The 2025 Festivus holding page: The Boxing Day Test

3 minute read

The Boxing Day Test is looming and despite the already terminal series scoreline, we are very excited indeed. Nevertheless, our default approach to covering the sport’s biggest Test match is to wish you all a happy Festivus and then bugger off… so that’s what we’re doing.

The long and short of it is that we can’t really guarantee we’ll write anything at this time of year, but the Boxing Day Test is such a big thing it demands acknowledgement and a place where impassioned early hours insight from the readership can be posted for the good of all humankind.

So that’s what this article is for. We probably won’t be writing much above the line during this Test match, but we’ll definitely be found below. We rather enjoy being a reader at this time of year. What a great website. We really should show our support and back its Patreon.

The 2025 Boxing Day Test

There is just the one Boxing Day Test this year, but it’s the big ‘un: Australia v England at the MCG from 11.30pm on Christmas Day (UK time).

We’ve rarely been accused of upbeat positivity and this week’s “Woe! The Ashes are gone!” dissection was no exception. We haven’t really lost any interest in the series though.

It’s depressingly true that England still haven’t won the Ashes in Australia since 2010/11, but they also haven’t won a single Test match there since that same series. This seems to us an even more significant unticked box on the ‘to do’ list – it’s kind of a requirement for the more ambitious goal, after all.

Any chance?

Stranger things have happened. In fact one of England’s strangest single days of Test cricket happened at this week’s location: Melbourne Cricket Ground, the MCG… the ‘G.

With the 2010/11 Ashes level at 1-1 and Australia clearly in the ascendancy having reverted to bowling their opponents out for under 200 in both innings of the previous Test match, England came out and gave themselves an innings-and-59-run head start going into Day 2.

Read all about it! (We really need a special ‘Read all about it!’ image to go with these book plugs.)

Boxing Day Ashes Tests since then haven’t been quite so delightful – although there was a very boring draw in 2017.

Teams

England were always going to drop their number three batter in favour of the other after the third Test. The only question at the start of the series was which number three would be heading in which direction. They ultimately chose to sacrifice Ollie Pope in the live Tests and have therefore now moved on to Jacob Bethell for the dead rubbers.

Almost as predictably, Jofra Archer has been struck down by injury and England’s journey to right-arm fast-medium is all but complete.

Australia, meanwhile, are back to just the one first-choice bowler (Mitchell Starc) in Melbourne, after a brief flirtation with three (Starc, Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon) in Adelaide.

Happy Festivus!

Stay focused and try not to spray it around too much during The Airing of Grievances and then don’t get overly ambitious during The Feats of Strength – remember, you aren’t as young as you were.

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The post The 2025 Festivus holding page: The Boxing Day Test first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. The 2021 Festivus holding page: The Boxing Day Tests and ancient Ashes
2. The 2023 Festivus holding page: The Boxing Day Tests
3. The 2022 Festivus holding page: The Boxing Day Tests

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The Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda Ashes – the Choose Your Own Adventure book with no winning page

7 minute read

How do you feel about this one England fans? We feel like the team went from monochrome dreadful four years ago to at least striving for technicolour peaks. The bleak truth is that they’re 3-0 down after three Tests and we’d still chalk it up as progress. 

Let’s quickly recap the loss of the 2021/22 Ashes, just for context.

• England made 147 in their first innings of the series, Australia replied with 425 and won by nine wickets.
• In the second Test, England made fewer than half of Australia’s runs in the first innings and lost by 275.
• In the third Test, Australia made 267 and WON BY AN INNINGS. 

It wasn’t so much the fact England lost those first three Tests, it was that at no point did it feel possible to envisage any other outcome. 

Paul Collingwood meant something slightly different when he said they were sitting ducks, but that’s nevertheless a pretty good assessment of how they approached the series; as passive targets just waiting for the worst to happen.

Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum subsequently imposed a, “let’s at least throw a few punches,” philosophy that provided a plausible if unlikely course of events whereby England could win matches that would previously have always ended as sleepwalks to defeat.

Why Stokes and McCullum aren’t worried about bad shots, only bad innings

Sometimes it actually worked. Surprisingly often really. These higher highs were more than welcome and they dragged England up to a better level overall. But not to a stunning level once you factor in the off days. And those off days couldn’t really be entirely suppressed with an approach like this.

England sometimes talk about the ‘high ceiling’ of an individual player, but they probably bounced off their own collective ceiling a year or so ago. There was no raising it without more players getting an awful lot closer to those idealised fantasy versions of themselves.

