A BATTLING five-hour 85 from Alastair Cook spared England a three-day defeat in the final Investec Test match yesterday but barring drastic intervention from the weather – and some rain is forecast - they look certain to go down to a heavy loss today, a result that will dampen the victory celebrations planned for after the game.
Having been made to follow on before lunch, England ended the day on 203 for six, still 129 runs away from avoiding an innings defeat, but by the standards of the losing teams in this series they did well to get through 79 overs, one over short of forcing Australia to take a second new ball – something the winners have done only twice in the five games.
Only Jos Buttler – unbeaten on 33 after 27 overs at the crease – remains of the recognized batsmen.
The pick of Australia’s bowlers was Peter Siddle who took one for 14 from 16 razor-sharp overs but an inspired move from Michael Clarke to bring on Steve Smith three overs from stumps produced the wicket of Cook, who was within sniffing distance of a first home Ashes century. Nathan Lyon took two for 52 from 25 overs.
Buttler conceded England may have lost sight of what they needed to do to win in the euphoria of winning the series in Nottingham. “It’s had a different feel to the game,” he said. “The high of Trent Bridge and that emotion of winning the series, for a lot of young guys in the side was such an amazing feeling. Then [we had] ten days riding on the back of that. We spoke about wanting to try to win 4-1 and maybe we got caught up in that as opposed to actually focusing on what we’ve done well to get the end results.
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“It’s disappointing the way we’ve played here but we have won the Ashes and no one can take that away from us - no matter how badly we’ve played in this game … We’ve played good enough cricket at times in this series to win three Test matches - and at the start of the series, that’s what we wanted to do. At the end of the day, we’ve won the Ashes and whether you’ve scored nought or a hundred, that’s a pretty good feeling.
“The great British weather may come and give us a bit of hope. It was disappointing to lose Alastair at the end, after he batted so well for such a long period. At the start of the day, we said we wanted to show some character and some fight and I think we did that. The captain led from the front.”
Siddle’s wicket was that of Adam Lyth, who now looks likely to lose his place after scoring only 115 runs in the series, the lowest return by an England opener in a full Ashes series.
“That was pretty much the ideal bowling performance,” Siddle said. “The way we got the couple of [first-innings] wickets this morning and then to get back into the work straight away and put them under pressure [with the follow-on]. That’s what we wanted to do and it’s something we’ve been trying to do. It was nice to get the rewards today.”