In a sport full of them, field settings are, to be frank, one of cricket’s nerdier elements. They are more subtle than sexy, full of nuance but seldom newsworthy, an appreciation of which all but the watching badger can probably take or leave without enjoyment of game or spectacle suffering a great deal.
And so to anyone tuning into this most-hyped Ashes series with an interest leaning more towards sport-liker than cricket-lover, it might have been slightly perplexing that across its first three days so much of the chatter has focused not, as billed, on the duel between bombastic English batting and an all-star Australian attack, but on how many catchers might be lurking in front of square or quite what that bloke is doing at deep backward point so early in the day.
Alas, with so little to separate the sides across their first innings — just seven runs, in fact — it is in the field that the first battle of this cricketing culture war has been fought (probably a welcome change for Pat Cummins, whose team are also facing a more general one over their apparent wokeness back home).
The explanation, as with so many things, lies with Ben Stokes, the England captain’s blue-sky thinking having done for field placements what the Queen’s Gambit did for chess in making strategic warfare cool. By the need for an equal and opposite reaction, Cummins’s conservative defaults have been declared decidedly not.
The man from Mars could have turned up at Edgbaston just after half-past midday yesterday and recognised something out of the ordinary, as Ollie Robinson stood at the top of his mark about to burst through a V of fielders, looking more like the lead jet of a Buckingham Palace fly-past than a fast-medium seamer. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a field like that in Test cricket before,” said former Australia captain Ricky Ponting, who has seen plenty of them.
As it happened, Stokes and Robinson had actually tried this ruse before, in Rawalpindi in the winter, and on a deck as lifeless, turning to a recreation in a bid to oust Usman Khawaja, Australia’s opener unbeaten on 141, having taken the tourists to within 21 runs of England’s first-innings score.
“Stokesy came up to me the ball before and said, ‘What did we do in Pakistan?’” Robinson explained at the close. “I said, ‘I think we had an umbrella field’, and he said, ‘Let’s go for it, shall we?’”
“He said to bowl a yorker first up, so then I went for it and Uzzie came down the wicket and played a different shot to what he’s been playing and, luckily, it hit the off-stump. It was one of those plans that just comes off and Stokesy looks like a genius.”
The breakthrough came at a vital moment in the game, following the kind of half-hour passage it is easy to forget could account for entire sessions, sometimes even days of English Test cricket not long ago, an opposition bowler threatening an annoying cameo with the bat and his specialist accomplice well set.
The last Ashes Test here four years ago provided a case in point, when Peter Siddle and Nathan Lyon between them put on 162 with Steve Smith for the final two wickets to fall. In the years that followed, Joe Root’s England had persistent trouble bouncing out the tail.
It is in the field that the first battle of this cricketing culture war has been fought
Asking a seam attack of Stuart Broad, James Anderson and Robinson to do just that might seem rather like booking The Three Tenors for a gala and having them perform 99 Problems, but the short-ball ploy worked in a fashion that bodes well for the rest of the series.
Australia’s last four wickets cost just 14 runs and left England still a nudge ahead. The advantage really should have been greater, Stokes’s tinkering having defied a lack of pace, a broken spinner and a flat surface to create four or five more wicket-taking chances than were grabbed.
They were due to resume this morning with that advantage extended to 35 on a rain-ruined third afternoon, though with both openers already in the hutch after Cummins, with more than a little encouragement from the weather gods, at last went on the attack.
Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett were both caught in a 20-minute spell under the lights — the latter to a superb one-handed catch by the octopus-like Cameron Green — that England were relieved to emerge from with Root and Ollie Pope unscathed.
With Stokes around, no game this series will be allowed a moment’s rest. Cummins, though, has served reminder that he, too, knows when a moment is ripe.