2025/26 punch-throwing

We count one meaningful jab so far – Australia’s first innings in Perth – plus the glancing blow of Joe Root’s Brisbane hundred. 

That doesn’t feel like much and because there’s always plenty to take issue with on a losing Ashes tour, it’s tempting to identify Where England Went Wrong. But it’s a fallacy to view the series as some Choose Your Own Adventure book where if you make the correct decisions at the end of each page you’ll ultimately emerge victorious.

People love to pinpoint mistakes, but sometimes you just can’t make enough right choices. Honestly, the team that wins the Ashes is generally the one that’s good enough to get plenty of things wrong and emerge unscathed.

Misshapes, mistakes

Australia suffered a bunch of injuries, didn’t pick their spinner, stumbled on an opening partnership basically by random chance and won anyway. 

In contrast, England simply weren’t good enough to get away with anything. They’re a team whose greatest performances have stemmed from taking risks, but there’s a reason why cricket has always valued averages over highest scores. It gives a truer measure of worth over a span of time.

Zak Crawley retained his place in this side in large part because he was expected to perform better in Australian conditions. He has indeed performed better, but his baseline is so low that he could have excelled himself even further and it still wouldn’t have been anything incredible. Conversely, there was a good chance Ben Duckett’s desire to hit every ball would prove counterproductive in these parts and so it has proven thus far.

Basically, England hoped conditions would outweigh class for one opener, but that class would outweigh conditions in the case of the other.

Ollie Pope has been an okay number three. Believe it or not, he actually averages almost 40 in that spot. But for whatever reason – the relentless scrutiny and intensity or whatever – he invariably performs worse in big series. The Ashes is the biggest series. Pope has been terrible.

It’s early days for Jamie Smith, but he’s been a little bit the same – albeit tempered by the fact he isn’t a 60-Test veteran and the fact he made a few in his most recent innings. Smith was the right pick, but he’s another question mark; another unknown that may or may not have worked out that England needed to get lucky with given the sheer volume of other question marks in the equation.

The bowling attack is callow and has bowled like it. The most experienced, Jofra Archer, has missed a lot more Test cricket than he’s played. Nobody else, other than the captain, has done much bowling at all in Australia. Gus Atkinson arrived with the most promising record and method and so far has been the least effective. 

Someone tell Brydon Carse he’s getting tonked –  we’re not sure he’s noticed

Up until this tour, these guys had performed well enough. England could have kept Jimmy Anderson around but how would that have looked had he failed or succumbed to injury – both of which would have been entirely plausible outcomes?

A few years back, England gambled on a spinner. Surveying the alternatives and not seeing much that inspired confidence, they concluded at least Shoaib Bashir could work out. As with several other things, they saw one possible sequence of events where he would become a more threatening option than anyone else. Alas, those events didn’t happen and then, with all those other things-that-might-or-might-not-work-out already in play, they chickened out. 

Still no Shoaib Bashir then. Do you remember when Ben Stokes used to back his spinners?

Would picking Bashir have helped? Probably not. Would picking someone like Jack Leach instead have worked out? Looking at those first two Tests in particular – again, probably not. 

So spin-wise they had three options and no obviously correct answer. Presumably one would have worked out better than the other two, but not to the extent it would have made much difference. 

We feel similarly about the team’s much lauded/derided/mocked approach to batting, which has only intermittently been attempted to our eyes. (Most likely an enforced absence stemming from the accuracy of Australia’s bowlers.)

England’s batters have at times seemed hell bent on ‘giving it away’, but in other innings the majority of them have actually lost their wickets playing defensive shots. Whatever they’ve tried to do, the one constant has been that they’ve been dismissed for fewer runs than their opposite numbers.

When Ollie Pope blathered on about putting pressure on the bowlers and sometimes absorbing it and being crystal clear about which to do when, he was essentially saying, “We need to be better at batting.” Making the appropriate choices for your level of ability is what batting is – and again, better players have more margin for error. 

We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of

Australia haven’t really blooded the next generation, which represents a not insignificant vulnerability should they need to replace anyone.

Steve Smith missed the last Test. Josh Hazlewood is sitting out all five. Pat Cummins missed Brisbane and Perth. Usman Khawaja was unavailable in Brisbane and hurt in Perth. And they’re winning 3-0.

Australia responded to Khawaja’s injury by setting their openers to ‘shuffle’. There is no clearer measure of the difference between the two sides than the fact that they tried two stand-in openers in the span of one Test and one of them performed well enough to get the gig for the rest of the series and possibly beyond.

Australia make dumb decisions and win. England make dumb decisions and lose.

