wonders for a man’s confidence, not to mention 300 Test wickets, and a 4-0 victory in the last series.
Five Tests and 135 overs later, Starc was back again, only running in from the Pavilion End now, to open the innings for the final time this summer. His first ball was full, and up outside Zak Crawley’s off stump. Thwock. It went rocketing off to the cover boundary, just like the first delivery of the series. Starc’s fifth ball was punched down to long-off, his sixth clipped through mid-wicket, his seventh glanced through square leg, and his 12th sliced over gully. Four, four, four, four, four. The two overs went for 22 runs, at which point Pat Cummins decided to yank Starc out of the attack so he could bring himself on to bowl from that end.
Starc wandered off down to fine leg. He didn’t seem to be grinning. If he hadn’t found the answer to that question at Old Trafford already, England gave him one last lesson in it over the course of this long, sunny Saturday’s play. They reached their 100 off 20.1 overs, their 200 off 38.2, and their 300 off 57.5. Which made it the second-fastest 300 made by any team in Ashes history, after the one they made at Old Trafford just last week. Not that they stopped there. The innings rolled on into the late afternoon. It was one long carnival of batting, an orgy of drives, cuts and clips, pulls and ramps and sweeps.
It was their best batting of the series, and the fullest expression yet of Ben Stokes’s way of playing. Mick Jagger was watching from the pavilion, and like him, England played all their greatest hits. There was Crawley’s cover drive and Duckett’s late cut. Stokes, playing, for the second time in his life at No 3 because of Moeen Ali’s injury, hooked a six to deep backward square, where Josh Hazlewood dropped it over the rope. Harry Brook walloped one down the ground and into the sightscreen. Joe Root played his reverse scoop for six off Mitchell Marsh, and Jonny Bairstow bristled with anger and clumped cuts and thumped pulls.
Even Mo got a go. Ali came in at No 7 again, for what is very likely to be his last Test innings for England. He swept Todd Murphy for one four, punched Starc down through long-on for another, then pulled a couple more in between the fielders at long leg. Then he got caught on the boundary playing a ramp over his own head off a short ball. Because how else was he ever going to go out? Hell, even his dismissal meant the crowd got to spend the last 10 minutes of the day singing Jimmy Anderson’s song, while, out in the middle, he shared one last partnership with Stuart Broad, who announced his retirement from Test cricket right afterwards.
And Anderson, of course, reverse swept for four. When it was all over, England had made 389 from 80 overs.
Dementia charity drive
For the second year a day of the Oval Test was dedicated to supporting Alzheimer’s Society. For the first year, the day actually happened – last year’s events were planned for 9 September, when all cricket fixtures ended up being cancelled following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. One of the charity’s Singing for the Brain groups performed Jerusalem while England’s players wore each other’s shirts “to draw attention to the confusion often experienced by people living with dementia”, and one stump from each end was removed to “raise awareness of the reality that 1 in 3 people born in the UK today will go on to develop dementia”, before being replaced by Marcus Trescothick, the England coach whose father suffers from the disease. “I’ve seen the damage caused by dementia and know the pain it can cause,” said Moeen Ali. “This series might not have delivered the memory we’d most like to cherish – regaining the Ashes – but thanks to the money raised at the Oval it is great to know many more families will get the support they need.”
Barber’s hair-raising stats
Herewith follows a list of England openers who have averaged more than 35 with a strike rate above 70 in any Ashes series (where strike rates can be accurately calculated): Zak Crawley in 2023 (average 53.3, strike rate 88.7), Ben Duckett in 2023 (average 35.7, strike rate 75.9) and a ghost from the distant past in Bob Barber, who averaged 41 at a strike rate of 74.5 in 1965-66. Barber’s opening partner in that series, Geoff Boycott, wrote in his autobiography that he “was amazed at Bob’s apparently cavalier approach to the game. It was obviously a source of pleasure and entertainment to him, as it was supposed to be to other people.” Sound familiar? Less than two months after that series ended Barber stepped back from full-time cricket to spend more time working in business, then retired altogether at 33 to make a fortune selling toilet cleaning tablets. Appropriately, thanks to the Alex Carey hairdressing hoax at Headingley, this is the first series since that one to have a barber in the headlines. Simon Burnton
In 150 years of cricket, and 250 series, no team has ever scored at more than four runs an over against Australia, not Michael Vaughan’s England, who went at 3.87, not Graeme Smith’s South Africa, who went at 3.66, not Sourav Ganguly’s India, who went 3.09, or Arjuna Ranatunga’s Sri Lanka, Imran Khan’s Pakistan, Viv Richards’ West Indies, Ali Bacher’s South Africa, or any of the rest. Until this summer. Stokes’s England have rattled along at 4.74 against them, which is almost an entire run-per-over more than anyone else. And, for scale, is twice as fast as Colin Cowdrey’s England scored in the 1968 Ashes, when Geoff Boycott and John Edrich were opening the batting.
On the flip side of the coin, Australia managed to bowl two maiden overs all day. That brought their total for the series to 34, which may just be the most extraordinary statistic of the lot. To put it in perspective, in five Tests on this tour their nine bowlers have bowled fewer maiden overs between them than Shane Warne did all by himself in a single game at Old Trafford in 1993, or the offie Tom Veivers did in just one innings there in 1964.
So yes, England really can against Australia’s attack. And if they win this match perhaps those last few sceptics left will finally realise they should, too.
