ROOT BOYS IN A HEAP OF TROUBLE
Sadly familiar story of batting collapse leaves England facing ANOTHER defeat Down Under
ENGLAND are staring down the barrel of an 11th defeat out of 12 matches in Australia as their brief hopes of a second Test fightback collapsed in a heap.
With alarming familiarity, England’s batting proved itself technically and temperamentally unsuited for Test cricket Down Under.
Under coach Chris Silverwood (below), they are no nearer a solution than they were four years ago en route to a 4-0 hammering.
The parallels with that 2017/18 tour are piling up with this pinkball Test almost a carbon copy.
It makes a mockery
of Joe Root’s relentless assertion that England will be doing things differently this time. In a catalogue of horrible days of Ashes cricket here over the past three tours, it really takes something to keep putting up contenders for the worst of the lot.
But it appears to be the only thing that the England Test team are getting better at.
The main thing they are yet to improve on is their ability to prevent a collapse when a wicket falls – even more so when that wicket is Root’s.
Root and Dawid Malan (80) actually batted pretty well during the sunshine of the first session on day three to add 123 without loss to provide fans with hope of a first good day in the series.
But once Root was dislodged by the improving Cam Green for 62, the wickets just kept coming as England lost eight wickets for 86 and slumped to 236 all out.
“It was disappointing and frustrating that we got ourselves back into the fight and then lost too many wickets in clusters there,” said Malan.
“It is a bit of a trend and it is something we did on the last tour as well. We get a bit of momentum and then the Aussies take one wicket and suddenly we lose two or three and we’re chasing our tail again.
“We can talk about the guys who failed but ultimately Rooty or myself should have gone on and got a big hundred and taken the pressure off those guys.”
“I didn’t play a great shot. I needed to execute better, but you also have to identify certain periods of the game where the Aussies are going to attack you and stand firm against it.”
In the case of Ollie Pope and Jos Buttler, they could really do with illustrating that Test cricket is not simply beyond them.
Pope was skittish while struggling Buttler couldn’t have looked further away from the man who took down Aussie spearhead Mitchell
Starc in
October’s T20
World Cup.