Decisions of course matter. But Australia have had the raw materials that taking the worse option often hasn’t been so bad, while even some of England’s better decisions haven’t really ended up especially helpful.

Where did it go wrong for England?

Certainly not solely with the coach or captain, who initially played a poor hand massively better than the previous England management team, even if they’ve perhaps not played it quite so well more recently.

Captain Stokes v Captain Root

Not massively with the players either, we’d argue – except insofar as a couple of them have manifestly failed to improve over the course of unjustifiably sizeable Test careers.

Team selection? Certainly a bit – but a lot of the wishful thinking that’s been exhibited is really just a reflection of the alternatives. Rob Key has certainly overshot in his distrust for county cricket performances, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a basis for doing so. The domestic game remains low intensity and we struggle to fathom the huge collective aversion to playing spin bowlers these days, regardless of how they’ve chosen to schedule red ball matches. (As Graeme Swann pointed out last week, it turns square in England in September.)

A lot of us don’t like this insidious school scholarship system that’s developed either. A good cricket team contains all sorts, but England’s seems to contain fewer and fewer sorts with every passing year. The many paths into the England team seem to have narrowed to just one.

Finally, there’s the basic fact that when playing in the opposition’s home conditions, you already start at a disadvantage.

All these things stack up. None is unsurmountable on its own, but queue them all up, page after page, and it might just be that the path to victory is no longer there to be read.

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The post The Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda Ashes – the Choose Your Own Adventure book with no winning page first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. Shoulda, coulda, woulda – five things England got wrong ahead of the 2017-18 Ashes
2. Do the English not enjoy winning?
3. Winning the Ashes isn’t shit

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Sky Sports has boiled its Ashes coverage down to its purest and greatest form: Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain standing there talking about what’s gone wrong

6 minute read

Give us this day our daily treat: 15 to 20 minutes of two 50-something former England captains broadcasting their grey area opinions with a sense of humour and a lack of ego. 

Sky Sports doesn’t have the rights to this Ashes series because they were again snaffled up by what is now TNT Sports. This isn’t great because not only is Sky Sports’ cricket coverage excellent, but the channels aren’t even owned by Rupert Murdoch any more, so you don’t have to give the satanic old prick any money if you subscribe to it.

The Ashes on TNT Sports

We’re going to break with popular opinion on this and say that TNT’s coverage is adequate. They show you all the pictures; the app’s annotated timeline is great for mainlining all the finer elements of the overnight horror show each morning; and some of the broadcast team have their moments. 

Of the two non-cricket commentators who have been roped in from other sports, Rob Hatch, the multilingual cycling commentator from Clitheroe, does a solid job. He’s relaxed, he seems to know cricket and he gets on with the ex-pros well enough that they can joke a bit without it descending into that excruciating self-conscious awkward banter you so often get. We believe the other fella is a rugby guy. We haven’t yet formed an opinion on him. 

One unexpected revelation has been Sir Alastair Cook’s previously well-hidden dry humour. There is something under that bland, safe exterior after all! Turns out he isn’t uniquely badly qualified for the role he now fulfils! Rather delightfully, Cook has seen fit to take unnecessary pot shots at all sorts of people this series. At one point he expressed sympathy for Alex Carey for having to embrace Marnus Labuschagne when celebrating a wicket. Another time, you could almost hear his eyes roll when Steve Smith was claiming to have been distracted by some distant atom behind the bowler’s arm. Good stuff, Sralastair! More of this sort of thing!

At the same time, sometimes the coverage makes you want to switch off and go for a shower. Matt Prior hamming up his cheerleading for Joe Root to the max as the Yorkshiremen approached his first Ashes hundred stands out as being an especially grisly passage of audio.

The end of day analysis can sometimes feel like a bit of a lightweight nonevent as well. Fortunately, that doesn’t matter because you can instead watch…

Athers and Nass on YouTube

Sky Sports doesn’t have the Ashes broadcast rights, so it can’t show you the action. It can show people talking about it though.

So it does. And it puts it on YouTube for free.

“Athers? Nass? Why don’t you just do your end of play dissections outside the ground each day? We can do some video podcasts between Tests as well. If there’s someone to interview, speak to them. If there isn’t, just speak to each other.”

Works for us. Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain are the best thing about Sky’s coverage and really this is them at their best anyway. 

You need authority and gravitas to do daily Ashes analysis and who knows about having a shit time in the Ashes better than Athers and Nass?

When Mike Atherton was run-out for 99 – was this the worst ‘no’ in the history of cricket?

Not only have they been there and done that as players and captains, they’ve followed and commented on pretty much every series since. Crucially, they had occasional successful moments too – or at least know someone who did.

