Across this entire Ashes series, it has felt like a contest of philosophies as much as a contest of teams. England have done a fair bit of talking, and had a lot more talking done on their behalf, about their adventurous style of play and how it is upending Test cricket norms. Australia have insisted that they don’t care about England’s style and will carry on with convention. In the first two Tests England’s insistence on delivering on the talk verged on being performative, and to their own detriment. In the fifth Test Australia might have done something the same.
The man who has embodied the conflict has been Usman Khawaja. When the series began at Edgbaston, after England’s helter-skelter opening day included 393 runs and a declaration, Khawaja went the opposite way. He faced 321 balls in the first innings, 197 in the second, pressing forward with the softest hands and defusing each delivery. As England tried to heat the game up, making its molecules bounce with agitation, Khawaja was the cold compress, the only sound a slow hiss of steam as he took temperature out of the match.
He continued at Lord’s, 70 balls in the first innings and 187 in the second, taking him to scores in the series of 141, 65, 17, and 77. While his returns dipped in the third and fourth matches, he still approached each innings as though his only job was to induce calm, to take up time, to bat like it was a form of meditation. Every ball of every innings was faced while wearing his knitted jumper and his long sleeves, as if to say to England that they couldn’t make him break a sweat.
So it went on at the Oval, another 157 balls faced, taking his tally in the series up to 1,118 – more deliveries than Don Bradman faced in his Ashes debut series of 1928-29 or his farewell tour of 1948, more than David Boon faced in 1989, more than Mark Taylor in 1994-95 or Michael Vaughan on his excellent visit to Australia in 2002-03.
As the morning session of the second day wore on, with Khawaja stretching forward to ball after ball, seeming to drain the energy from them, sending them rolling back down the pitch with such an absence of pace that the ball was nearly apologising to the bowler who picked it up, England supporters dreaded the prospect of Australia batting two days, building a giant score, shutting England out of the game.
But in order to build a giant score, runs are part of the equation. Runs were the part that didn’t come. With Marnus Labuschagne becalmed at the other end, the scoreboard barely moved. And so to that clash of philosophies. Test cricket is about more than just scoring, or more than scoring all the time. The argument could be made that batting time was tactical.
England were already down a spinner, Moeen Ali out of action with a groin injury. Their ace was Mark Wood, a bowler best used in four-over bursts at infrequent intervals. That meant that if the Australians could put enough overs in the ageing legs of James Anderson, Stuart Broad and Chris Woakes, they could look to punish them later in the innings as they have done in so many matches in Australia.
There is logic to it, but there is also logic to England’s batting idea: that every ball you face is another opportunity to get out, and that biding time can be the same as wasting time. By the time Labuschagne was out, Joe Root taking a classic at slip, Australia were still 192 runs behind. He had batted through 26 overs with Khawaja while they had only added 42. Labuschagne had made nine from 82 balls.
When Khawaja went nine overs later, just after lunch, he had made 47 from his 157 balls. Australia trailed by 168. So when a couple more wickets fell in quick time, leaving Smith batting with Alex Carey and then with the tail, all of that occupation of the crease had still left Australia in a perilous position. Only some good fortune for Smith with the third umpire and another resolute performance from the lower order helped Australia escape what would have been a position of severe disadvantage. But did the extra overs bowled by Wood in the morning session help Todd Murphy take him down in the third?
The thing about facing over a thousand balls in a series is that some of those deliveries are going to get you out. So how many runs do you want to try to score from them before that happens? How much do you increase your risk of dismissal by being more aggressive? Is it better to accept facing fewer but potentially score more from them?
These are the fundamental questions of batting back to the beginning: the balance, the quotient, the calculation. The decisions in one direction or another though haven’t previously felt like they represented an entire team’s identity. One might work one time, one might prevail another. The arguments for and against can go on forever.
