It was not the most imaginative chant ever written, but that Todd Murphy spent so much of the Ashes Third Test’s final day parked on the fence, close enough to the Western Terrace that he would have heard even a whispered rendition, was telling.
"You’re just a s*** Harry Potter," they sang to the bespectacled offie, the boy wizard, of course, having been renowned for ragging it square in his Hogwarts days. By the time Headingley emptied, the crowd knew about as much of Murphy’s aptitude for potion-making as they did his task of bowling spin.
Test match fourth innings are, traditionally, where spinners stop singing for their supper and start eating it, and while this was not a surface on which Murphy could have expected to tuck in, Pat Cummins’s reluctance to throw the ball to the 22-year-old was still striking.
True, it was only one Test ago that Australia bowled England out in the fourth innings without a wicket falling to spin. Then, though, they had more runs to play with and three potent seam options, whereas here, with Josh Hazlewood rested, Scott Boland was ineffective, going wicketless in the match.
Of the 50 overs in England’s chase, Murphy bowled just two, one a token squeezed in before lunch, the other a Hail Mary with only 30 runs left to protect. Harry Brook pounced on both, justification, perhaps, for Cummins’s hesitance, but, given a longer look, it would hardly have been uncharacteristic for the Yorkshireman to get greedy and take too great a risk.
It was only a couple of days earlier that Ben Stokes had holed out trying to wallop Murphy out of the ground one time too many. Heck, Marnus Labuschagne had succumbed trying to slog-sweep England’s spinner, Moeen Ali, who also managed to prize Steve Smith’s wicket out of nothing on the same unhelpful pitch.
The loss of a bowler about to surpass 500 Test wickets was always going to leave a hole in this Australian side, but even as the Lord’s contest in which Nathan Lyon was struck down was still playing out, there seemed fair optimism that Murphy was ready to plug it. It was not that anyone thought the spinner might fill Lyon’s shoes entirely, more that he might do so sufficiently enough to take a few strides without them sliding straight off. Yesterday, though, he was barely given the chance.
Having missed an opening to get him into the heart of the battle on Ashes debut, Australia must hope that Murphy’s confidence is not too badly knocked. Cummins blamed conditions in Leeds, but they are unlikely to be an excuse when the series next heads to Old Trafford, historically England’s most spin-friendly track.