All of which gives a lot of weight to their opinions. They know what a bad decision feels like. They’ve had long days in the field. When Zak Crawley made a pair in Perth, Atherton could tell you just how long the gap between two Test matches would have felt, having made an Ashes pair himself in the 1999 Boxing Day Test. (Long. The gist of his words was that for that whole period, the prospect of another duck is the first thing you think in the morning and the last thing you think at night.)

But rather than piss that hard-earned weight down the toilet by disingenuously latching on to controversial angles, picking fights and manufacturing polemic to raise their own profiles, the two men instead add to it with their fairness and balance. 

Spades are called spades but with an acknowledgement that others might label them disgraceful shovels who should be sacked and sent home. They talk up the opposition too. Every Test match involves two teams, after all.

And they see the funny side of all this. The Ashes is a deadly serious silly game. Hussain can stand back and laugh at how a bad day for England can result in a long line of complete strangers hurling mocking abuse at former England captains in the street. Atherton might just be the greatest purveyor of the wry smile who ever lived.

“We’re getting sledged here.”

“It’s not us, you know. We didn’t lose nine wickets!”

Basically, they’re always willing to laugh, without making the mistake of thinking they’re actual comedians. As with their analysis, they walk that line assuredly. Sometimes the self-deprecation tips over just a touch, but only ever for a moment, and far better to relentlessly undercut yourself than go the opposite way. 

What is this sort of coverage worth?

Athers and Nass are sufficiently funny and serious and thoughtful and interesting that it doesn’t really matter that you don’t actually get to see what they’re talking about, or that on one occasion the entire video looked like this.

They even had a laugh about that in the next one.

They’re enthusiasts too. When big and unusual things happen, they visibly love it. The value of that shouldn’t be underestimated.

Live Test cricket isn’t on free to air UK TV any more, but Ashes tours never were. Free access to this sort of stuff is therefore a total positive, added to which you can also watch different sized highlights packages – via TNT Sports’ YouTube channel or the BBC’s iPlayer – pretty much whenever you want. Things ain’t so bad.

Except the actual cricket. That’s not the best.

Conclusion

From what we’ve seen of Ashes coverage in Australia, it is a Western Australian rural drive away from being anywhere near as good as these two blokes standing outside a cricket ground, asking each other what they thought of the day. 

Maybe this kind of broadcasting excellence is a direct product of losing pretty much every Ashes in Australia for the last 40 years. If that’s the case, well… at least we got something watchable.

Are you David Lloyd’s unoccupied hand when Nasser Hussain is answering a question? Because we are

More Athers, more Nass…

Pretty sure it doesn’t count as a spoiler if we tell you that both Atherton and Hussain appear regularly in our book, The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments.

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The post Sky Sports has boiled its Ashes coverage down to its purest and greatest form: Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain standing there talking about what’s gone wrong first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. The Realm’s England XI – 1. Mike Atherton
2. Are you David Lloyd’s unoccupied hand when Nasser Hussain is answering a question? Because we are
3. When Mike Atherton was run-out for 99 – was this the worst ‘no’ in the history of cricket?

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Still no Shoaib Bashir then. Do you remember when Ben Stokes used to back his spinners?

6 minute read

It’s confirmed then. England have put themselves in a position to lose the Ashes without ever once playing the spinner they fast tracked into the team at least partly because they thought he could perform well in Australia. With no great career record and no real form to speak of, you can see why England might not have much faith in Shoaib Bashir right now. It’s a bit odd though given the faith of Ben Stokes has been his Test career’s single greatest buoyancy aid this whole time.

The preparation

Have you ever watched The Rehearsal?

Most of the biggest laughs in The Rehearsal come from the sheer scale of the extraordinary painstaking effort Nathan Fielder has put into the setup. Unlike some, Fielder is very definitely not a man who believes you can prepare too much. That is, in fact, the central premise of the show.

In the first episode, Fielder builds a full size replica of a Brooklyn bar called the Alligator Lounge so that a guy can better rehearse confessing a minor lie to his pub quiz teammates.

In the second series, he builds a partial replica of the George Bush Intercontinental Airport terminal and staffs it with actors, so that pilots can roleplay interactions with colleagues. His goal is to ensure first officers are sufficiently assertive to challenge their captains should they find themselves in a potential crash situation. 

For related reasons, Fielder later attempts to replicate the personality of Sully Sullenberger – the pilot who famously saved all his passengers by landing in the Hudson River – by putting himself through a series of simulations of Sully’s life. Quite unforgettably, these simulations begin when Sullenberger was a baby…

While there are often noble intentions somewhere in the mix, it’s always funniest when you feel like he’s gone to these extraordinary and elaborate lengths simply to make a joke. 

