Shortly before tea at the Gabba on Friday, Joe Root and Dawid Malan stopped for fresh gloves, a towel and a drink. You couldn’t help but be taken by their pit crew, in lookalike yellow tunics.
There they were: James Anderson behind space-age glasses, Stuart Broad with sunhat tugged down, 1,156 Test wickets between them, heroes of a thousand fights, busily employed not playing.
They have been in Australia for five weeks. They represent half of England’s accumulated Test caps. They trundled at length in the nets during play. Yet England had brought into the Test a five-man attack with a total of two dozen wickets in Australia. Perplexingly, it was perfectly possible to follow England’s thinking. Once the team’s tedious quarantining had been undergone, most of their intrasquad preliminaries had been rained out.
Such bowling as players had done had been followed by rest, monitoring and massage. It was like preparing for a World Cup final with 20 minutes of five-a-side. Anderson conceded in his newspaper column: “In terms of bowling overs in the middle, I have never been so underprepared.”
Certainly England had done nothing to ready themselves for the 104 overs they spent in the field under a sapping sun on days two and three at the Gabba. Test cricket is a game of long duration, rationed concentration, split-second energy. These cannot be simulated by a laboratory, gymnasium, hyperbaric chamber or virtual reality helmet. Sure, what if undercooked Anderson and Broad had fried in Brisbane? With four Tests to ensue in 33 days, there would have been no opportunity for them to work their passage back.
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Yet England were also inconsistent in this. They rushed Ben Stokes, who has played one first-class match since March, back into the fray, in the manner of El Cid, who after his death was apocryphally suited in armour and propped on his warhorse to lead the charge at Valencia.
So there it was: a bit of this, a bit of that, a hurrah-for-Ben, a Joe’ll-fix-it, a silent prayer for rain, and England effectively turned a Test match into the quality four-day warm-up match they’d previously been denied. After all, a warm-up is an event where you may experiment with your line-up, rest a few key players, try a few more who you’re taking a look at.
“We’re game-hardened now,” Root said, not exactly a positive given the obvious inference that they weren’t before. In some respects, of course, England may as well not have played, especially given they’ve been docked both their wages and five World Test Championship points for their over rates — another consequence of Australia’s successful assault on Jack Leach, confining him to ten overs, and hardly a good omen for an all-pace attack in Adelaide.
Australia, it is true, faced similar challenges, but not quite the same. For a start, they are playing under home skies and on familiar surfaces. Their batters, furthermore, had the advantage of practising against their own bowlers. Facing Chris Woakes hardly did Rory Burns much good given that his first ball of the series would be coming from Mitchell Starc; facing Pat Cummins would have readied Marnus Labuschagne for pretty much anyone. David Warner and Steve Smith lacked red ball cricket coming into the Test — and, actually, this probably showed a bit. Warner battled, Smith fizzled.
But Australia’s two most fluent strikers at the Gabba have had years full of cricket: including since the end of April, Labuschagne has played 12 first-class matches, four 50-over games and eight T20s, Travis Head 12 first-class matches, 11 50-over games and nine T20s. At the Gabba they looked to be humming familiar tunes.
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For bowlers it is always harder. Which makes Cummins’s performance all the more meritorious, Josh Hazlewood’s more commendable and Mitchell Starc’s more excusable. In 82.1 overs, they did not bowl a no ball and only two wides — compare this with Stokes, barely able to bowl a legitimate delivery when he took the ball, and even Ollie Robinson, who started the fourth innings six sloppy inches over the front line.
Cummins captained effectively. Starc contributed with the bat, Hazlewood in the field. They showed their experience, while Anderson and Broad honed theirs on ferrying refreshments. Perhaps this is sounding familiar to you; it should be. The calendar’s ludicrous, late capitalist congestion has turned adequate preparation into the great challenge facing modern Test cricketers and coaches. The dissolution of defined seasons, the rise of the franchise and the denigration of first-class cricket makes for huge workload spikes and a lot of on-faith judgments.
Yes, Covid and all that. But that is almost a decoy. We know the Goldilocks problem — the search for playing porridge not too hot, not too cold, hopefully just right. We’ve simply reached a new extreme where England decided not to take the oats out of the cupboard.
Everyone’s got it in some degree, with the related assumption that if you pay people enough they will work it all out for you. So the players pick up their paycheques and the administrators continue trousering their bonuses trusting that the public don’t notice how they are being short-changed.
