England batsmen send a defiant message to Australians
Stoneman and Vince pave way with 125 stand Malan and Moeen make steady start on day two
It was still a long, long way from the summit. There again, on most recent occasions when England have batted at the Gabba, they have slipped and slid into the abyss, never to be seen again for the rest of the series.
A second-wicket partnership of 125 between Mark Stoneman and James Vince conducted England to this base camp. Neither went on to the big individual hundred which England head coach Trevor Bayliss had defined as the key to retaining the Ashes; yet they went into this match with only 10 Tests between them, and their stand was higher than anything England managed in the whole of their last series in Australia of horrific memory.
Neither the head coach nor his assistant, Paul Farbrace, ever played an international game, but that has not stopped them reading people and pitches. They paired Stoneman and Vince in the same two-bedroom apartment in Perth on arrival because they did not know each other, and Joe Root no doubt had the coaches’ backing in deciding to bat first on a greenish pitch, when a fainter heart would have looked at the cloudy sky, and the forecast for lunchtime rain, and opted to bowl first.
Stoneman has reached 50 in every tour innings and looked more assured than Alastair Cook. After Cook had stabbed instead of waiting to play the new ball under his eyes, Stoneman’s leaving was the first sign that England could live with Australia’s vaunted bowlers, and gave heart to Vince as well as the 5,000 England supporters.
Stoneman leaves the ball as well and calmly as Michael Carberry, his predecessor in 2013-14, but he backs up better and runs harder between the wickets. He is luckier, too: Mitchell Starc bowling bouncers on this slow pitch was nothing compared to Mitchell Johnson on a hard and fast one.
Stoneman scored all round the wicket against pace but was tied down by Nathan Lyon. Reasonably enough, he did not sweep or slogsweep because Lyon turned his offbreaks away from Stoneman from the start, and a sweeper in Australia is liable to top-edge. As Vince, too, was making his way in Test cricket, on his return to it, neither batsman could risk a cavalry charge at Lyon, who thus kept England in check until the second new ball, bowling his first six overs for eight runs, and his first 20 overs for 31, before Moeen Ali mowed him for six.
It was Vince’s back-foot play that encouraged Bayliss to believe that Vince could succeed in Australia – and once the outfield had dried after all the recent rain, topped up by a lunchtime shower, he started striking fours through the off side like Michael Vaughan in the 2002-3 series, or Graeme Hick, if he had batted for England as he did for Worcestershire.
With a similarly imposing physique and style, Vince went up on his toes to crash a drive through the covers or cut. It is rare for an English batsman to be so accomplished on the back foot, and the explanation is to be found in the village of Erlestoke, Wiltshire, beneath Salisbury Plain. The ground was made in what was a walled kitchen garden, and it was Vince’s first cricket club, until the age of 10. The pitches were belters with Australian-like bounce, benefiting from many hours of the heavy roller, which was operated – as in the case of the Recreation ground in Antigua – by prisoners from the adjacent jail. It was usually a lapse of concentration in his shot selection that stopped Vince making a success of his first attempt at Test batting last year. This time, after he had almost doubled his previous highest innings, it was a lapse of concentration in another area of decision-making. He pushed into the covers, not too hard, not too soft, but at just the right pace for Lyon to run on to the ball and throw down the non-striker’s stumps. Still, 145 was about 100 more than the normal score for England’s third wicket to fall last summer, and an appropriate platform for Root at last.
But if the greater speed of Australia’s bowling let them down in the opening session, when a fuller and more accurate English length would have been more testing, it brought them back into the game when Stoneman and Root were beaten for pace by Pat Cummins, who was finally playing his first Test at home. Tim Paine missed Vince when he edged Lyon on 68: this was the price Australia paid for
not picking Peter Nevill, who “takes” all of Australia’s four bowlers for New South Wales. Lyon had another, harder chance missed when Root turned an off-break to the debutant Cameron Bancroft at short leg moments before he was out. Seldom has the Gabba turned more on the opening day.
England’s third rookie batsman to get into this series was Dawid Malan, who was at sea against Lyon but at home against all three pace bowlers. Cook and Root, indeed, contributed only 17 in this innings, but juniors learn by watching their seniors, then doing it their way.
To have all three rookies get runs under their belt on the opening day was an achievement that should keep England in contention for the remainder of this series, whatever the result in this opening encounter. Malan persevered on the second morning with England’s policy of wearing down Australia’s pace bowlers and blocking out Lyon, who found ever more turn on a pitch that was more Mumbai than traditional Australia. Moeen watched with some interest as Lyon ripped his offbreaks past Malan’s bat, but Lyon’s inability to bowl any variation that goes the other way, or even straight on, remained.
Malan went to a 50 gilded by several consummate cover-drives against the second ball. From the outset of this tour he has looked like a batsman whose time has come. He took 119 balls and it made a splendid hat-trick for he, Stoneman and Vince to pass 50 in their first Ashes Test.