Similarly, you have to admire the long setup for England’s 2025/26 Ashes campaign with regards to spin.

Jack Leach

Four years ago, the England Test team run by Joe Root and Chris Silverwood was not big on picking spinners and even less big on picking their best one: Jack Leach.

Despite this, they did actually play him in the first Ashes Test and he got a walloping. England responded by dropping him for the second Test in favour of a five-man right-arm fast-medium attack that immediately conceded 473-9.

It didn’t really matter what they did by then though because the work to undermine Leach’s confidence had been completed long before. By that point, he’d been left out in the name of team balance so many times he’d surely come to believe he was made of osmium.

We wrote about this in an article titled ‘Root and Silverwood have the Jack Leach that they created’.

Here it is:

Root and Silverwood have the Jack Leach that they created

A year or so later, after a warmly encouraging change in the style of man management, we wrote a contrasting follow-up piece, titled ‘Stokes and McCullum have the Jack Leach they created’.

Here it is:

Stokes and McCullum have the Jack Leach they created

Where the previous management team had omitted Leach every chance they got – generally in favour of no spinner at all – Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum picked him by default.

But not just that. Stokes backed him in the field too. He gave him plenty of overs and even asked him to open the bowling at Headingley on one occasion. No longer was Leach’s spin bowling the option of last resort, it was clearly a valued tool in its own right.

When Leach later slipped down the pecking order, it was chiefly due to injury: a stress fracture and then a knee injury. But this only served to give Stokes an opportunity to burnish his reputation as a captain you’d really want to play under if you were a spinner.

Tom Hartley

Leach’s final match as England’s first-choice spinner was probably the first Test against India in Hyderabad last year, when he suffered the knee injury. England actually played three spinners in that match, one of whom was Tom Hartley.

Opening the bowling in India’s first innings, Hartley’s first ball in Test cricket sailed over the ropes for six. A ball or two later, another one went and after three overs, he’d conceded 34.

Tom Hartley: first look in Test cricket

Actions speak louder than words. In 2013, Alastair Cook’s actions told Simon Kerrigan that after two overs he didn’t trust him and the young spinner never really recovered. In 2024, Stokes’s actions told Hartley that he did trust him. He kept him on for a nine-over spell.

“Stokesy and Baz, they really got around me,” said Hartley afterwards, having finished that first innings with 2-130 off 25 overs. “I lost no confidence and was able to come out and do my best out here.”

In the second innings, Hartley’s best translated into a match-winning 7-62.

Shoaib Bashir

Since that tour, England’s premier spinner has been Shoaib Bashir. Plucked from basically nowhere, in large part because the England captain liked what he saw, he has shown admirable grit in taking 68 Test wickets, including four five-fors.

That he remained first choice even after Leach had recovered was a big vote of confidence in itself given the backing Leach had been given. According to Nathan Lyon, having spoken to James Anderson, Bashir retained this status at least partly because England felt he could replicate what Lyon himself does in Australia. 

So Bashir arrived for this Ashes tour with those qualities in mind and as the first-choice pick for an England captain with a properly decent track record of meaningfully backing his spinners.

And then they just never picked him. When push came to shove, they didn’t back him.

As we said at the outset, given his career record and the form he’s shown on tour, Bashir’s omission is understandable, but looking back to Root, Silverwood and Leach, we’re also struck by how little distance we’ve covered. Yet again, England just don’t quite trust their main spinner in Australia, so they’re instead taking what they see as a safer option.

How did we get here?

Was the goal all along to identify and develop exactly the kind of spin bowler where no-one would complain too much if you left him out?

We’re being flippant there, but if it’s a colossal and unexpected loss of form, why is there no-one else in the squad to step in? Will Jacks is a good cricketer, but his one wicket in the second Test was only his 50th in first-class cricket – Leach has taken more than 10 times as many. No matter how he actually bowls, Jacks is a “this is a peripheral job almost anyone could do” selection.

If we had to identify when things went astray, we’d be tempted to go for Liam Dawson’s selection for the fourth Test against India at Old Trafford a few months ago. In overlooking Leach (who had a central contract at the time), this was the moment when England stopped picking their best spin bowler and so implicitly downgraded the value of spin bowling as a whole. Since then, we’ve been back to the spin bowler as optional luxury.

