Alastair Cook began this Test in Churchillian mood. His team “shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves” but had “more ahead of it”, and were “getting better”. With the toss he was given the tools; he backed his bowlers to finish the job.
Like almost every pronouncement about this series, the remarks have proven instantly perishable. England’s listless bowling, flat fielding and indolent batting left their captain with the task of relieving Dunkirk on his own. In a rowboat. With one oar.
Cook was willing. He is never otherwise. Rain existed as a rumour. Cook willed it true. Halfway through his sixth hour at the crease, the shadows were falling promisingly.
This summer, Cook has striven to be busier and more positive at the crease, on the advice of his old mentor Graham Gooch – dust Cook’s technique and you often find Gooch’s fingerprints. Quirky stat alert: his first dig here was the first occasion in 213 Test innings that he had scored faster than a run-a-ball.
Yesterday Cook reverted to former custom, like the kind of batsman who in the event of a ten-day Test would set out his stall to bat at least a week – unyielding, unsweating, not so much ungainly as not quite gainly. Twenty-seven deliveries to open his account; seven scoring shots off 39 balls from Peter Siddle; 83 dots in 104 balls from Nathan Lyon; all the while slipping away to square leg between deliveries for recuperative purposes, bat held in his right hand as daintily as a lorgnette. Microbursts of scoring kept him going: three off-side boundaries from four balls when Marsh tired; at one stage, 16 successive, steady singles. Irony alert: his best batting as an Ashes-winning skipper this summer will have been in the shadow of defeat.
Advertisement
Where Cook’s patience has been tried in this game, it’s been by his demob happy team-mates, four of whom have top-edged pull shots, another four of whom fell to balls they could have let go. The decline of Adam Lyth’s average to 20 has surely ruled off his Test career for the foreseeable future; nor did Jonny Bairstow’s hard hands and Ben Stokes’ sixth nought in 28 Test innings bode well for England’s forthcoming engagements in the UAE. Judgments should not come summarily, but the team are assuredly a work in progress.
In the day preceding this Test, Michael Clarke was as skittish as his counterpart was assured, startled by the shade of the pitch into predicting a three-day match, seemingly ambivalent about the XI with which the selectors provided him – perhaps more than that if the candid views of his confrère Shane Warne are to be credited.
Yet for much of yesterday he stood at glaring distance from Cook at slip, beneath the sun hat that Warne also preferred to his baggy green, ringing the changes through what should become a 24th Test victory in charge. He dropped one difficult catch, took another almost as difficult and enjoyed the sensation of control that has generally eluded him this summer.
At the medium pace ascribed him in commentary by Warne, Peter Siddle has penned England up in this game as no Australia pace bowler since Ryan Harris. With Mitchell Starc down on pace, Mitchell Marsh bowled a dozen brisk overs in the day with promising hints of swing, and was fit enough at the end to execute a superb headlong save on the fine-leg fence that prevented a Jos Buttler boundary.
With stumps in sight, Clarke had a last brainstorm – perhaps the last of his storied career. He tossed the ball to Steve Smith, who had bowled two previous overs in the series, and Cook became his second Test wicket since last November, turning to short leg. His actions had spoken for him, but probably not for long enough.
Advertisement
• Gideon Haigh is a columnist for The Australian