For all the talk of batting intent and hitting Australia with fast bowling and all that bollocks, this feels like the area where Stokes and McCullum have blinked. As the Ashes hoved into view, they moved away from the perceived risks of specialist spin and towards the comfort blanket of seam bowling and batters who bowl. This is doubly galling given that Stokes is probably the best England captain of spin bowlers we’ve seen for all the reasons given above.

In summary

After near enough four years of rehearsals as a Test team that values spin and backs its spinners, it’s off to Adelaide, where temperatures are forecast to hit 39C and Nathan Lyon is the top wicket-taker of all time… with no spinner.

If nothing else, you’ve got to admire the extravagant and painstaking effort that’s gone into setting up that punchline.

Can England defy the irresistible gravity of right-arm fast-medium in Adelaide? An Ashes third Test preview

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The post Still no Shoaib Bashir then. Do you remember when Ben Stokes used to back his spinners? first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. Shoaib Bashir and Tom Hartley have the bendable fingers England are looking for when they tour India next month
2. Stokes and McCullum have the Jack Leach they created
3. Root and Silverwood have the Jack Leach that they created

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Can England defy the irresistible gravity of right-arm fast-medium in Adelaide? An Ashes third Test preview

6 minute read

If England know one thing about playing Test cricket in Australia, it is that successful tours cannot be built on right-arm fast-medium bowling. Except for the one that was. (Or was it? Let’s come back to that in a bit.) At the same time, right-arm fast-medium has an incredible gravity to it that history suggests England struggle to defy. Right now, Mark Wood is injured, left-armers haven’t made the squad, trust in Shoaib Bashir seems at a low ebb and all the occasionally-quick seamers are gradually being shorn of any distinguishing sharpness. Someone save us. It’s happening again.

Last time England came to Australia, they picked five right-arm fast-medium bowlers for a Test match and it went very horribly.

This time around, they picked five right-arm quick bowlers in Perth, two of whom were properly fast, and it worked in the first innings but not so much in the second when paces began to drop. The story wasn’t quite as simple as that, obviously – but it was a factor. The match again went very horribly anyway.

In the second Test, England hedged their bets. With Wood injured, they picked a batter who sometimes bowls spin instead of a specialist. This bowling attack fared even worse.

England’s 2025 take – the upper end of right-arm fast-medium

There is a recurring phenomenon in cricket, whereby right-arm fast-medium bowlers – cursed with the narrow perspective of being right-arm fast-medium bowlers in a world awash with such things – truly believe themselves to be radically different from one another.

It crops up all the time in interviews. The basic template for the quotes is, “Actually, we work well as an attack because we’re all really, really different from each other.” After this, the player in question will list some really niche and unremarkable ways in which he and his team-mates differ from one another, without at any point acknowledging that in far more meaningful respects they are, to all intents and purposes, basically interchangeable.

Your natural impulse upon hearing such comments is to feel like an ignorant outsider, unaware of the crucial nuances of Test cricket. Don’t feel like that. This is basically a group of similarly-dressed blokes in the pub, marvelling at their slightly differing tastes in indie bands and Quentin Tarantino films. “Man, we are all such individuals,” they think. No, lads, you’re not. It’s a big and diverse world out there.

It was Steven Finn voicing such thoughts on the England team’s behalf this week when assessing whether they’d picked the right bowlers for this tour.

“They’re not one-dimensional,” claimed Finn. “Atkinson comes over the top and gets steep bounce with a predominantly scrambled seam, Carse angles the ball in to right-handers and gets it to leave them at his best, Archer is Archer and Mark Wood quick and skiddy.”

All of which is technically true. But it’s also true that all four are right-armers who mostly bowl 85-90mph – or maybe a bit quicker in Wood’s case if things fall his way. None of them offers anything more meaningfully distinct, like being left-handed, or being a spin bowler. Hell, even out-and-out medium-pace would bring some variety.

Who will bowl in Adelaide?

Australia also dropped their spinner for Brisbane, we hear you point out in an affected, wheedling, Comic Book Guy voice. Absolutely true, but Australia also have far greater variety built into their attack through that man, Mitchell Starc.

Remember what Steve Harmison said that time about ensuring your attack has all the necessary components? Starc gives Australia a properly fast bowler, and a left-armer, AND he’s 1.97m tall.

It’s worth reminding yourself that Mitchell Starc really does have an awful lot going for him

Height is an attribute, but not necessarily a point of distinction. If none of your quicks is unusually towering then you’re liable to find yourself in a land of fairly-tall sameyness. England’s four right-armers from the second Test are all between 1.82m and 1.91m, for example.

Jofra Archer, Gus Atkinson, Brydon Carse and Ben Stokes – will they go with the same four again?

Someone tell Brydon Carse he’s getting tonked –  we’re not sure he’s noticed

We honestly have no idea. It was only last week that we were highlighting the fact that fast-medium line and length isn’t necessarily such a no-no with the updated Kookaburra ball. England’s 2010/11 Ashes victory was also built around such bowling – although it’s worth pointing out that the crucial first victory hinged on 10 Australia wickets falling to spinners and run-outs.

Pertinently, that win came in Adelaide, the location for this third Test, where the top wicket-takers of all time are Nathan Lyon with 63 and Shane Warne with 56. Shane had to wait until Day 5 on one occasion, but you can’t say he didn’t make the most of it. (See the ‘Amazing Adelaide, The Test That Never Happened’ chapter in our book.)

Historically, Adelaide has taken spin. There have only been a couple of day games here in the last decade, but R Ashwin was India’s most successful bowler in one of them. Going further back, Graeme Swann, Dan Vettori, Anil Kumble and even Sulieman Benn have taken five-fors.

So England surely want to play a spinner… except their spinner is Shoaib Bashir, who they suddenly don’t really seem to want so much after all.

Who would they drop for him? Will Jacks after he showed some fight with the bat in Brisbane? It feels like Jacks has earned himself another Test with that performance, even though it had nothing to do with bowling spin. (The fact they’ve found themselves in this position is why they never should have picked him in the first place.)

Would they replace a seamer with Bashir? If Jacks is still in the team, that would mean two frontline quicks, Ben Stokes and one-and-a-half spinners. That doesn’t sound likely.

So most likely Bashir remains on the sidelines and England will try to salvage this Ashes campaign with four right-arm quicks and a part-time spinner. That doesn’t feel hugely encouraging. Archer will need to bowl quickly and we suppose Josh Tongue could come in and add another 2cm of height.

And what of the samey batting?

Because this is the other way in which England have ended up a bit of a narrow Test team. The general principle of encouraging batters not to be fearful has certainly been a net positive when you think about where they came from, but it’s also resulted in a certain sort of player being picked to the exclusion of others. This means the team as a whole has erred on the side of an approach that has come to feel like the default.

How much this has skewed the decision-making of individuals, we can’t say, but it was striking that even Joe Root seemed unsure how to go about things in the early days of the Stokes-McCullum era – and it’s not like he’d previously been scrabbling around for some kind of method. Newer players with an inferior track record – so basically everybody – have surely been influenced even more.

Samey team, same result?

Hopefully not, but it’s a neat way to finish writing an article that’s found itself desperately in need of an ending.

Following-on

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The post Can England defy the irresistible gravity of right-arm fast-medium in Adelaide? An Ashes third Test preview first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. Maybe England should have picked a sixth right-arm fast-medium bowler
2. England end up looking a bit fast-medium
3. England go with a bit of right-arm fast-medium

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Five ways England’s Gabba defeat to Mitchell Starc and Australia’s medium-pacers was even worse than the first Test

4 minute read

It didn’t even take three days for England to lose the first Test in Perth… but the second Test performance in Brisbane was actually way worse. Here’s why.

1. It took longer

England achieved some historic lows in Perth, but at least they contributed to the brevity of the Test in a positive way too by bowling Australia out for the lowest total of the match. There was at least some cause for optimism in that isolated feat.

In contrast, while some observers blackly complimented the tourists on at least making it to Day 4 at the Gabba, consider what accounted for that extra time. If you pass two hours failing to dismiss either Mitchell Starc or Scott Boland then a longer match duration isn’t really an achievement, is it?

2. Australia had no spinner

Australia went into the first Test shorn of their captain and two-thirds of their seam attack and then introduced a policy of sending out opening batters basically at random. For the second Test, they figured they clearly hadn’t made themselves vulnerable enough and so also dropped their spinner.

England steadfastly refused to exploit this by again failing to make it to the second new ball in either of their innings.

3. Fireballs-up

Ahead of this series, there was much talk of England finally being able to fight fire with fire with their bowling attack. Setting aside the fact this is a quite dreadfully ineffective way to fight fire, it’s also becoming quite apparent that fire isn’t the danger it once was anyway.

At some point or other, somewhere or other – we can’t be bothered to find exactly where – we highlighted the fact that scores have been significantly lower in Australia for the last few seasons. It’s widely accepted that a lot of this is down to a change to the Kookaburra ball.

It was therefore a little grim to watch England’s bowlers send down ineffectual and expensive bouncers in this Test on a pitch where the Australians weren’t merely focusing on bowling a tight line and length, but were quite often doing so with the keeper up to the stumps.

Quite why Alex Carey felt it was necessary to do this when he’s already proven himself more than capable of executing stumpings when standing back is a subject for another day. (Read all about that famous moment here!) Perhaps he was just missing Nathan Lyon. We also shouldn’t let Carey’s exceptional performance up to the stumps distract us from the more important point that it was even an option.

As Ian Healy worded it, Carey was keeping up to the stumps against some “quite fast” bowling. They’re not the medium pacers of our utterly disingenuous headline, but Scott Boland and Michael Neser do not whistle it through and only in such company would Brendan Doggett be the man called upon to bowl half-trackers.

4. Brydon Carse’s stippling

England’s bowling was epitomised by Brydon Carse, whose line and length was so consistently erratic it was like he was trying to colour in his entire pitch map, one dot at a time.

Carse’s 4-152 was one slice of luck away from becoming the worst England five-for since Dom Bess’s against Sri Lanka five years ago. He was still the top wicket-taker – but what does that really mean when he was shipping runs so rapidly? What was his actual contribution to this match? That England would have taken those wickets and conceded that same 500-plus total a little slower without him?

5. Will Jacks 

Will Jacks did some good stuff, but his is such a bleakly familiar England Ashes tour selection, it can’t help but make our heart reflexively sink. He isn’t a real spinner, so isn’t going to take wickets, and however diligently he batted on this occasion, it seems pure wishful thinking to imagine a man with his career record will make meaningful runs when those who come in ahead of him can’t.

Honestly, best of luck to him. He took a screaming catch and batted for three hours in the second innings. We just can’t shake the feeling that the promise of the latter will have a ‘false’ inserted before it with the benefit of greater hindsight.

Last orders

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The post Five ways England’s Gabba defeat to Mitchell Starc and Australia’s medium-pacers was even worse than the first Test first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. It’s worth reminding yourself that Mitchell Starc really does have an awful lot going for him
2. Pace and sustained pace – Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins are half an attack
3. Two hat tricks in one match – has Mitchell Starc peaked too soon?

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Someone tell Brydon Carse he’s getting tonked – we’re not sure he’s noticed

3 minute read

An Ashes cliché that we repeatedly embrace in The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments is “the wheels are coming off”. (There’s actually a whole chapter on it, which is about the last Ashes tour.) It’s a term that crops up depressingly frequently when England are in Australia. On day two of the second Test, Brydon Carse in particular didn’t appear to be rolling too well – but for some reason he seemed oblivious. 

England have been putting all their bowling eggs in the right-arm quick basket this series. One over from Will Jacks was enough to dissolve the mad notion they’d actually picked a spinner for this match.

In the first innings of the first Test, the strategy worked out well, but they don’t have many moves to make if their solitary basket starts to lose its integrity, as it has done a few times since. We don’t know whether Australia have consciously identified Carse as the weakest patch of rattan, but there was no point on day two when he wasn’t getting flayed to all parts. 

So who’s in England’s first choice Ashes bowling attack then?

Carse though is not like the majority of historic England tourists. He didn’t really seem to notice. As the world looked on in pity, he sat there in the driver’s seat, face impassive, pressing the accelerator, forlornly spinning his denuded axles.

Utterly undeterred by his abject motionlessness, Carse then took two wickets in an over – one of which was Steve Smith.

He didn’t much react to those developments either. This is how he reacted to splattering Cameron Green’s stumps.

Smith’s record in day-night Tests is not as good as his overall record, so for this match he’s resorted to using the anti-glare eye stickers that were so memorably employed by Shivnarine Chanderpaul.

Sixty-one runs seems a reasonable return on this piffling AliExpress investment, but if he wants to make a hundred perhaps there are a few more lessons he should take from the great man. We suggest adopting a more elbow-centric technique and sidling around the crease like the Artful Dodger with rickets.

Carse’s understanding of the whereabouts of his wheels sadly didn’t improve after momentarily finding and reattaching them because not too long after, he grassed a sitter.

In his defence, it’s tough to take the safer Jamie Smith approach of ‘leaving it for first slip’ when you’re fielding at mid-on.

Carse was far from the only England fielder to drop a catch in the final session. There’s a question mark about delivery times, but you can probably get a decent discount on eye stickers if you buy them in bulk.

Speaking of delivery times

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The post Someone tell Brydon Carse he’s getting tonked –  we’re not sure he’s noticed first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. Ian Botham’s last Test as captain was remarkable for another reason too
2. Forget the “official” result – England have actually taken an early lead
3. Joe Root’s efforts definitively prove that England do/don’t need a spinner for the first Ashes Test

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